Wired 10.11: Power Houses

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Tech execs and extreme jocks are making the world safe for plasma-screen shaving mirrors and Wi-Fi window shades. Join Jack Boulware for an exclusive tour of the ultimate wired homes. And please wipe your feet.

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.

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.

He designed and installed everything himself over six months in 1999. Then he learned the frustrating truth about home networking: Installation never ends. In June 1999, he junked the DVD jukebox, which he never used, and the following year, he replaced the entire audio system. But he still wasn't satisfied with the sound quality, so he started looking hard at the individual components. He soon discovered that while CDs and MP3s are optimized for a data rate of 44.1 kHz, most PC cards run at 48. Converting from one speed to the other was robbing Perlman of his crisp high end! Within weeks he tracked down a German-made card, the Delta DiO 2496, that's optimized for both rates, and his ears were soothed.

Perlman's an enthusiastic tour guide, with bulging sanpaku eyes and a wide grin. Opening a wooden cabinet in the living room, he reveals a Sony Vaio with a 160-gig hard drive filled with 15,000 MP3s — all of which he himself ripped from his collection of 1,000 CDs, he assures me. (To be honest, I'm less concerned with the legal issue than with the time it must have taken him to rip 1,000 CDs.)

He dashes to a touch-panel resting on a coffee table, punches up an MP3, and cranks the volume. The saccharine opening of the Eagles' "Hotel California" erupts from a pair of 180-watt M&K-powered studio monitors.

"Now stand in a good position here," he says, pulling me to the center of the room. "Listen for how crisp the fingers are coming off the strings. When you hear the resonance of the cymbal, is it clear?"

Fingers are squeaking across the guitar strings. Don Henley's brittle voice fills the air, earsplitting yet crystalline: "On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair."

"Peter Frampton has the same system!" Perlman shouts over the music. "If you listened to this as a 128K MP3, the cymbals would phase out. This is 192K!"

"Steve!" Perlman's wife is standing next to him, yelling. "Steve!" He mutes the sound. "Can you move the car?"

For the past three years, Lyor Cohen, the 43-year-old president and CEO of Island Def Jam Music Group, has been renovating a 120-year-old mansion on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Once the home of architect Cass Gilbert, who designed the landmark Woolworth Building, the residence stands seven stories and includes a ballroom, a gym, and — when Cohen's finished — a video system that's one-half Pentagon teleconferencing network, one-half MTV.

"My wife and I just got crazier and crazier and crazier about the electronics," says Cohen, intensity streaming from his blue eyes. "I made the decision that I wasn't going to be left behind, and that I wasn't going to be afraid of having a lot of stuff."

When the urban entertainment palace is completed next spring, the stuff will include a 61-inch Marantz 6120 plasma monitor — one of seven screens in the house — hung over the fireplace in his office. More stuff, in the form of a Bowers & Wilkins center-channel speaker, will descend from the ceiling above the monitor at the touch of a button. And a Meridian 568 surround-sound processor will spit out ultra hi-fi 24-bit, 96-kHz sound to B&W Nautilus speakers on all sides, not to mention an REL Q201 subwoofer.

To feed this enviable rig, a roof-mounted hi-def satellite dish will receive more than 500 channels. A SonicBlue ReplayTV digital video recorder connected to a T1 line will allow Cohen to grab any Def Jam videos he might have missed. And if he gets bored, he'll be able to view feeds from exterior and interior security cams, or take some meetings on his videoconferencing system.

Cohen isn't the only one dreaming of videotopia. Mark Cuban, the 44-year-old founder of broadcast.com and cofounder of hi-def TV network HDNet, still looks like a somewhat awkward Midwestern boy who'd rather be out back shooting hoops. But he lives in Dallas in a 24,000-square-foot spread that's bigger than the Playboy Mansion. Cuban tests most every widescreen product on the market, and he eventually wired the place with four HDTV monitors, including a mammoth 102-inch Runco screen in the family room. Using a Panja controller, Cuban can pull hi-def imagery from DVD, D-VHS, basic broadcast, or DirecTV's three HD channels. And if he wants to watch late-night sports — say, the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, which he also owns — he can settle into bed in front of an RCA 61-inch monitor.

"The hi-def screen spoils you," says Cuban. "I can't watch regular TV anymore. It just isn't worth the effort."

Tony Hawk loves videogames. He's hooked on the new Kelly Slater surfing title, though his all-time favorite is Marble Madness — which inspired him to buy his first computer, an Amiga. At 34, the skateboarding legend himself has become a one-man videogame franchise, the star of four best-selling Activision titles. His 5,000-square-foot ranch-style house in Carlsbad, California, is jammed with $150,000 worth of gaming electronics.

"I've always played games — ever since Pac-Man and Pong," says Hawk. "I've pretty much bought every system ever made." Unlike most gamers — who calculate the number of hit titles available for each platform and contemplate the prospects of the company before finally plunking down the $250 for a console — Hawk never made the choice. He owns all three — a PlayStation 2, a GameCube, and an Xbox — along with some 100 games.

The consoles sit on shelves along one wall of the room, surrounded by amps, a DVD player and recorder, a CD player with a 100-disc changer, a DSS satellite feed box, and a Zenith R65W28 65-inch HDTV screen primed for thumb-twitching competition. Dolby six-channel surround sound blasts from two 4-foot-high Shearwater main speakers, a floor subwoofer, center-channel speaker, and rear speakers built into the ceiling. The best seat in the house is the sofa, centered in the room to give Hawk and his family the optimal big-screen gaming experience.

Like any self-respecting geek, Hawk runs game audio through his stereo. He's also wired the PlayStation for broadband Ethernet. Hawk's PlayStation — a special production unit — can play any disk that he burns. That allows Activision to FTP beta versions to the star, who then burns his own copy using his Apple G4, troubleshoots the game on the PS2, and zaps it back.

Gaming is still the bastard child of home networking, in part because game rooms don't require the big-ticket items that installers like to push: The equipment is relatively cheap, off-the-shelf stuff. Moreover, the joystick generation doesn't get its thrills from automated drapery, so gamers don't hire installers like Rich Green in the first place. Just give them a console, a futon, and a lot of free time, and they're in Grand Theft heaven.

But as those players grow into adulthood, buy their own houses, and start wielding the market power of disposable income — and as online gaming takes off — home-networking professionals will start to see gaming in a different light.

"We have to pay attention to gaming," says Green, who doesn't play games himself. The one time a client demanded an over-the-top home arcade, Green had to hire a 15-year-old to help him design the setup: four gaming stations, supporting 16 players, big-screen TV, and surround sound. "Gaming," says Green, "is the future of our industry."

Catherine Bell is a sexy geek -�an FHM cover babe who knows which protocol underlies each of her wireless devices. Between takes on the set of her TV show, JAG, the 32-year-old beauty brags that her network follows her wherever she goes. The 802.11b Buffalo AirStation in her set trailer is one of three wireless repeaters she's installed at the studio.

Inside this $500,000 dressing room on wheels, there's a table cluttered with technology: Gateway and Mac G4 Titanium laptops, a Sony Ericsson T68i cell phone with a Bluetooth wireless headset, and a Sharp Zaurus Linux/Java PDA. Surrounded by an arsenal of gadgets and dressed in her impeccably tailored marine-uniform costume, she looks ready to call for air strikes — except that her expression is somewhat sheepish. "Look at all this stuff," she says. "I'm sitting on the set with three ways to get online. It's such a distraction."

Booting up the G4, Bell shows me detailed 3-D renderings of the Malibu house she's having built. The modern glass-and-steel dwelling is modest by Hollywood standards: a measly 7,000 square feet (one-eighth the size of Aaron Spelling's manse), four bedrooms, a tennis court, a stable, and an underground garage large enough for five cars, 12 motorcycles, and the requisite 22-foot Correct Craft Super Air Nautique wakeboarding speedboat. She and her husband, actor and producer Adam Beason, are haggling over the network specs; they haven't picked an installer (a decision as critical as choosing an architect) or broached the tricky question of which touch-panel system to go with.

The new house is a wireless mecca. By installing a Wi-Fi repeater in every room, Bell will be able to roam freely while browsing, emailing, and IMing. At home, she'll be able to adjust audio, video, lights, and HVAC from any room. On the road, she can control those subsystems via the Web, turning on the AC before she pulls in the drive, for instance. Wireless motion sensors will automatically activate security cameras.

If someone rings the doorbell when she's not home, the system will beam webcam images of the visitor to her phone or PDA.

Bell's house sounds like a trip to a perfect future, but an automated home can turn mean. In 2001, Roger Shiffman's Boca Raton mansion was shaken by a severe thunderstorm. A lightning bolt zapped a tree next to the residence, knocking out power and sending the shock of a short circuit rippling across the network. Soon, things began to go very, very wrong. Lights would switch on but not off. Motorized blinds wouldn't budge. Satellite receivers, pool filters, water fountains, gate control, HVAC — all began to fail, one after another. Maintenance crews worked around the clock to straighten things out. They needn't have bothered, though. A few weeks later, lightning struck the house again.

The moral of the story: Use surge protectors, and back up your home's software. It also might help to avoid copper wiring — except that extreme home networks require extreme bandwidth, and for the moment, at least, you can't get serious bandwidth without wires. So even the Wi-Fi-obsessed Bell is resigned to the fact that she'll be installing Cat5 — a cabling of four twisted pairs that will keep her network zipping with audio, video, and voice data. If wireless doesn't catch up quickly, she might well find herself tearing it all out and upgrading to the new Cat6 — a pipe with 10 times the capacity of the current standard.

When it's completed, Bell's home may be the closest realization yet of the futuristic smart homes promised by the high-flying tech companies of the '90s. She's looking into kitchen appliances like the Frigidaire Screenfridge by Electrolux, which has a touchscreen and broadband Internet connection. "Isn't that weird?" The woman who checks her email three different ways pauses, then adds, "I think it's a bit too much."

For a gadget freak of ample means, there's no such thing as too much. "Having something your neighbors don't have," says Chicago-based installer Andy Willcox, "that's what keeps our market moving."

To their credit, many home-networking obsessives are forthright about their mania. "I just get whatever they've got," Bell says. "Just totally live it up." Cohen flat-out states, "I want to be first with everything." Cuban admits his mansion is "disgusting" but adds that "today's high-end is tomorrow's low-end." Even if you've got the coolest pad on the planet, equipment becomes outdated. Perlman figures he'll be watching movies on the 58-inch Faroudja HDTV screen in his master bedroom for another year at most. Then he'll drop $20,000 for a new and improved 60-inch plasma.

So how do you keep up with an industry that constantly rolls out new models and capabilities? You hire 21st-century butlers, experts who tend your network in the same way that your groundskeeper tends your lawn — people like Rich Green. Green once anchored a pair of $100,000 living-room speakers in bedrock, placing them atop 18-foot-tall columns of concrete and steel to minimize vibration. In another home, he mounted a plasma flat-screen TV behind a bathroom mirror. For Ellison, he put a rock concert-sized video projector at one end of a drained swimming pool and turned the gaping hole into a giant subwoofer.

Above all, it's the butler's job to solve the biggest challenge of home networking: how to keep your house on the cutting edge and yet avoid the costly disruption of ripping out walls, ceilings, and roofs to install more wiring. Green's solution: Blue Smurf Tube. That's what he calls conduit, the corrugated PVC tubing that's built into every home constructed today. Most of it lies empty, waiting to be filled with the cables that will bring the technofuture that hasn't yet been invented.

By the end of this year, Microsoft's eHomes unit will roll out Windows XP Media Center Edition, gadget and code designed to turn any old house into a mini-network — no Blue Smurf Tube required. The eHome products will make it possible to remotely control music, movies, and TV for around $1,500 to $2,000 — roughly one-quarter the price of a Crestron panel.

Even as home networking trickles into the consumer market, the Catherine Bells and Steve Perlmans will keep pushing the limits of extreme tech. These obsessives are hardwired for conspicuous consumption, often with the emphasis on conspicuous. Take the story that Rich Green tells of dropping by Larry Ellison's house several years ago with a contract that totaled more than a million. The Oracle CEO looked it over, saw the price, and refused. Green reminded him this was the system they had agreed upon, the biggest ever designed.

"Nobody does this," Ellison snapped. Then he looked at the paperwork again. "Is it really the biggest?" he asked. "Bigger than Gates'?"

Thanks to the trailblazing of the rich and famous, the price of home networks is finally trickling down to the rest of us. In this model home system designed by Rich Green, there are four ways to connect: cable modem for the gateway, phone lines for audio, electrical outlets for gaming and the kitchen, Wi-Fi for everything else. — Chris Baker

Wireless broadband is great, but the coverage can be limited. You may need an Ethernet or HPNA bridge to an additional access point in a distant room.

DSL is on the rise, but cable is still easier to deploy, has higher bandwidth, and is more widely available.

This emerging broadband standard uses existing electrical wiring to deliver up to 11 Mbps via old-school wall outlets.

Home Phone Network Alliance is an increasingly popular networking standard that utilizes existing telephone wiring — all you need is a phone jack.

A secure router/hub — with a built-in firewall that auto-recovers after crashes — will be the centerpiece of your network.

This firewall/hub/router is compatible with standard Ethernet as well as HPNA connections. $120

You'll want a second PC for a dedicated server; 80-gig hard drive and low price make this a good bet. $900

A networked home audio system means any device can grab music from any other device and play it anywhere, whether it's CD, MP3, or TV.

Supports Net radio and sat radio, as well as MP3 and WAV files. Also makes playlists available to other devices on the network. $1,600 and up

Remote decoders with built-in amps for streaming music from the Entr� server. Run up to four simultaneously. 3 @ $400

Dolby ProLogic II, DTS ES Surround, THX Ultra-certified sound. Supports seven speakers with two simultaneous audio/video streams. $2,500

Set-top boxes, satellite receivers, and DVD players are all well and good, but home networking means you can also watch downloaded video straight from your PC.

ReplayTV can store 160 hours of your favorite shows. Pause and rewind live TV, skip commercials, and watch one program while you record another. $1,000

This smaller, cheaper unit holds 80 hours and is ideal for in-house video streaming. $550

A 55-inch widescreen with built-in high-definition receiver. HAVI compatible. Onscreen interface controls all your A/V devices. $2,800

The four-way multiswitch lets up to four receivers play separate programs simultaneously. $150

Stores and plays more than 400 DVDs, CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, and MP3-encoded CD-R/RWs. $1,400

This flipdown 12.1-inch LCD screen hangs under a cabinet and is Web-, cable-, DVD-, and CD-compatible. The wireless keyboard is waterproof, shockproof, and greaseproof. $3,000

As consoles get wired, treat the kids (and yourself) to a low-fuss, high-speed HomePlug connection.

Wi-Fi is the only broadband standard robust enough to turn your PDA into a universal remote for every system in your home.

Supports up to 64 users, and provides solid encryption and authentication. $300

PDA optimized for controlling electronic systems and home monitoring. Add HP's PC Card Expansion Pack Plus ($150). $750

Xanboo makes the ultimate poor man's security setup. Its devices use a proprietary AFM2 (418 MHz) wireless standard. This means that they're Web-accessible from anywhere in the world, and can instantly alert you to breaches via email, text message, or cell phone.

Standard USB connection to your PC — all other devices interact wirelessly. $50

You'll always know when the front door is opened, a window is lifted, or your dog has wandered out the back gate. 3 @ $20

Immediately detects the presence of water, before it becomes a problem. Great for under the fridge. $20

Device listens for 70- to 110-decibel noises. Learn instantly if a baseball breaks your picture window, or if your kids are throwing a house party. $20

These compact touchscreen PCs aim to usurp your laptop, PDA, remote control, and HDTV.

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