[RainDawg]

I highly recommend the Yamaha Natural Sound series of recievers. I bought one last year after trek through all of the "high end" audio stores in the delaware valley, and it has fantastic sound and a nice array of options for anything less that $1000. It's an A/V reciever which means it can decode DTS, Dolby Digital, and also act as a Composite/S-Vid/Coponent video gateway, a VERY nice feature if you've got a bunch of devices to control with it (I've got my PC, VCR, Nintendo, DVD Player, Turntable, and Antenna).

Stereo recievers are more for controlling non-video devices and usually do not have multi-channel capability. But if that's all you're using it for, there are certainly some very nice stereo units out there. But, for the multitude of purposes these things serve these days, I'd recommend an A/V unti that you can grow with instead of being limited by.