Your poor dad. The closest he ever came to getting his hands on a piece of hot technology during his youth was a half-arsed black and white TV with non-operational vertical hold, or maybe a valve-driven “wireless” the size of a baby elephant. No wonder he crosses himself when you reveal that you've just spent a month's salary on a chunk of super-modern home entertainment equipment.

Throw in the news that you plan to blow next month's lolly on a set of speakers so powerful they can shred a sheep at 40 paces, and it won't be long before the oldster is staring at his fingers, muttering about making homemade go-karts from war rubble... while you retreat into a boredom coma.

What your balding progenitor fails to appreciate, of course, is that in the 2lst Century a young chap has to labour like a dog for a living - and that, when he gets home, he needs mind-blowing escapism to help him wash away the dust of the daily grind. Take 30-year-old Shimshad Khalid.

A London drinks wholesaler who spends his days importing and exporting booze for the capital's thirsty hordes, he freely admits that he works harder than Tony Blair's cheesy grin during election week. So when it came to bagging himself a new flat in London's Chinatown area, only an entertainment palace would do.

“I work 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” the inexhaustible entrepreneur explains. “After that I want to chill. When I bought my flat I wanted a place where I could lose all concept of where I was. “I love music, and I wanted to take things to extremes,” he continues. And he's not kidding. His Soho flat contains a sound system that would impress a Bond villain, featuring a pair of Yank-made 7ft M&K speakers, a top-of-the-range Pioneer stereo and a state-of-the-art Lexicon processor.

And that's before you get to the giant Fujitsu plasma screen, the wall of 12-inch TVs and the tip-top DVD player, all of which add to the effect. Why, even the furniture gets in on the act - the sofa has two sub-woofers built into its structure. “I usually get home at about 9pm, and I guarantee I won't stop the hi-fi until lam,” Shimshad exptains. “I had the whole place soundproofed,” he adds, in case you were wondering how the neighbourhood coped with him cranking his evening's entertainment up to nosebleed volume.

The job of stuffing the couch full of bowel-shuddering noise gadgetry fell to Richard Martin of interior design gurus CA1. Shimshad had sourced most of the techno toys in advance, but it was Richard who had to slot them together into one stylish mass - and hide the acres of spagetti all the cables no doubt produced. “These days people don't want a stereo simply sitting in the middle of the room,” he comments. “We design furniture that fits the look of a space, then build in the hardware so that it's unobtrusive. We had to work closely with electrical experts when we converted the sofa. The sound it simply unbelievable – it bites through your ribs.”

Shimshad doesn't even have to leave his seat to get intimate with his gizmos: a single - and ludicrously complicated remote runs the whole show, including the fire, blinds and lighting. It's all enough to leave him in a techno daze, which is one reason why the flat's finishing touch is a quirky dose of reality: the back of a genuine Pakistani bus lying along one wall in the main room.

“I needed something to remind me of my roots,” Shimshad grins. “I bought the bus when I went home, chopped the back off and flew it over here. It got stuck in customs, and I had a nightmare getting it up the stairs, but I had a blank wall and wanted to do something different.”

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