A HOME THEATER DREAM COME TRUE
FOR MICHAEL MEEKER, the road to A/V paradise was long and circuitous but also immensely rewarding as he experimented his way from cobbling together a crude setup almost 30 years ago to building the theater of his dreams—one most of us would die for. In those early days, the “marriage of audio and video” was a concept embraced by enthusiasts and a handful of audio companies as they inched their way toward what we would come to know as “home theater.”
“My love for—and obsession with—home theater was born in 1993 in a small apartment in Southern California,” Meeker reminisces. “I had a 19-inch television that, through a myriad of spliced Radio Shack adapters, I somehow managed to hook up to my stereo. Top Gun was the first VHS tape I ever bought. Watching it over and over, I was fascinated by how it sounded like a fighter jet was landing in my living room—albeit a 3-inch-long fighter jet, courtesy of my tiny TV. I remember thinking, now that I had the sound, I had to upgrade my television. So began my journey.”
Fast forward 28 years, and “a hundred upgrades” later, Meeker developed a COVID-induced itch to build a serious theater in the family’s new digs near the Temecula Valley Wine Country just north of San Diego. “Selling the idea to my wife wasn’t difficult,” he recalls. “We both love movies, and we have passed that love down to our kids. The onset of COVID was the icing on the
