If you could build your dream listening room to your exact specifications, what would you create, and what would you put in it?

We can tell you what we'd do - or rather what we did. As part of the move to our new 18,000- square-feet Audiophile Fort Knox, we decided to create two state-of-the- art Acoustic Sounds showrooms - a place where we can both demo audio equipment and recordings for customers, and evaluate them for ourselves. No expense was spared in the construction of these rooms or in the selection of gear that would outfit them.

Acoustic Sounds owner Chad Kassem decided early in the process that the crown jewel of these rooms would be the Avalon Sentinel loudspeakers. We had just struck a deal to begin sale of a select part of the Avalon line, and what better way to get this relationship off the ground but to feature Avalon's flagship product in our flagship room? More importantly, the Sentinels sound so unbelievably incredible, and we'd decided at the very beginning that our listening rooms were going to feature the absolute best. So, Acoustic Sounds in-house carpenter Charles Littell got on the phone with Avalon owner Neil Patel, and the two mapped-out the perfect specifications to make the Sentinels sing their sweetest.

Both rooms (they are adjoined by a connecting door) are 33-feet long by 18-feet wide with 10-foot ceilings.

The exterior walls are made of eight-inch split-face block filled with Foamcore. Then there's three inches of airspace before a 2x4- structured wall filled with R-13 insulation. Next is 12 inches of airspace, followed by a second 2x4-structured wall with more insulation. The whole thing is finished in one-inch sheetrock. You'd never know by listening that on the other side of the rooms' east wall is Salina, Kansas' busiest street. The rooms are dead quiet. The ceilings are one-inch sheetrock with R-13 insulation. The floors are solid concrete with a half-inch dense pad and three-quarter-inch thick carpet. Both rooms are trimmed with oak crown molding.

As for juice, we've got plenty. Every 110-volt, hospital-grade duplex outlet is isolated on its own 20-amp single-ground circuit. The high voltage supply continues in our Reference Room with a couple of 220-volt, 20-amp circuits with dedicated grounds for use with the Richard Gray SubStation and/or PowerHouse. The sound rooms' breaker box is also isolated from the rest of our building with a commercial-grade transient voltage suppression system. On the street are brand new transformers installed by our local power company just for our building.

And best of all, every audiophile recording you could possibly hope to hear is available in the next room.

So, we built the rooms to what we figure are the perfect specifications. The back room is our Reference Room, where the system will undergo minor tweaks and tradeouts but mostly stay fixed. The front room is our Evaluation Room. This is where we're constantly switching out gear of all kinds, evaluating seemingly everything under the sun.