Which came first, the chicken or the egg

The best advice may be to use the search function of these fourms. Insert key words..and see what you can use from work that's been done on prior posts. That said..it is more difficult to do HT that is still also a high-end 2 channel system. My biggest suggestion is to be VERY, VERY carefull with cable/dish or DSL feeds. These can cause real problems with system grounds..and more, and can handicap the very high-end sound you may be seeking. Good luck.

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.

Whatjd,You hit a home run.Great post.
J thunders if you cant see the big Lie part 2 is well under way.You are being conned by the big buck marketing campain.
Big lie # 1, cd perfect sound forever.20 years later Vinyl is still better.
Big Lie # 2 HT can reproduce music better than 2 Channel. It cant.
You need to keep them seprate different room.If you dont have the space dont try to do HI FI in an HT setup.Cost's a fortune and your money can be better spent.

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.