As your room is a challenge with all the hard reflective surfaces, a surround system with multiple speakers could end up sounding very muddled. I recommend just doing a 2-channel system, which will be easier to get sounding right and be a lot more immersive for watching movies than a poorly designed surround system. You will also reduce the amount of ugly wires and hardware. For amplification, if you do go for the B&W, I recommend looking at the integrated amps by Yamaha, Luxman and McIntosh. Best of luck with it!
confused and don't know what to do
We would like to buy a nice audio system and also have this double as a surround sound but listening to music is the priority. We have listened to many speakers but have settled on the B&W 804's. Now the challenge is to select a receiver and all the other accompaniments we require. We have a little challenge in that our home is a condo and the outside wall is all glass. The space is combined kitchen, living room, and dining room all open with hardwood floors and hard tile on the walls of the kitchen and a lot of granite counter tops. It seems that every where we go, the recommendations are different depending on what the store is selling and of course, the sales people would like us to buy the most expensive. What would give great sound without going crazy. We are thinking about 2 tribe sub woofers and space is limited and an in wall center B&W speaker but we don't know what we are doing and don't want to throw our money away. Help! Too many choices and we don't have enough knowledge. Thank you so much.