At the same time, media is changing. Stored as 1s and 0s, music, video, and even television can share the same network. Once, the only connection between a CD player, a VCR, and a videogame machine was that they might all sit in the same room as the TV, amid a tangle of wires and incompatible standards. Now their networked descendants have arrived: the MP3 player, the TiVo, the Xbox, and PlayStation 2. These devices have their roots in the computer industry, rather than consumer electronics. They all speak the language of the Net, and they want to be connected.

The leading edge of all this is the showplace manors of the rich and gadget-mad. It is a universe dominated by athletes, entertainers, mobsters, and, of course, tech moguls, who spend up to $2 million to wire their castles with state-of-the-art audio and video (for security, as well as thrills), game systems, broadband pipes, and electronically controlled lights and drapes and webcams and sprinklers and fountains. Their quest for the latest has created a home-networking industry worth $11.5 billion and growing.

Behind the magic are wizards like Rich Green, a 46-year-old with the glasses of a nerd and the khakis of a boomer. Green is the home-electronics installer who has tricked out the dwellings of Silicon Valley giants Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Jim Clark. After decades in the business, he knows the rules: Always be pleasant and patient. Keep the customer happy no matter how ridiculous or petulant the request.

It's easy to dismiss people who would bankroll these projects as profligate spend-alls. Of course they are. But they're also an informal cadre of beta testers pushing the standard-of-living envelope for the rest of us. We can laugh at their self-indulgence. Or we can learn from their fearless pioneer spirit. Better yet, we can do both.

The view from Steve Perlman's lakefront home is postcard perfect: the sapphire waters of Lake Tahoe, shimmering in the sun, framed by pines and a flawless blue sky. But as far as Perlman is concerned, the real action is indoors. Who cares about a million-dollar view when you have a million dollars' worth of electronics to play with?

Perlman — a 41-year-old geekazoid entrepreneur who was part of the Apple team that developed QuickTime before founding WebTV and then set-top box maker Moxi (now part of Digeo) — purchased this 4,500-square-foot cottage in 1997, gutted and rebuilt it, then packed it to the rafters with hardware. Some 10 miles of wire and optical fiber snake behind walls and above ceilings. Racks of amplifiers, processors, servers, switches, and routers fill the crawl space beneath the stairs. Ten Crestron touch-panels, mounted on horizontal surfaces throughout the house, control the electronics. Four rooftop satellite dishes provide EchoStar and DirecTV feeds, as well as Starband 500-Kbps Internet access. And above all, there's the audio — the network component that Perlman insisted be the best of the best. Throughout the house, no fewer than 52 speakers give voice to three big-screen TVs, four DVD players, a grand-sized digital player piano, and a hard drive crammed with MP3 files.