You’ve got to love anyone who means to tackle the project of building a home theater on a budget.  It takes a lot of restraint, not to mention discipline and sheer grit not to go hog wild and blow every nickel you’ve got on a gigantic plasma TV or the finest speakers or anything like that.

And for Stephen Hopkins, restraint was the order of the day.

He put together his sweet home theater setup for under five thousand dollars.  That’s right, an entire home theater setup for the cost of a fairly low end used car.  How did he do it, you ask?  Simple–by careful shopping, haggling, and loads of scratch and dent, refurbished, and B-stock merchandise.

And it’s not like he just threw an old nineteen inch TV in a room with a couch and called it good.  No sir!  He’s got some pretty prime equipment in here.  Sure, he had some stuff on hand already, and that got thrown into the mix, but he also brought in other stuff.  He’s got an Onkyo receiver, a Samsung Blu-ray player, and a hundred-inch projector screen, part of that scratch and dent I mentioned.

So when you look to set up your own home theater setup, spare a thought for Stephen Hopkins, who showed us the way.