Paige, like many others, simply buy or borrow CDs and "rip'' the tracks they want.

....There is, however, a segment of baby boomers who have put their generation's stamp on MP3 music.

A growing group are buying high-end "music servers'' with huge storage capacity that are designed to work with a home entertainment system, said Jon Iverson, 44, a columnist for Stereophile magazine who lives outside San Luis Obispo, Calif.

These servers often sit in a home's basement and can be networked and controlled throughout the house, from laptops or other access points, where tracks from a huge library of songs can be selected and played in any order, Iverson said. With a WiFi hub, the music can be networked wirelessly.

"I've found a lot of baby boomers out there doing that,'' Iverson said. This I will do when I can afford it - that's flexibility without loss of fidelity.

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Behind the gates of Boca Raton's exclusive Polo development, where Spanish-style mansions and palm trees line the manicured cul-de-sacs, one house stands apart. Sprawling across two lots, the 17,000-square-foot monster belongs to Roger Shiffman, the former CEO of Tiger Electronics. There's the pool and cabana — this is Boca, after all — and a three-story cathedral ceiling in the foyer. But what distinguishes the house is its digital guts — the $1 million of electronics that control this audio-video nirvana, and the remote-controlled waterfall, too.

Sure, you might have DSL and Wi-Fi, an Xbox and a TiVo, maybe a Bang & Olufsen stereo with 5-foot speakers and a six-CD changer, but you're still an amateur in the world of extreme home networking — where computer-controlled window shades and palm-scanning security systems are de rigueur. It is a world driven by insatiable gadget lust and no small amount of money. You've met these people before: the rich, often famous, who build and furnish outrageous homes to match their larger-than-life personas. In the '70s they installed the latest in hi-fi, in the '80s remote everything, and in the '90s megaplex-scale home theaters. The newest generation of electronics pioneers is different, because home networking is more than just the latest entertainment indulgence. It will be the backbone infrastructure of the 21st-century lifestyle. Just as the office LAN, designed to let PCs share printers and exchange files, helped supercharge the growth of the Internet, so the home network will help seamlessly weave the Net into our lives.

Home networking's moment has arrived thanks to a convergence of technologies. It starts with broadband Internet access, which has reached critical mass with nearly 20 million American homes boasting DSL or cable modems. That solves the "last mile" problem, delivering broadband to the door. And fortunately, three new technologies have arrived to help solve the "last room" problem. Depending on which you choose, every phone jack, every power outlet, even the air itself can deliver broadband content to every corner of the house at a cost of a few hundred dollars.

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