If your particular room layout (or spouse) won't allow running a bunch of wires (perhaps through the walls and/or ceiling) to five to seven speaker locations throughout the room, especially to rear surround speakers, but you still want to experience the magic of multi-channel digital audio, you might want to consider one of the latest batch of soundbar speakers that handle 5 to 7 channels of audio, and pair it with a separate powered subwoofer to provide some low frequency effects.

Atlantic Technology and Polk are the only companies I am aware of that offers a seven-channel surround soundbar speaker. You should also check out the five-channel soundbars in the slideshow from Definitive Technology and BIC America.

Because a soundbar is a long, slim multichannel speaker that either sits beneath, or is wall-mounted directly underneath or above, the television screen, you will only need to run five to seven short lengths of speaker wire from the speaker outputs on back of your home theater receiver to the back of the sound bar. Some sound bars actually include the wire.

Connecting a separate sub will also require running a subwoofer cable from the sub pre-out jack on back of the receiver to the subwoofer location (perhaps sitting near a corner or behind some furniture), unless you purchase a wireless subwoofer.