Earlier post:
Well, in the heat of the demolition and early remodel, we decided we were going to "hold off" on doing anything about our audio-visual, after we talked to a few experts who made us realize there was a whole lot out there we hadn't even considered. Our contractor put conduit in the walls and cielings to the places where it was pretty much agreed our rear and kitchen speakers would go and we thought we were just going to leave it like until after the remodel. But as we settled into our new routine and had more opportunities to talk to people, everyone encouraged us to at least "do something" so we did a little research on our own and ended up buying Polk TC60i speakers for our rear speakers for our tv and for the kitchen. We have found a guy we can hire to come pull the wire through the conduit and put the speakers in the cieling which was our second level of "well, this is all we'll do for now". And now we're thinking, geez, we've gone this far, let's at least get the surround sound for the tv in place so we researched receivers and are pretty convinced we'll get the Onkyo 876. (We started out with the 806 but then realized we will eventually want to hook up an Ipod, our son's Wii and PS3 so decided the 876 was a better choice.)
So we think the next "final step" is to get the front and center speakers BUT we don't want to put the front speakers in the wall and we think we understand that we can have our center and front speakers in the form of a bar.

However, when we tried to read about this, we didn't make much progress. Can anyone enlighten us as to what the main things are we need to consider in looking at these front-center speaker bars? Are there aspects about the rear speakers we need to consider in looking at a speaker bar? Any hints to help getting us going on this step will be appreciated....thanks!