Hey zach, if you do in fact work at circuit city like me, then you can also get good deals on Onkyo right now. Onkyo is offering employees accommodations up until January 15th. Just check with the manager of the home theater dept, or just get on the accommodations website and print out the form for Onkyo. You can get the Onkyo TXSR-602 for 310 bucks shipped to your door.
The harmon kardon are good, and do have hi current amplifiers, but power ratings are seemingly lackluster. But, if you do want to stick with the harmon kardon, then the obvious answer would be the one with the most power in your price range!!!
here is a good thing to know about speakers.......
Let's say that you start with a speaker with a sensitivity rating of 90db. That means that if you put just one watt of power into the speaker, and measure the sound output from exactly one meter away, you are getting 90db. The human difference threshold for volume is actually 3 db, meaning that if there isn't at least 3db of change in volume, the human ear doesn't detect the change very well. In order to make any given speaker 3db louder, you have to double the power input. So, the power to volume correlation for our speaker rated at 90db would look like this:
Watts dB
1 90
2 93
4 96
8 99
16 102 there is a harmon kardon reciever @ circuit city
32 105 rated at 35 watts per channel.....
64 108
128 111
256 114
There is also an HK reciever at circuit city with 50 WPC..... shouldn't really matter so much. Besides, who really listens to their home theater above 105dB? (probably shouldn't have asked that question here.....hehehe) To go with a reciever that was noticeably louder than the Harmon kardon reciever rated @ 50 WPC, you would have to step up to a reciever with at least 100WPC like the onkyo TXSR 702. Employees @ circuit city get the 702 for less than 500 bucks.... for me myself and I, I am going with the 602 cause it is bang for the buck quality.....
Hope that helped more than confused....