Home Theater Wiring

Home theater wiring is an important consideration for your room.  It is generally expected that a home theater owner will spend around 5% of their overall home theater budget on cables, connectors and wiring. 

Upgrading cables from the basic cables that were included free with your equipment will generally improve the performance of your system, however it is important to note that you can spend a lot of unnecessary dollars on cables if you are not careful.  There are some manufacturers of cables and connections that sell good products, but they are also excellent marketers and can have you easily spending more for their cables then a comparable cable with a much lower cost and comparable performance. 

Lets start with a brief overview of some of the cable options that you have for your system.

Audio Cables

In the past there was not many choices when it came to audio connection cables.  Cables were analog and RCA composite connectors were the choice for sending stereo signals to your receiver.  These RCA cables are still very common today and used by many components.  These cables are typically the red and white connectors that are included with many components. 

With the advent of digital surround sound, digital cable options have also become very popular in order to take advantage of the high quality digital sound output.  The two options for digital cables are the digital coax cable or the optical cable (TOSLINK) which uses fiber optics to send the audio signals.  To take full advantage of your home theater's capabilities, you will want to make sure that your system is capable of transmitting digital audio.

Video Cables

As with audio, you also have several home theater wiring options for your video including analog and digital cables.  The basic analog cable is the composite video cable which is the RCA connector that is typically yellow and sometimes included with the composite audio connectors.  Another cable that used to be regarded as a high end video connector offers is the s-video cable.  The s-video cable offers a step up in picture quality.  Component video cables offer an even greater step in picture quality and can be used to transmit high definition video content.  Component cables consist of three cables (generally labelled green, blue and red), each transmitting different parts of the video signal.    

DVI cables offer a digital video connection between a digital source and a digital display.  While there are some DVI cables in use, DVI has been superceded by HDMI.

HDMI

HDMI is the new digital standard for high definition sound and video.  You will see it advertised on many of the new components, from TVs to Receivers to video game consoles. 

Today's high definition signals carry much more information then the standard definition, analog signals.  HDMI is able to support the higher transfer speeds for high definition.  It is able to support uncompressed digital audio so there is no degradation of the source signal due to compression.

One of the major benefits of HDMI is the ability to carry both digital audio and high definition video signals such as 1080p in one cable eliminating the cable mess.

HDMI cable can typically accomodate lengths of up to 50 feet.  If you need connections longer then 50 feet you can also purchase extenders or booster amplifiers to ensure a clean signal.

HDMI also complies with HDCP (High Definition Content Protection) standards so is supported by consumer electronics manufacturers as well as movie studios.

Home Theater Wiring Tips

• Make sure keep the connection runs as short as possible as the longer the cable run, the greater the chance of interference.
• At the same time you want to make sure that you have plenty of cable and that you are not stressing connections because the cables are too short.  You also want to make sure that you allow a bit of flexibility in case you want to move your equipment around.
• When wiring keep your cables away from power cords in order to lessent the chance of interference.
• Make sure cables are snug and that connections are hooked up correctly.
• Avoid bending and kinking cables.
• Gold plating helps prevent corrosion thus keeping a high quality connection and signal.
• Beware of overpriced, over hyped cables and connectors.     

Check out the Speaker wiring section for additional information about speaker wires for your home theater system.