Advice Needed - $500 Budget

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Welcome to the forum!

Looks like you've covered the video portion of your home theater pretty well with a quality 1080P native set and a great Blu-ray player. The audio portion is very important also, but you may not understand if you've only used tv speakers. A good sound setup will improve the immersion capability of your home theater by leaps and bounds.

Entry level AV receivers start at around 400 bucks, which will get you decent wattage, video passthrough over HDMI, and some of the advanced codecs, not to mention the legacy sound formats. You can go lower if you can do without video switching, the new audio formats, and room filling power. For speakers, you could always start with fronts and a center channel, and add a subwoofer and surrounds as you can.

If you go small budget and then get bit by the bug, it could be money tossed away unless you can use it some where else. On the other hand, if you are bound by a smaller budget, check out some of the new HTIBs coming out like the Onkyos.

My first (and current) audio system is a Panasonic SA-XR55 7.1 receiver (around $260 at the time) and an Athena Technologies Audition 7.1 timber matched speaker setup (around $1400 for the set). All video to the 50PZ700U, all audio to the XR55. I can't tell you how much I have enjoyed this modest system. I'm looking for a good class 6 receiver now but they all seem to have one goofy problem or another.

Check out Crutchfield, J&R Audio, Amazon, and your local B&Ms for good deals. AVS Forums has some good audio threads so check them out too. Good luck and I hope you enjoy whatever you decide to get.