[gafftaper]

First off an important point is:
Why do you want to run surround sound. The vast majority of pro-theaters are running mono sound. Why? Because Surround sound or (and to a lesser degree stereo) only works for one seat in the theater. Everyone else is either too close or too far away from the other speakers to get the correct effect. Someone sitting in the back left corner is generally only going to hear the rear surround speaker. That's not very good. Stereo is also a problem because you have a single row of seats down the middle that sound good but the rest don't. The exception to this rule is if you are in a unique seating space like a black box or theater in the round. In my theater I have speakers all over the place that I use to send specific sound effects to unique locations... But the mains come out mono.

As for how you would hook it up:
That depends a lot on your sound board. Some boards are set up to run surround more easily while others are more difficult. What make and model board do you have? We can tell you how it could be done.

As for the headroom concept mentioned above:
We installed an 18" sub woofer in my theater. Even though the amp was supposedly "ideally matched" by an "expert" it was a 1400 watt sub with an amp bridged to 1800 watts. In order for the amp to hit those really deep notes it has to pump out everything it's got. The more power the amp puts out the more distortion it creates. The end result was on the really big deep notes, the speaker would "bark" or go "thhhhpppppppppph" in a very bad way. We upgraded to an amp putting out 3000 watts and now it sounds great. The amp doesn't have to work hard to put out the power needed to drive the speaker... this is head room. True we could potentially damage the speaker if we cranked the amp all the way up. But the truth is you are actually likely to do more damage by under powering than over powering a speaker.