In reply to:
Should I be going for surround sound? Is it really that much more incredible just for music with no visual?
The answer is clearly yes for well-mastered, well-mixed material, where the music style benefits from surround. I can't believe anyone who listens to the Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon multichannel SACD on a 5.1 Axiom setup could think stereo was better. It's a vastly improved experience.
Here are the catches -- (1) There's relatively little high quality surround music material. It's complicated and expensive to remix for multichannel, and the potential listening audience is relatively small. Most albums aren't available in multichannel and there's lots of junk that was poorly mixed.
(2) Not all musical styles benefit. E.g, simple vocal arrangements don't benefit that much. Forcing them to surround (except for ambience) can be unnatural. By contrast heavily textured instrumental material like Pink Floyd can benefit greatly if properly mixed. Surround provides a broader canvas for the engineer to place sounds.
That said, good stereo is better than poor surround. OTOH are you really planning *no* home theater use? Most recent DVD movies have 5.1 soundtracks.
I definitely wouldn't do 6.1 or 7.1, especially if you're on the fence. But depending on your music tastes and home theater plans, a limited surround setup can be beneficial.
You could get M60s plus a "minimal" surround setup of QS4s, VP100, and Hsu STF-2 for under $1730. That doesn't leave much for a receiver, but break your price limit a little and you could shoe horn one in.
The other direction would be just do stereo based on M60s and upgrade to surround later.
