The Internet can bring a radio signal or a recording from the other end of the country to your house, but getting that music from your computer to your stereo can take a little more work.
Computers are a natural at downloading music off the Internet, but most have terrible speakers and don’t even occupy the living room in the first place. Stereo systems provide all the volume and sonic fidelity you’d need, but they don’t connect to the Internet.
Several years ago, computing vendors started selling a new type of gadget, the wireless media receiver, to fix this problem. It plugged into your stereo but connected to your computer via a wireless network to allow playback of your Web radio feeds and music files: no need to string audio cables from laptop to stereo, or burn audio CDs of each new set of MP3s.
Unfortunately, most of these things did little to smooth over the hassles of home networking and file-sharing.
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Maybe a good thing to do is have one of the media center computers and having it connected to the net and TV. If you have a theater sound system you’ll get all of the fidelity you need and you can watch the visualizations from Windows Media Player on that big screen.