I do prefer Axiom's speakers to Bose's myself, but that does not invalidate your appreciation of the Bose AM10. What a lot of audiophiles manage to overlook in their anti-Bose tirades is that Bose owners repeatedly list themselves as "extremely happy" with their speakers.

Is that because Bose consumers "don't know any better," as many of the company's critics claim? I think that's a condescending, simplistic answer. Bose makes its systems easy to set up, and systems like the AM10 manage to put out a lot of sound for the space they take up -- factors that people who like big, complicated loudspeakers tend to undervalue.

I'm a big advocate of the philosophy that listening to music and watching movies are supposed to add happiness to your life, not add tension and uncertainty. If you like the AM10s and think they're worth the money Bose asks for them, then they are -- no argument from me or any other "expert" could prove otherwise.

Most binding posts have -- wait a minute, are we alone? [Furtive glance over the shoulder] OK, nobody here but us audiophiles.

As I was saying, most binding posts with those plugs in the center of the post are a nudge-nudge-wink-wink response to safety legislation. Those plastic plugs can generally be pried out of the binding posts, leaving you with a socket that accepts a banana.

The GreyHawk should do just fine with an LCD projector putting out 2200 ANSI lumens, especially for dark scenes. On the other hand, some viewers prefer more overall brightness, even if they lose out on detail and black level. In your dedicated room, with no ambient light, you could certainly get by with higher-gain screen, but what you gain in brilliance, you'll pay for in shadow detail.

No, of course it doesn't. It's actually a pretty complicated subject -- for now.

It all depends on a number of factors. For example, is your RPTV digital or analog? If it's digital, DVI might offer a noticeable improvement over component input. But then you have to ask whether or not your cable box or tuner outputs DVI -- do you want to have to use component and DVI inputs? Of course, if you're using an HDTV source, as well as a DVD player that outputs high-rez on DVI, you might not have to make that choice.

And then there's the issue of which high-rez display your DVD player and RPTV-player support. I've heard reports that 480p on DVI isn't noticeably superior to component input, but 720p -- at least, from what I've seen -- is startlingly crisper.

By "Monster Cable," I assume you are asking about the whole category of specialty audio/video cables and not specifically the products manufactured by Monster Cable the company. This is a pretty controversial subject and the answer depends on your system, your requirements, and your budget.

The quality of cables and of the connectors they utilize can have an impact on the sound of your system and audiophiles are quite vocal about whether those differences are profound or simply subtle (some would claim illusory).

I've posted several reviews of audio cables on www.onhifi.com that discuss some of the differences between cables.

In the realm of coaxial digital cables, the differences tend to be less pronounced, in my opinion. That's assuming the connectors are the right impedance (75 ohm) for the digital signal, which not all are.

It all depends on how you define discrete. In one sense, you will be getting seven channels of information, with each channel receiving its own separate amplified signal. However, as you suspect, the two rear channels are identical. You say that it "hardly sounds like it would be an improvement," but that may be missing the point of diffusion. (On the other hand, maybe not -- there's no real consensus on this.)

In a movie theater, the same signal is sent to entire banks of loudspeakers -- the whole point of this is to remove the specificity of the sonic image, to kind of mush it up to sound bigger. This is the theory behind 7.1 -- to remove that pinpoint imaging of the single center channel and give the rear-channel sound more spaciousness.

Of course, that's the theory. It might even be true in really large home theaters, but in small to mid-sized rooms, those rear channels are going to be so close together that the mono summed image is going to sound pretty specific; I suspect it will be functionally equivalent to a single rear channel.