Oh good, DreadPirateJosh seems to be on top of what I was going to contribute, that being the subwoofer is the biggest factor of whether you can just drop in a proper receiver. With a passive subwoofer like you get on budget home-theater-in-a-box setups, you really can’t just reuse them, as good receivers send signals to the subwoofer through a preamp, which means you’d need a powered subwoofer. And budget home-theater-in-a-box setups, as he said, also have different impedance for the speakers than is optimally supported by good receivers. A friend of mine with lots of time on his hands used to pick up these kinds of systems for cheap on ebay (these cheapo sets usually have sub par chips that overload, and he’d solder in new ones), fix them up and cheaply sell to friends or give them away… Only real problem was that they didn’t sound anywhere near as good as he felt they were; very muddled, lots of distortion, and really no EQ control in the crappy all-in-one “receivers”. I have 3 proper receivers and surround setups in various rooms of my house, and the clarity is night and day compared to the various home-theater-in-a-box setups I’ve experienced from him and others.

I’ve even turned down accepting free speakers of this kind of quality for those very reasons, it wouldn’t be worth the hassle. It might be for the best to just sell off this set and put some money into a better all around setup. It’d likely be less headache in the end, and the sound quality would likely yield a noticeable improvement.

The speakers and everything look nice on the outside, but they’re really not up to par with what they’re pretending to be…