After months of reading reviews, advertisements, marketing blather, and forum posts by the hundreds, I'm finally beginning the actual purchasing stage of gathering the equipment for my new Home Theater. Though I cringe at calling it that after seeing the drop-dead gorgeous examples of Home Theaters that some of you folks have in your homes!

I actually began the process about a week and a half ago, but my Onkyo receiver arrived with a good-sized hole in the box, so I sent it back to Amazon. I really felt I needed the extra time anyway, so I'll just use today as my official starting point.

Let me start out by explaining where I am beginning my journey. I currently have only two smallish front speakers and a subwoofer--all by Klipsch--and a 27" JVC CRT television. So, my quest is to find compatible speakers for my existing Klipsch speakers to complete a 5.1 (or at bare minimum a 3.1) setup, buy a widescreen HDTV, blu-ray player, tv stand, and AV-Receiver.

Also, there are a couple of wrinkles. Ideally I'd like to find a blu-ray player that also plays SACD discs, but that is going slowly now. The current-generation PS3 doesn't play them, and neither apparently does my first-choice stand-alone blu-ray player, the Panasonic DMP-BD35K.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. During my intel-gathering, since my speakers were Klipsch, I found myself seeking information from their tech-support folks at the factory. And, while they didn't point me toward Klipsch on Ebay, I discovered that earlier today. Among the items there was a refurbished center channel speaker that had such similar stats that I believe it was the replacement for the center channel that Klipsch had earlier recommended for me. (Ebay=RC-35; Klipsch recommended=RC-62).

At any rate, I snatched the RC-35 from someone for $255 + 10 shipping. So I now have at least a 3.1 speaker system, heh.