Tired of HT

To further amplify what Tholt has said, start by placing the front speakers in the most perfect position relative to the room, irrespective of the TV or HT. Then, place your seat accordingly, use a pre-amp with bypass, keep your amp if you like it, and then place the other speakers where you like as long as they don't interfere with the reflections of the main speakers. This is what I ended up with. Two channel is always great and multi-channel is good enough. It takes a whole lot of money and the perfect room to do both.

If you value music more than sound effects, and it sounds like you do, then dispense with the entire HT hoax and apply your resources to a nice two channel music system. Home theater is car stereo brought indoors.

Congratulations to you for recognizing as much. And good luck in your quest. Tubes are not necessary.

To clarify if it wasn't clear before, my suggestion is to transform your current surround sound setup into a competent 2 channel setup via a good 2 ch amp and preamp. The receiver would be used for movies only (powering the center and rear channels) or if you wish to hook up some sort of surround music capability. this would have both an HT set up and a 2 strictly 2 channel set up in one system.

Home theater is car stereo brought indoors.

What to say to that? what the hell are you talking about?

HT Hoax is only a hoax if you expect to get the same two channel sound (when playing just two channels) from a similarly priced HT system as you get if you poured ALL your money simply into Source pre-amp amp and two speakers.

This fact is self evident: 6 cheaper speakers and an amplifier that does 6 channels all at once cannot possibly equal what you can achieve with a similarly priced two channel setup.