In a standard DVD home theater setup, you must run speaker wire from your sound system out to five speakers: left, center and right speakers in the front, plus two in the back generally called "surround" left and right. (There's also a line to the subwoofer, but it's a different type of cable.) Getting wires from the sound system to the front speakers is easy, since it all usually happens behind your entertainment-center cabinet. Running the wires to the back threatens more of an eyesore: if you can't hide them under the carpet or inside the walls, you could end up with two long wires down either side of your home-theater space like the boundaries of a tennis court.

Kenwood's system does away with those two wires, but brings new ones into the picture. Instead of connecting speaker wires to your sound system, you wire in a little transmitter. Using radio technology like that of a cordless phone, it sends the surround left and right signals to a receiver at the back of the room. That receiver amplifies them at 50 watts per channel and sends them out through wires to your surround left and right speakers. (For ideal performance, you need 8-ohm speakers — yours probably are, but check the back or your owner's manual to be sure.)

You still have wires running to your surround speakers, but now they originating at the back of the room, perhaps starting from behind a sofa, table or other obscuring furniture where you can hide the receiver. You still need to plug in both the transmitter and the receiver, adding two more wires to the equation. Nonetheless, many floor plans could benefit from this new situation, where wiring is broken into two sections (up to 100 feet apart) rather than depending entirely on one central point of origin.

But how does it sound? I connected a Yamaha system using the Kenwood wireless gadgets, cranked it up and experienced full theater sound, with no noticeable static or any other radio-frequency issue — all of that, with the receiver tucked well out of sight behind a couch.