Hi everyone; I'm a 19 year old college student, and im looking to upgrade my sound system. When i was in 7th grade i received my first receiver/5.1 surround sound speaker setup for my birthday, and have pretty much kept the same system since then. I have some KLH speakers that are, well... put it this way, last time i saw them for sale, they were giving them away free with the purchase of a 200 dollar receiver. Anyways, i went through a couple receivers relatively quickly and ended up keeping the one i have now, a sony str-de575. I think it's ok for now, but will probably upgrade it later. I went through the "bose phase" and actually almost came quite close to buying one of their lifestyle systems; I saw their little presentation in their acoustically engineered room, and was pretty impressed by it, but then luckily i decided to try my own test. I burned a cd just to see what music sounds like on it, and well, sometimes my free klh speakers sound better then that system. So i was back to square one, doing research, looking through this forum, reading many reviews and such. The primary use for my system will be to listen to music and movies, so I'm trying to decide whether i should buy individual speakers and create my own mix of speakers (possibly bookshelf speakers for the left and right channels, as well as a nice center channel) so that I could listen to music better, or if it would be better to get a ht speaker kit. I would appreciate any suggestions. I have anywhere from 300 to 1000 dollars to spend on speakers and cables. The speakers that i was looking at were these:

Hsu Research VT-12

Onkyo SKS-HT240