One of my good friends wound up with a (disgustingly annoying) windfall profit when his company IPO'ed during the dot.com days. A couple of years ago, he bought a Meridian system that I think cost approximately $75-100k at the time. It sounded pretty good, but not 10-15 TIMES as good as my Outlaw-based system. To be honest, I'm not even convinced it sounded better. It did have all kinds of fancy controls and you could interface it with your pc, etc. The last time I checked, he'd become quite disillusioned with Meridian due to support issues.

The interesting thing about it was that all the pieces were connected with cabling similar to ethernet (or perhaps firewire).

If I had a ridiculous budget for home theater gear today, I'd opt for a full boat from TACT. That gets you up into the 4-5 TIMES the price of an equivalent Outlaw system, but it absolutely sounds better and the room correction features are state of the art (making it mostly unimportant where you place your speakers). That said, you can see by my signature where I think the true value in home theater systems lies these days. 8-)

Cheers,