I TiVo’ed an interesting documentary on Pete Rozelle on the NFL channel last week. For those who aren’t fellow NFL junkies, Rozelle was the NFL commissioner from the early sixties to the late 1980s, during whose reign the NFL merged with the rival American Football League, resulting in the Super Bowl.

About halfway in, the documentary features a sportswriter who says that he once told a group of NFL owners that once a day, they should kneel in the direction of Rozelle and thank him for the millions his business acumen put into their pockets.

Rozelle passed away in the mid-1990s, but the consumer electronics industry should probably give him daily thanks as well, at least this time of the year: how many big screen TVs, TiVos, and other pieces of home theater gear are sold in January, the post-Christmas month that used to be dead for big-ticket retailers, in anticipation of the Super Bowl?

My wife and I host an annual Super Bowl party in which about 20 to 30 people stop by and partake in all sorts of munchies. The party invariably breaks down into two groups: the hardcore football junkies who inhabit the den with me, and the casual viewers who remain close to the food in the kitchen (the game is also on in the kitchen, just not on a 50-inch screen with surround sound).

The food and the game are taken equally seriously: at halftime during Super Bowl XXXVIII, no one saw Janet Jackson’s mammarian protuberance escape; we were all in the kitchen noshing in anticipation of the second half of the game.

Over the years, we’ve used the Super Bowl as an excuse to upgrade the electronics in the media room: several years ago, I installed new cabinetry to house all the equipment; the 50-inch JVC rear projection followed us home around this time last year after I wrote a piece on HDTV on the cheap for PC World in late 2004 and had some idea of what to look for.

This year, I finally gave in and bought a new A/V receiver, to replace the Pioneer Elite unit I bought in the late 1990s, about five minutes before new inputs were required for DVD-Audio/SACD players, and the Dolby EX surround sound technology was launched. (Its debut film was the little-known art house sleeper, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. You may have heard of it.)

I try to buy the most full-featured receiver I can afford; partially because it’s such a bear to hook these beasts up. There’s a moment near the end of Goldfinger where James Bond is trapped within the bowels of Fort Knox with a ticking atomic bomb, and is finally able to open the case.

Prior to its opening, he thinks he’ll be able to defuse it. Afterwards, his eyes bug out for just a moment as he finds it absolutely crawling with miles and miles of indecipherable wiring.

Other than worrying about blowing up Kentucky, that’s pretty much how I felt on Saturday night, after lugging the big cardboard box containing the receiver home from my local strip mall's big box retailer.

On one level, it’s easy to pull out the old receiver: just yank out the wires, and then the receiver itself. But I wanted to document all of the wiring--and if there weren’t the miles of it that 007 encountered, there’s certainly a good several hundred of feet of it--plus, I wanted to remove any cabling rendered superflous by the new unit. While many of the leads had already been labeled, not all had--and I tried to remedy as much of that as possible with the handy-dandy Brother P-Touch.

Eventually I extracted the old receiver, and set-up the new one enough to watch TiVO and DVDs again; the rest took a little while longer.

It’s a lot of work--and much of it down in the cramped space between the rear of the cabinet and the wall. Hopefully I won’t have to repeat the process for another five or ten years. And even if the game is a blowout (we’re due, after several years of reasonably entertaining Super Bowls), I know the sound and picture will be pretty killer.