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Anyone who's set up a home theater system knows how much work is involved. Once you find the right TV and speaker system, you need to round up a stack of components, including a DVD player, a video recorder, and, perhaps, a satellite receiver. Then you have to spin a frightening web of wires to route all of those signals through your A/V receiver or preamp/surround processor.

At least some things in life are predictable. And one of them is the progression of value-added features in consumer electronics.

The "trickle-down" economics theory didn't work, but it sure seems to describe what's happening in the world of home theater electronics. Take one of the latest multichannel refinements, those 6.1- and 7.1-channel surround modes that require adding one (or two) back surround speakers to the standard five-speaker-plus-subwoofer array.

When progressive-scan DVD players first emerged almost two years ago, the already excellent picture quality we'd come to expect from standard players suddenly got a whole lot better. That's because the new models could convert video signals to a progressive-scan format for display on a TV or monitor with progressive-scan capabilities.