Pay Attention the the HDMI Features of Your Cable Plan ahead and keep it simple and you’ll avoid overspending. Distances over 10 feet are where the problems lie. There’s not enough distance to have any problems or lose frequency response. When you’re merely connecting a DISH satellite box to your AV receiver-a grand total of a three-foot run-you’re just not going to run into issues if the cable is at least made well. But having 24 karat, gold-plated RCA cables or battery-powered HDMI cables simply isn’t going to make your system sound any better. Interconnect cables are important-in that your system won’t work without them. People buy the most expensive cables at the last second because they didn’t include them at the time they ordered their speakers. If you’re running cables further than 50-60 feet you may want to rethink your multi-zone audio system design. So if you add more resistance with cables that are too thin, you can actually change the sound-particularly at higher frequencies.Ī good rule of thumb when hooking up a home theater system is that 16 gauge cable will work in just about any in-room situation, but if your runs are going to be over 40-50 feet in length, 12 gauge cable will further drop your resistance and keep your cables from becoming equalizers for your sound. The reason this is related is that the load the amplifier has to deal with when driving a pair of speakers, changes with frequency. The more resistance a cable has, the more it will affect the frequency response which is possible at the end of the cable run. There are other factors as well, but this is the big one. The thinner the cable, the more resistance the cable will have. Since we’re talking about resistance to the flow of electricity, it feels a little backward. You don’t have to buy expensive cables to run wire for those surround sound speakers, but you had better not think that some left over 24 gauge cable is sufficient to make that 50 foot run from your AV receiver to your surround speakers. In no particular order, here are my top ten mistakes when hooking up a home theater system: 10. These mistakes can range from simple problematic issues to things that could quickly lead to premature device failure. It’s much more manageable this way.I’ve seen lots of errors in my time as more and more of friends, family and clients start hooking up a home theater system. I originally had just a pair of 8 foot cables, one to each speaker, which is how I know about the unwieldy coil of slack cable. So I have a pair of 4 foot cables going to one speaker, and a pair of 8 foot cables going to the other. I do, however, bi-wire, and use the same length for both cables going to each channel. I have seen calculations that sufficiently convinced me a ratio up to 1:5 between channels will not have a perceptible difference using adequate gauge cable at the relatively short runs we are talking about (4 and 8 feet, in my case). Admittedly, it would be ideal to have more space overall so things could be more spread out and the components centered, but alas, that’s not my situation.

My left and right channel cables are not the same length, simply because my installation has the integrated amp much closer to one speaker than the other, and using the same length for each gives an unwieldy coil of slack cable to deal with on one side, along with a lot of other cables needing space in that same area.

Which is right and left speaker wire