[Bill Riel]

In article .com,
says...

Hey guys thanks. No I have not yet bought the system. What I want to
get is a home theater system in a box.

While you might be perfectly content with a mass market HTIB, I'd
strongly recommend that you look into some of the lower end 5.1 packages
from a company like Paradigm or Boston Acoustics - it will cost a bit
more, but the sound quality will be head and shoulders above your
typical HTIB.

You'll have to separately purchase a receiver, but there are some
affordable HT receivers from Denon, Yamaha, Sony or Panasonic (& some
other companies) that would work well. For your TV viewing, I suspect
that much of the signal will be mono - I know that my Denon receiver
does have a "Mono-Movie" mode which seems to work well to get a more
"immersive" sound out of such a signal.

You'll still need some way to get the audio signal to your receiver
which might require the purchase of something like a VCR/DVD combo. I'm
just not sure if you could run your antenna directly into your receiver
or not. You could run your antenna connection into the coax in on the
combo unit and run the audio out to the receiver. May be a bit clunky
but should work.

One thing though: before you purchase a VCR/DVD combo unit, make sure
that it has optical or digital audio outs: when watching DVDs you want
to be able to get the 5.1 audio track to your receiver. That can't
happen with the typical RCA stereo outs that a VCR has.

Bill