My father had an 1970s-ish RCA 25" TV that was blown up by lightning a couple of times. He managed to fix it each time and it remained a pretty good set. The fact that he couldn't hear the flyback tranformer whine any more let him think it was ok too. ;-) He told me what finally did it in was the quality of the soldering in it - there were eventually too many bad connections for him to fix. It was over 20 years old by that point.

Modern soldering of circuit boards is automated and is usually pretty good so that is probably not the problem with your stuff.

It used to be that my wife's Dual turntable would only work on both channels if she banged the tonearm just the right way. I eventually found a replacement cartridge for it and the problem went away.

Your description is classic signs of bad connections somewhere. I think that bad capacitors usually have different symptoms (e.g. in my 30" Toshiba with some bad caps the vertical size of the image is way off.). Caps fail by internal failure (short circuits or open circuits), leakage of the electrolyte, swelling, or bad external contacts. It's something that might be worth a visual inspection (after checking the stuff below). But my guess is you've got a bad contact somewhere - most likely the cables or where the cables attach.

Buzzing is often a bad ground connection.

Check the cables from the amp, the interal connections to the output conectors, and the speakers. Simple things like that - you might be surprised. Have you tried using a different set of speakers? You need to figure out if it's the electronics or the wiring or the speakers.

If size of the electronics is a big issue, I think there are remote remotes that let you control things in a different room. Maybe you can put your electronics in a closet and just have a remote sensor wired to it. Then get your 15.1 CyberSurroundMegalopolisCompanderExplosion box wired into your existing amplifier, etc. (Of course, it's probably easier to find a new all-in-one than to find just a Dolby x.y decoder box.) You'd still have to figure out what to do with your speakers. Maybe build a coffee table around them or something....

Or you could throw caution to the wind and just get [link|http://www.crutchfield.com/S-HY7ZuCKahb0/cgi-bin/ProdView.asp?g=10420&I=033AV5805B|this ] contraption. After you win the lottery. You'll probably need to reinforce your floor first. Here's the back view:

[image|http://akamaipix.crutchfield.com/products/2004/033/h033AV5805B-b.jpeg|0|Denon AVR-5805 back|194|300]

:-)

Luck. HTH.

Cheers,
Scott.
(Who hates to see good equipment replaced before its time.)