5.1 surround sound suggestions

[Woochifer]

If you're tight budgetwise, you should focus on finding the front two main speakers that match your preferences, and add the matching center speaker as soon as you can afford it. Don't bother with accounting for the cabling in the budget. If you got a spool of bulk cable lying around, use that. Matching the front three is critical because any mismatches will disrupt the continuity in the front soundstage. Since you already have a pair of KLH speakers, you can use those for the surrounds on a temporary basis. The ultimate goal should be to build a timbre matched system eventually.

With your budget, you got much better options by aiming for the first two bookshelf speakers, and building gradually. These all-in-one speaker packages all present major sonic compromises for music especially, and with home theater you don't need to buy the whole thing at the same time. Patience will eventually reward you with a better sounding system once you're done. Impatience will put you on an upgrade treadmill.

[Siper2]

I'd definitely build something up, if I were you. Bookshelves all around, or even some inexpensive towers up front and bookshelves everywhere else, would sound a lot better (typically) than an HTiB setup.

But...

Some HTiBs are pretty great for the money. I'm a big Boston Acoustics nut (my system is CR95 fronts, CR75 rears (2), and a CRC7 center), and one of their old DT6000 or DT7000 systems from a few years ago would do you well, I think. There's often one or two on eBay. BA has their Micro series systems, as well as the new(ish) Bravo speakers... but a speaker package from them may exceed the budget. Check www.bostonacoustics.com

Onkyo's HTiB sets are pretty great, too. They also come with a nice receiver, and I think all you should really do with the setup is upgrade the speaker wire to 12-ga or maybe 14 if 12's too thick for whatever posts they have. (I'm sure the "stock" cable/wiring is very thin, like an 18 or so.) I was dead-set on an Onkyo set before I decided to piece together what I've got.

Circuit City sells the Onkyos, as do several others. www.crutchfield.com may, but I'm not sure. You might also want to try one of the Axiom or Paradigm packages...
They're popular for the web purchasers, and Axioms seem very cool in that there's a lot of choice in cabinet color, style, combinations, etc.

=S2=