A good friend of mine unexpectedly passed away from a heart attack, and now I'm getting his home theater speakers. They're tower speakers, but not outrageously tall or heavy (1.2m tall, 32kg each), plus a center channel and a big subwoofer.

I'm trying to understand how to get them from Seattle to Houston. So far as I can tell, the two main choices are going to a pack-and-ship store, which sends them via UPS or FedEx, or calling up a freight shipping service who does everything end-to-end, probably including custom boxes, and everything presumably goes on a shipping palette and is somehow routed through the shipping network

I've searched the usual suspects, like AVSforum, but there's not a whole lot about this sort of thing out there.

Thoughts?