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It seems that it's been years since tech manufacturers claimed the book has already been written on the digital home. So how's it progressing?

Very slowly, by the looks of it — the hype over the past five years or so predicted we'd all be living in digital entertainment heaven by now. And it still seems to be another 10 years away.

When we think of the digital home-entertainment system, we think of multimedia centres, where we sit passively, surrounded by a multitude of speakers, listening to music, playing first-person-shooter games, watching Hollywood thrillers, buying downloadable TV shows and pumping entertainment from our computers to the home theatre.

Well, the promises are not a book yet — they've been scattered around on hundreds of loose pages fluttering around the digital home's driveway in an incoherent blizzard of hype. The industry had better own up to the facts: The digital home, which promised to add colour to our black-and-white lives, is still a fantasy, and the closer we get to that dream the further away it seems to be.

Since 1995, when the first digital entertainment arrived online in the form of MP3 music files, manufacturers have been pushing the notion that the technology to get anything, anywhere and any time -- all at the push of a button -- is here.

It hasn't happened — at least on an integrated and mass scale — and I doubt it will in the near future. It will more likely devolve into the kind of thing that hi-fi systems did a half-century ago.

In those days, all marketers of home entertainment believed that the answer to the arrival of TV and stereo systems was to bundle them all together as a single piece of furniture that could also take over your home , with a cubbyhole for all your 15 record albums (anyone remember Project G from Clairtone in 1963?). Some units included a TV set, some were crafted to match a floor-model TV, which was also primarily a piece of furniture.

All these things could have been called a home-theatre system, if the phrase had been invented then.

Needless to say, it didn't last long. People started buying components.

And I'm convinced that the reason we moved to components in the 1960s is because we separated two different activities: Listening to music and watching TV.

Manufacturers are making the same mistake again. Not only are they trying to merge different activities together — watching TV, listening to music and using computers — this time they're doing it in a much more complicated market.

The massive new home-theatre TV screens overwhelm homes, and they're usually sold with steel-and-glass stands that can also handle CD and DVD players, HD players, radio tuners, amplifiers, speakers, cable set-top boxes, digital media centres such as AppleTV , perhaps an IPTV gadget like SlingBox or an outboard hard drive to hold more recorded TV. Put them all together, and you have something even bigger and clumsier than the old entertainment-as-furniture concept.

At least if you went with a mahogany or teak console from the 1940s to the early 1960s, you had only one cable to worry only about: the power cord. (Well, add the wire to the rabbit ears.) When components took over, the wires started to multiply, but we put up with the self-propagating cables: There weren't that many, they were easy to figure out and there were no conflicting connections that might make your console blow up.

Today, however, a peek behind a home-entertainment system reveals a mare's nest of cables, dongles, splitters, HDMI switches and power bars. Not to mention those power-bar extenders to accommodate the "bricks" manufacturers use as power plugs, which block adjacent power sockets.

Looking at the cables behind my own home-theatre system brought back memories of the first TV I ever saw, back in 1953. The man in the next apartment had a radio-repair business, and he wanted to learn about television, so he built one from parts. He was no carpenter, so he stuffed the box-less TV chassis into his hall closet, positioned the couch so it had a clear view of the closet, and his wife was too terrified to go near the thing (this was in the 1950s, after all). Zillions of volts running through the picture tube, she was told. And so their kids had TV, but couldn't watch it until their dad got home and turned it on.

It was my first lesson in user interface design: Just because something works doesn't mean it's not in need of a simpler way of being operated.

This wouldn't be so bad if we were happy with the components until we decided to upgrade to new ones. But it's not up to us any more: Manufacturers have the jump on us, and upgrade their gadgets constantly. So, for instance, when the faster USB 2.0 connection was released, it cascaded the need for other components to be upgraded to USB 2.0. Sure, they were backwardly compatible, but a USB 2.0 system is only as strong as its weakest link, and if the weakest link is USB 1.1, then you hadn't upgraded much at all.

Now we have two-year-old components being leapfrogged by tech advances. Downloading stuff from your computer to the home theatre works much better using faster wireless routers (the latest standard in speed is the 802.11n), never mind the money you shell out gambling on whether Blu-ray will clobber HD DVD in popularity. And it seems that Ethernet over the home electrical system advances in speed every six months, and you will need that speed to accommodate the HD disc player you just bought; 56 megabits per second were fine for analog or normal computing when Bell Canada released its first HomePlug network last November, but by July this year, Actiontec released the MegaPlug Ethernet Adapter Kit , which offers a connection running at 200 Mbps.

And if you're trying to play HD movies over your home network, which you can do more often these days, you will need that speed.

Another complication is that most of the activity in the high-tech market is the trend toward the miniaturization and multiplication of previously large items: handheld computers and multimedia players, for instance. It seems a waste of money to buy both a good home-theatre sound system as well as a good portable multimedia player. Not everyone can afford to have a home theatre as well as an iPod Touch; for many people it's an either-or situation.

This is not the fault of marketing; the marketing people simply try to maximize the perceived impact of new toys, regardless of whether the companies they work for already have a better and cheaper product in the pipeline. The consumer is therefore caught in the eternal upgrade cycle — never buying anything because something better is sure to come along. I bet there are a lot of people holding off buying a next-generation DVD player until a clear winner is announced — or the price drops enough to make the gamble worthwhile.

As far as I can see, there is only one clear winner in home theatre: Big-screen TVs and their digital box companions. They offer the most bang for the buck, and have very few issues with their connectors. They also offer pay-per-view movies as well as some pretty good movie channels (depending on your service provider), and the ability to record and keep your favourite movies or simply to time-shift your viewing habits. But they require monthly service payments, and those can not only add up pretty quickly, but seriously curtail your spending power for more and better toys.

So scratch the HD disc player until a winner is announced; scratch the old VCR unless you still have some archive tapes; scratch the radio tuner because you won't be watching a blank TV screen while listening to the radio; scratch the IPTV setup because it's just too much bother to operate when you're in the Bahamas on holiday , and hold off on media extenders such as AppleTV until the downloadable TV programs and movies are allowed into Canada.

You can keep the game console, although that will have to be replaced soon enough, and keep the set-top box, which you need if you want digital TV. That leaves only one more gadget that can immediately be added to the system without worry: An outboard drive that will extend the recording capacity of your set-top box. All you have to worry about there is that the outboard drive has a serial ATA (SATA) connector, and that it will work with the particular set-top box you have (it isn't easy figuring this out, though).

So you see where we are now: Just about where we were 25 years ago, with a TV set and a VCR to record stuff, only in much better quality.

Before the industry manages to get the home theatre off the ground, it will have to resolve the matter of what it calls the conflict between the two-foot screen and the 10-foot screen, which is their way of differentiating the experience of a computer screen, which is close, as opposed to the entertainment TV, which is farther from where you sit.

About the only way that anyone has been able to make the Internet work on the 10-foot screen is a multimedia system, such as Microsoft's Media Centre. That package acknowledges that it's useless to think of reading and writing e-mail or surfing the Net on a 10-foot screen, and seeks to narrow the usefulness of the home computer to a storage device for stuff you watch elsewhere.

But anyone who has tried to set up even a basic computer-to-home-theatre system in two rooms knows that this can be an intimidating process, especially for those who don't want to have to learn a whole lot of tech stuff.

So where does that leave us? Not very far into the future we were all promised.