I just finished putting together a secondary theater in the family room of my new house and I got a little carried away. I had 5 Antique Sound Labs Wave mono amps on hand and was curious what a low powered tube home theater system would be like. I have another dedicated theater upstairs and a seperate 2 channel system in my den so I didn't want to spend a lot of money because the family room system is mainly for my two daughters (ages 2 and 5). After trying a few different things I ended up using 3 ASL Wave amps for the 3 front channels and 4 channels from a Pioneer reciever for the rear and side surrounds. I needed to have the rear speakers in the ceiling and 8 watts just wasn't enough for any in-wall speaker I am aware of. The Pioneer reciever was a great find because it has preamp outputs for all channels and it looks cool in the silver finish with my Wave amps and silver Pioneer SACD/DVD-A player. The front speakers are a pair of Axiom M22tis and a VP150 center speaker with a HSU VTF-2 for the low-end. All told I only spent about $2000 for all of the audio related components (including paying an electrician to run 4 speaker lines for the surround speakers). It sounds different than my higher powered solid state system upstairs (using a single 5 channel amp) but I have been using it way more than I expected. I never listen to music on the upstairs theater but the new system downstairs has been on constantly. This probably has more to do with the tubes and the multi-channel SACD playback than the fact that I am using mono amps (neither of which are in my upstairs theater).
Now that I have written this, I am not sure how much of my experience will be useful to you since you will most likely not be using low powered tube amps but I love my new tube home theater system. Funny how it is now "my" system but I still let the girls watch their Willy Wonka and Power Puff Girls DVDs - just had to make sure that the tubes were out of reach of little, curious hands.
Now that I have written this, I am not sure how much of my experience will be useful to you since you will most likely not be using low powered tube amps but I love my new tube home theater system. Funny how it is now "my" system but I still let the girls watch their Willy Wonka and Power Puff Girls DVDs - just had to make sure that the tubes were out of reach of little, curious hands.