What do you want from your home audio system? Do you want to bring a movie screen to life or give the illusion that musicians are in the room with you? Do you want to play your favorite music in every room of your house? Do you want the components to be invisible?

Here are a few products that offer exciting solutions to these requests and others.
 
I want a room with concert-quality sound, and cost is no object.

The $150,000 Steinway Lyngdorf Model D system—named for Steinway’s signature grand piano—fills this need. It includes two tower speakers, a CD player/head unit, and a remote control. The keys to the system’s sound quality are the digital amplifiers contained within the speakers and company’s innovative “room perfect” system, which enables the sound to be calibrated to fit the room’s dimensions; the music sounds the same regardless of where you are standing or sitting in the room.

Despite the height and weight of the speakers—at 6 feet 7 inches and nearly 400 pounds each, they are as tall as many NBA forwards and outweigh most NFL linemen—they do have a simple and classic design and can be covered with a custom finish that matches any decor. The control unit is finished with silky black lacquer and brass accents, which evoke the look of a classic grand piano.

I want speakers that can fill a large room with exceptional sound. Some of my music is in digital music files, and some of it is in other media. I need speakers that can play digital music files with great fidelity as well as music and audio from my own components. And the speakers also should look good.
 
The David Weiner Collection offers stylish, high-quality speakers that can accept sound from a variety of electronic sources. Last year’s model was the $20,000 David Weiner Collection Art.Engine, which features a Ferrari-influenced design that includes a red “engine start” button as well as 16 woofers, two tweeters, and four 200-watt digital amplifiers that produce enough sound to fill a ballroom. The Art.Engine can accept digital music files from satellite radio, CD players, or an iPod. Now the company has introduced the $39,000 David Weiner Collection Art.Opera, a passive speaker system that can be paired with other audio components to create a complete system that will provide exceptional sound.

I want a whole-house audio system that produces great-quality sound throughout my home. But the system has to be so easy to use that my technophobic elderly mother can run it without asking a single question.
 
The key component of this question is portability. You want to be able to move around your home and access your music and other media files wherever you are. The Meridian Sooloos system can corral all your music into one system where it can be accessed from any room in your house or moved to any portable device that you have. The system accommodates every format, from MP3 to FLAC to WAV files. It can even integrate fully with home automation systems, such as Crestron’s.

The system’s interface is a monitor that makes all available information about your music collection instantly accessible. You can organize your music in an dizzying number of ways, and yet the system is intuitive to use. You’ll need no instructions to guide you. “You can pick up an iPod, select an app, and then direct it to any pair of speakers in your house,” says Craig Finer, director of performance systems for Definitive Audio in Seattle. Anyone can use it, he says.

I want to build a room in which aesthetics are as important as sound. I want to minimize the components or make them invisible, but I want the sound to be as clear as possible.

“Most of our clients are not really into equipment,” says Josh Christian of DSI Entertainment Systems, an audio design company in West Hollywood, Calif. “They don’t care what the speaker looks like.” In fact, he says, they’d rather not see it at all. To achieve that effect, designers sometimes do what movie theaters do: They hide huge speakers behind cloth screens, allowing the sound to come through what looks like a wall. The $30,000-apiece JBL Synthesis Everest II speakers aren’t pretty, which is why they are great candidates for home theater installations, where they can be tucked behind cloth screens but still deliver sound so clear that it can startle movie viewers.

For a music interface system, Christian recommends the Crestron TPS-6X wireless touchpanel, which looks both stylish and high-tech. It allows you to control every aspect of the music, as well as other environmental factors, including lighting and other media sources. Christian says the Crestron device can replace every remote in your house.