By: Brian Crecente

Back in December I wrote up a guide for picking out an HDTV for your gaming needs. I decided to write the story at the time because I was in the process of choosing one for my basement, which was getting a major overhaul and being turned into an entertainment room.

After much procrastination, and harassing the executive of a multinational corporation, I decided to completely ignore my own advice and buy a 50-inch plasma from LG.

The TV was delivered a few weeks back to a half completed basement. Over the following weeks I worked on getting cables, choosing my surround sound system and hooking everything up while the contractors finished up their work.

Yesterday, the crew came in and installed the last set of cabinet doors in the entertainment center and The Lounge is now officially completed.

The unfinished basement was converted into an office/bedroom, bathroom, two storage rooms, library and wet bar, but the biggest chunk of the 1,000-square-feet of space is devoted to the television room

Here's how we designed it.

We opted to have one wall of the room turned into an in-built entertainment center. The entertainment center is mostly taken up by the 50-inch television. On either sides of the TV is a cabinet with shelves for holding electronics. The right side holds an Xbox, Gamecube, PS2, PS2 debug unit, Xbox 360 and Xbox 360 debug unit and there's still an empty shelf. The left side has my audio system and cable box.

These two glassed in cabinets do get a little warm, but most of that seems to dissipate through the cut-outs in the back of the cabinet.

Along the bottom of the entertainment center are four more cabinets, two of which are for storage. The center two cabinets each have three pull out drawers which hold my games and our videos.

Along the top of the entertainment center are three built in speakers, a left, right and center channel.

There are two other speakers mounted in the ceiling above the couch and a plug behind the couch for a subwoofer.

The contractor, a really clever guy, knew I was putting a crap load of electronics in the entertainment center, so he did a couple of cool little things for me.

First, when the electrician installed the new sub-panel, he made sure to give the entertainment center outlet its own breaker.

The coolest thing, however, is in the closet in the bedroom, which shares a wall with the entertainment center. The contractor built a 2-foot crawl space behind the entertainment center and you can access it by a little trap door built into this closet.

The space gives me access to cut-outs for the cabinets and the back of the TV as well as the plugs for all of the speakers in the room.

I was able to install a huge APC back there, and I can't actually slither into the space and tinker with wires when I need to. It's fantastic.

Two weeks into using the television on a daily basis and I'm still quite happy with it. There are only two things I don't like about the LG. First, you have to cycle through all of the inputs, no matter how many are in use, to get to the one you want. Second, while there are a ton of inputs, I wish there were more.

I'm fairly happy with the rest of the entertainment room's set-up, though I've been having some strange surround sound issues.

I purchased a Yamaha HTR-5860 for my sound and a Yamaha'sYST-FSW100 subwoofer. The surround sound seems a little muddled to me, it's not nearly as surround as I would like it to be, but worse still, I can't get the subwoofer to make any sound whatsoever.

The 5860 comes with a microphone and a mode that automatically goes through the speakers to set up the levels and such. When that runs the subwoofer makes noise, but I've never heard it in a game or when watching a movie.

I've tried cranking up the balance both on the unit and in the settings and still nothing.

Any suggestions?