Which came first, the chicken or the egg

I will expand on my advice.
If the HT is for movie watching mostly you dont have to go bezerk/Its only bombs and special effects and dialog.You could do it quite nice with an Anthem MCA 5 AVM2 combwith a Camelot Roundtable DVD palyer.Speakrs are your next choice a nice 2 pair of monitors Triumph Coincident with a good Entec or Velodyne sub.And get Israel to do A triumph center channel your all set to watch movies.Coincident cable will finish this of and we have a nice system.For under 20K and 30 k left over to do 2Channel properly.
Point is how much HI- End do you need for bombs exploding.Its not the sound of a violin or acoustice guitar you are trying to reproduce.Its backround noise and dialog.

Leafs points sould not be missed. When one attends a live performance of any type..the best seat in the house is centered a few rows back.(or something of the like). I was in what used to be a high-end audio shop over the weekend..that is now a HT shop. Well, the "salesperson" played a new DVD-A cd for me that he thought was quite good. It sounded very, very stupid. The sound was spread out with noise comming at me from behind..to the point where it sounded like a higher-tech version of early 70's Quad..or worse. The vast majority of movies are making noise..and seem to think that it should come from the side and back ala Disneyland.. but this has absolutely nothing to do with music, either live or recorded. So, use two rooms. Take ten thousand and do a home theater room based on the 36"
XBR450 Sony and the Martin Logan Home theater speakers..get it over. Then take the other 20 to 40 thousand and spend time learning what you like about music and high-end audio.

Pathetic. Blob7, looks like you are on your own--good luck trying to get your info. May I suggest you try Audioreview instead, it looks like some in here are confused with your attempt to gather suggestions for building your HT system and instead would rather give a state of the union address on 2 channel and multichannel music playback.

Blob7, Mr. J_thunders makes some very good suggestions. AudiogoN by its very name is not VideogoN, and there is, likely, more reviews and HT systems to be seen on Audioreview. There was another thread, a few days back, complaining about service at a store called Tweeters. It seems that many former high-end stores went down the path of changing to HT to try to stay afloat. For many of them it was in vain. The Best Buys, Ultimate Audios, Circuit Cities and others are fitting the current direction of most peoples thoughts on what a store should be...maybe, maybe not. For what its worth Audio Odyssey in Iowa City, Audio Consultants in Chicago, and Audio Perfection in Minn. Minn., do the best
custom installs in the upper Midwest..that still can sound like music. AudiogoN is more of audio/music lovers site and if any of use have not served your quest well,...well, sorry. I have heard very good audio systems, that capture my attention, from five to two hundred fifty thousand..and most HT systems I've heard/watched(inc. ones where guys built on special rooms..etc.) have not been as successfull. That said, the closest I have seen/heard was with a direct view Sony or Loeve, and the Martin Logan HT speakers, perhaps a good place for you to start. Best of luck.