First, determine your budget. You can put together a pretty good system with carefully chosen compenents from your local Best Buy or Circuit City for under $2000. A really, REALLY nice home system can be assembled for $3000-5, not including the cost of the TV. Ultra high-end systems can cost more than your home.
For a baseline on a good system that uses your everyday amp/tuner/control combo you will want to investigate some of the current high-end consumer offerings from mfgs like Okyo, Kenwood, Pioneer, and Yamaha. Figure on spending a minimum of $500-800, depending on which features you feel like you need. At the very least, make absolutely sure the unit is capable of handling at least four inputs and is able to switch not only standard video (RCA plugs), but s-video and component video as well. These will be the standards when the switch to HD is completed over the next few years. It also helps to have an integrated DTS decoder in case your DVD player does not have it. There are a few units that also offer upconversion from standard video to component video, allowing you to have a single cable running from your control unit to the TV and to be able to use older equipment (like VCR's and laserdisc players) on your new HD equipment. My Yamaha HTR-5890 unit does this, and it's worth every penny. The savings in cables alone payed the difference.
Go over to the Home Theater Forum -
www.hometheaterforum.com . Their help, and some judicious internet research, helped narrow down my choices considerably. They also have a link to the audioholics review page. They also have a line on equipment specials that you may not hear about anywhere else.
One last bit of advice. If you are going to go hog wild on something, do it on speakers. A little generic amp played through good speakers will sound better than you realize, and the best amp in the world will sound like crap if played through junky speakers. Also, don't fall prey to the mega-doller specialty speaker cable craze. Just good, heavy guage (16 or larger) wire with the ends properly trimmed is fine. Use good component cables, but don't go nuts. Good shielding is a must, but mega-ultra-space-formed-ionic-whatever cables are nothing but a way to get you to pay stupid amounts of money for a negligible change in audio quality (changes so small it takes extremely sensitive equipment to even detect it).
Brad