My year old speaker system, which was already pretty old to begin with, is starting to mess up a lot and I'm thinking of getting a new speaker system, but realized I actually don't know almost anything about speakers nowadays, and after looking through ebay, amazon, buy.com, and the like, have not come across any that meet my expectations (not standards, mind you). I keep coming across speaker pairs, which are for computers, and like seven piece speaker sets for like $300-400. I am using an LCD HDTV, and have just been using an adapter to connect my regular old stereo audio (white+red) cable from the HDTV to the speaker system, which was just a green and black plug. Basically I just replicated my older setup that my father had put in for me... is everything just crazy expensive now because of technological improvements? Where would you suggest I read up to find out more information, or perhaps an example of a decently priced speaker system that I can compare with others?

<3!