They're are pro's and con's with the Home THX system. The good thing about it is that the speakers WILL sound good. The bad thing about them are the surrounds. The home THX system uses Dipole surround speakers, meaning they don't fire the sound at you. Instead they fire forwards and backwards alongside the walls. This technique puts the listener in a null, so you can't tell where the surround effects are coming from. The bad thing about that is that when you expect a surround effect to wizz towards the back left for example, you wont be able to hear a specific location. You will hear it, but you wont be able to localize it.

Thats bad in my book. With commercial theaters, you get to localize the surround effects because the speakers fire into the audience. It all basically boils down to the limitations of the "2 surround speaker" design, and their inablilty to sound flat, or give a flat response, or sound smooth. Home THX was actually designed for mono surround systems, with a nod towards 5.1 because the surrounds where 180 degrees out of phase with each other, or better known as decorrelation . When the 5.1 systems came out they didn't need the surrounds to be out of phase since the surround channels in a 5.1 soundtrack were already discrete, but it is still used in pro-logic mode ( mono surround ).

I personally don't have anything against THX home processing, as it actually benefits the movie watching experience a great deal. Home THX processing re-equalizes the front channels, and Timbre matches the surrounds to match the front speakers in tone. So when you hear a sound go behind you it won't change in tone.

About the reciever, Onkyo makes great products,. The receiver will not disappoint. I'm just not too fond of the THX speakers systems because of the surround design.