With all the experience on this site I hope to get some recommendations for a media room. I have $3500 to spend for a receiver, subwoofer, fronts, rears and center. The system will be used in a media room where most activity will be watching DVDs' and some music.
$3500 is an awesome budget, gives you plenty of nice options. Here's my 2 cents:
Receiver: go straight to UBID.com and bid on the Marantz sr8400, they have over 200 of them ending in a couple of days, probably will end up going for around $400-600 for a 2nd-to-top-of-the-line model that normally retails closer to $1300-1400. An absolute STEAL!
7 Speakers & sub: Ascend 340 center, 6 Ascend 170s, and Hsu VTF-2 Mk2 sub, $1670 shipped from ascendacoustics.com
If the room is a bit larger you can get the Ascend 340s for your front L/R speakers instead of the 170s for just an extra $200. If you go 5.1 or 6.1 it'll be less of course.
Lastly, if you don't see yourself getting into SACD/DVD-A surround music then you can use cheaper $100/pair speakers for the surrounds like Polk R15s or Fluance SV-6s.
CD/DVD player: Denon DVD-2910 Universal Player, $716 shipped from Crutchfield.com
All that would still leave you with plenty left over in your budget for speaker stands, wall mounts, and generic wiring/cables.
The Ascends are Internet-direct speakers, do a Google search on them and you'll find massive amounts of 99% glowing reviews on them from professionals and consumers alike. Look in the "Speakers" section for 2 threads about them, one of them has a link to a much huger thread on the avsforum.com
IMHO these are probably the best speaker value around today.
I think you mean God Bless American Prices. It really pisses me off that you guys get kit for SO much less than we do, and that was well before the internet happened.
well Frank, I think the downside to that is we have zero social safety net...if you get sick and end up in the hospital w/o insurance you are totally SCREWED in this country.