Cable Shopping


Enter the "Cable Cult", the belief that you cannot spend too much money on cables. Using clever marketing and exploiting consumer insecurities, the Cult will sacrifice your dollars for unrealistic expectations from home theater cabling. The reality is study after study using double-blind testing has shown not a shred of empirical evidence that expensive cables will make an audio system sound any better than the cheapest cables you can find.

The best RCA cables are on par with basic Radio Shack cables for under $20. The only danger in using the cheapest flimsy cables you can find is that they may break, creating an open circuit inside the cable, causing intermittent crackling or loss of signal.
Look for good finger grips so they can be connected and disconnected easily. Thick insulation can help prevent cables from opening inside and even the most basic shielding will sufficiently block inductance (noise).

Cables that use gold-plated tips can help prevent oxidation but do nothing for sound. Always use as short a run of cable as possible. In long cable runs, like runs of speaker wire, you must pay attention to resistance.

Expensive exotic cables making your system sound better is a longstanding myth perpetrated by the elite hi-fi industry. In the words of Peter Aczel, editor of The Audio Critic magazine:

"a nice pair of straightened-out wire coat hangers with the ends scraped is not a whit inferior to a $2000 gee-whiz miracle cable."

Digital cables
There is no audible difference between Toslink (optical) and coaxial digital cables. Use coax whenever possible because it's much cheaper.

The digital cable does no more than transmit binary code. The Cable Cult will try to sell you on problems like signal loss and jitter. It's true that the IEEE has written technical papers on dropped packets due to photon loss through miles of fiber optic cable, and high traffic computer networks may need to buffer against signal delay or "jitter". The Cable Cult marketers will sometimes try to sell jitter-resistant cables without even realizing what jitter actually means. The short and simple runs between home theater components are not susceptible to either of these problems.