I'd like to preface this with I'm an audio and home theater ignoramus. I've read a thousand articles but it's a topic I just don't know my way around, and depending on what I read I don't know what to believe. The more I read the more confused I get, so with that:
I'm looking to get myself a "quality" surround sound system--by quality I mean respectable to the discerning ear but not the audiophile ear. I regularly read that it's best to buy a receiver and assemble the individual components yourself, and that home theaters in a box suck. Is this really true? As an audio ignoramus I really like the idea of everything coming in one box so I don't shoot myself in the foot with my own stupidity. Also, I'm definitely going to require that rear speakers be wireless which I know vastly limits my choices.
Could someone take pity and point me in the right direction? I'm willing to spend anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a thousand. I could definitely be persuaded to go higher if necessary (I don't have a strong understanding of what price point I should be targeting to get quality, without going into the crazy high end audiophile stuff).
My primary uses would be movies and music. One sidenote: do some receivers have integrated bluetooth so I could wirelessly beam music from a laptop/phone/etc.? That's a feature I'd really like. My current home theater is a mess of technology that doesn't integrate at all, including a pc, a WD TV, a bluetooth adapter, a 2.1 speaker system, an HDMI splitter, sometimes a cable box sometimes a digital antenna, and about five or six remotes--it's becoming an embarrassment not to mention a daily hassle. I'm looking to end up with one quality set of speakers that I can easily feed audio to from my tv, my computer, my phone/tablet, etc.
Huge thanks for any help.