any decent powered speakers?

By far, the best sounding powered speaker I've ever heard is the Mackie HR824 Powered Studio Monitor. Ran across them in several studios --
they are both incredibly accurate and incredibly musical. They are actually
bi-amped! They are bookshelf type speakers, but they have two separate amps on them. They can be used nearfield or if you spread them and sit back, they throw a wide three dimensional image. I could not believe all of the sound coming out of these things! Hey -- also -- can you explain your set-up? Sounds intriguing.

You're not being long-winded. I am interested in doing something similar at some point. I have a dedicated listening room and a dedicated home theatre room, but I also like to have background music in the rest of the house. I have much of my music collection ripped to a hard drive. I am ripping my CD's using AIFF, uncompressed. I also have wireless internet via apple's AIRPORT. At some point, I would like to have the hard drive -- drive a central music system that could be controlled from any of several computers networked together. So, I am curious as to how you achieved your results,
how it sounds, any particluar problems, etc.