Lots of good advise above but I want to add more thoughts about the room.
Walk around your room and do a single hand clap at various places. Then go into other rooms, especially bedrooms, and do the same thing. In your main room you will likely hear a strong flutter echo. If your bedroom is carpeted and you have a couple chairs plus the bed you will hear a smoother fade-out of the sound. Flutter echo = bad sound. You want your large room to sound more like your bedroom. There is no amount of money you can spend on gear that will overcome the bad effects of flutter echo. One of the main things to know about room acoustics is that the digital correction technology in an AV receiver will do nothing to address flutter echo. It only concerns itself with frequency response, particularly in the bass region.
The next thing is to talk to your significant other about how you will be playing the system. There will certainly be times that you are sitting in the sweet spot listening intently to a piece of music. However, it sounds like this is your main living space which portends other requirements. Do you or your SO like to listen to music when you are in the kitchen cooking? How about watching TV. The point here is that you will need to think about how the system will sound in other parts of the room. If the room is large with a lot of reflective surfaces it might sound like a cave. In this case I would recommend that you think about remote speakers and where they should go. This will affect your choice of gear.
Before researching the optimum system I recommend that you focus your energy and dollars on treating the room. There is lots of good instructional information on the web and there are several companies who provide room treatment products that will have an expert personally assist you to improve the acoustics of your space. There are even custom absorbers available that can be covered by your own artwork or photos.
Lastly I agree with the above posters who recommend starting with a good quality two channel (or 2.1) system. You might find, as I did, that having more than two channels doesn't improve my movie watching experience. I finally came to the conclusion that the extra speakers were more of a distraction. For movies where multichannel sound is very important we usually go to the theater. We just saw The Rise of Skywalker and it was amazing. I'm simply never going to have a surround system that is anywhere near that good.
Walk around your room and do a single hand clap at various places. Then go into other rooms, especially bedrooms, and do the same thing. In your main room you will likely hear a strong flutter echo. If your bedroom is carpeted and you have a couple chairs plus the bed you will hear a smoother fade-out of the sound. Flutter echo = bad sound. You want your large room to sound more like your bedroom. There is no amount of money you can spend on gear that will overcome the bad effects of flutter echo. One of the main things to know about room acoustics is that the digital correction technology in an AV receiver will do nothing to address flutter echo. It only concerns itself with frequency response, particularly in the bass region.
The next thing is to talk to your significant other about how you will be playing the system. There will certainly be times that you are sitting in the sweet spot listening intently to a piece of music. However, it sounds like this is your main living space which portends other requirements. Do you or your SO like to listen to music when you are in the kitchen cooking? How about watching TV. The point here is that you will need to think about how the system will sound in other parts of the room. If the room is large with a lot of reflective surfaces it might sound like a cave. In this case I would recommend that you think about remote speakers and where they should go. This will affect your choice of gear.
Before researching the optimum system I recommend that you focus your energy and dollars on treating the room. There is lots of good instructional information on the web and there are several companies who provide room treatment products that will have an expert personally assist you to improve the acoustics of your space. There are even custom absorbers available that can be covered by your own artwork or photos.
Lastly I agree with the above posters who recommend starting with a good quality two channel (or 2.1) system. You might find, as I did, that having more than two channels doesn't improve my movie watching experience. I finally came to the conclusion that the extra speakers were more of a distraction. For movies where multichannel sound is very important we usually go to the theater. We just saw The Rise of Skywalker and it was amazing. I'm simply never going to have a surround system that is anywhere near that good.