A worthy replacement for "the" Z-5500?

[plonk420]

Well that's because you've never listened to a good 2.0 setup .

The Onkyo HT-S3500 5.1 looks pretty decent for the price. The only concern is the speakers are not great, probably not much better than the speakers on the z-5500. Although I'm sure it still sounds fantastic.

this. i "survived" on a 2.0 (+ nondiscrete sub) setup for 4+ years. "sidegraded" to the 15 watt RMS 1970s Sansui 4.0 setup only for L4D2, which i promptly stopped playing soon after.

also, a friend upgraded from an Onkyo HT-S5100 HTIB to some random amp + Infinity P363s on my suggestion and was pissed he hadn't done it sooner (and i guess he got the audiophile bug at this point and proceeded to replace them with some Klipsches and moved the Infinitys to his office)

edit: an upside to Infinitys is that you can get replacement parts (downside is that you can do this only as long as they're being made). the manual breaks down each component of the speaker and their part number.