I know many audiophiles are very happy with 2 channel home theater, Tom H and OCCD included. To each his own. I really enjoy the HT side of the hobby and the idea of recreating the movie action through sound sources throughout the room. Also, I could never see getting the LFE channel to reproduce properly in a 2-channel system (nor would I like to torture my Plats by asking them to do low frequency effects
) But going two channel definitely simplifies things and some swear by that minimalist approach.
Scott - I like the Denon 4520Ci and pretty much anything Denon and Yamaha these days, particularly from the reliability point of view. Seems like Onkyo has gone down the crapper in quality control, specially with HDMI switching: seems like this is the most frequently reported issue - and Onlyo is at the point where they trade your receiver in for a new one when the board fails. On the features side, Denon uses Audyssey for calibration, and I trust that better than Yamaha's proprietary system (I am not sure what Yamaha does with subs, if anything, but I recommend getting a receiver that will automatically calculate distance, set phase, and equalize the subs... Audyssey adds licensing costs to the manufacturer, so Pioneer and Yamaha are trying to save money by designig their own...). If I were to do it again I would explore some of the newer Denon receivers with Dolby Atmos support (supposedly "future proof"). Since these are so new, they probably will not show up in a discount website like Accesoriesforless for a while, so you would have to pay a higher price for any of those units. I would stick with Denon myself.
