Lightning

Contact your insurance company. The same thing happened to me and lightning does what it wants to do regardless of any protection you think you may have. If you can prove you took a hit, even indirect, you'll be covered as long as you had it in your policy. BTW-You should have replacement value specified in the policy.
I now have a Monster Power center in front of all of my components, which is supposed to carry something like 10 G's of coverage, but you should contact your insurance company first.
Note-my company gave me some BS that the strike had to hit my property. If it came down next door and bounced over, it wouldn't be covered. I went out back and found a dead branch from my pear tree and told them that was where the strike occurred.
After you get new gear, put it behind a surge protector and make sure everything is properly grounded. For example, the mast of my roof antenna is earth grounded to an eight foot x 5/8" copper rod driven into the earth. That just diverts static down to earth, a full out strike is unpredictably destructive.

I forgot to mention before, but one of my amps that wasn't even plugged in got fried by the hit. My theory is that the huge moving charge induced a voltage in the amp's mains primary. The tech that looked at it said every single component in that amp was damaged.

As I said, lightning is a force of nature and will do as it pleases. I was home looking out the window when it hit. Everything got super bright as I heard an explosion. You know how you usually hear the boom come at you, getting louder and then fade away? I never heard it coming, just the boom and fade.

In my opinion, no surge protector will make a difference when it's a direct or near direct hit. Don't get me wrong, I believe in them and use them like crazy to isolate inter-component surges or capture the surge of a compressor turning on. But a good insurance policy with replacement value is your best protection.

Respectfully, it is no secret that lightning wants to reach earth ground by the path of least resistance, but that is a simplistic view as I believe there are other things going on as well.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/lightning2.html

Even without instrumentation, I can vouch there must have been a great magnetic field moving through my house that day as every one of my TV's had their CRT's magnetized. Not destroyed, magnetized. In the case of my unplugged amplifier, I think the moving magnetic field of the tremendous bolt induced a current into the coils of the mains transformer. The damage cascaded from there.
Preamp was undamaged, as was the tape deck and CD player. Only the component with the biggest transformer was affected.

I understand everything you have stated but I still think it falls short of explaining why the amplifier was damaged in such a specific manner. Absolutely nothing else connected to the stereo was electrically damaged in a similar manner. The only other damage incurred was to the antenna input stage of the tuner, which given the circumstances is intuitively explainable. The damage to the amplifier however was complete. Every component after the power transformer including the main filter capacitors were damaged.
I doubt the lightning path to ground could have occurred via the speaker wires through concrete as the amp has a timed speaker connect relay in the normally open position while off. There was also no damage to the speaker wire insulation, which I would have expected had such a path to ground occurred.
There is no doubt in my mind that a very strong and rapidly moving magnetic field was in the proximity of the amp as the (two) nearby televisions were magnetized as a result of the event. No other set in the house was affected. I personally wired the house and can state to a certainty that each of the damaged sets were on separate branch circuits on different levels of the house and that no other devices on either branch circuit were affected in any manner. The stereo was and still is on a dedicated circuit using 12-3 BX. Each of the four duplex outlets on that dedicated circuit have internal surge protectors, and their indicator lights still glow to this day indicating they were not "spent".
The roof antenna is FM only and is in no manner connected to the CATV, except for a singular 10 gauge wire from the coax grounding block to the ground buss in the main service panel. Each TV is connected to the CATV via starship pattern to a single 4 way splitter to the CATV. The CATV coax is also grounded to the main ground bar.
The only difference between the power amp and every other interconnected component in the dedicated stereo system is the size of the Power Amp's Power transformer. Much bigger than any other power transformer in the system. I don't think it is unreasonable to theorize that a current could have been induced into the coils of the transformer by a rapidly moving powerful magnetic field. I also believe Ohm's law can be applied in this situation as there was never a direct path to ground other than via the interconnects.

To summarize, it is my belief that a great voltage was induced into the primary or secondary side of the amp's power transformer, which simply went on to blow out the power supply of the amp thus causing a cascading failure to the remainder of the amp's internal circuitry. Why the power amp alone was singled out is beyond me. The only difference between it and the other five components (preamp-tuner-CDP-EQ-Tape Deck) connected at the time was the size of the amplifier's power transformer.

Very impressive description, thank you. What else can I say, lightning struck while I was home. As the days passed I noticed more and more appliances had failed until I realized there was a common event. To collect from my insurance company each failed component was checked out by a technician who provided a notarized affidavit stating that the damage was indeed lightning caused.

The one thing everyone stressed is that lightning does what it wants, engineering logic be damned.

So the issue will remain unsatisfactorily explained to me while you are certain that my house was insufficiently earth grounded as a surge current found it's way to one appliance that wasn't even switched on. The fact that no other components, devices or even a single light bulb was damaged is a testament to their resilience I suppose.

Thank you.

Schubert,
You're lucky you didn't break your back, not from the flight or landing, but from the muscle contraction.
Having witnessed a nearby strike for myself, it's amazing that anyone could survive the amount of energy unleashed.
There's a very interesting discussion about lightning on the "tech talk" section of the Audiogon Discussion forum.

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?htech&1376746239&&&/Entreq-ground-conditioners-what-s-the-th