The world needs to deal with this very harsh conflict between stereo and HT. It is a real pain in the ass to piece together all the equip.
Tell me about it. I must have wasted a good 2 years banging my head against this problem. Until it hit me, HT is pure gimmick. Its not really made for home theater, its made for selling movie tickets. In movie theaters almost everyone is sitting way off center so the only way dialog can sound like its on screen is to have a speaker behind the screen. At home it usually just a few and if your stereo images like it should then what do you need a center channel for? You don’t.
Surround is even worse. Pure gimmick. Once you realize this its pretty easy to just drop the whole thing. Especially if you ever bother to compare sound quality between stereo and HT components. There is no comparison.
So after a couple years I ditched the whole thing and never was happier. Can’t say it saves money, probably spend the same amount, but it sure does get a lot better quality for the same money.