When you shop at your nearby home theater retail outlet, you might be presented with a large selection of “extreme” exotic sounding names for home theater audio and video cables like Mega Cables, Monster Cables or Uber Cables the ever increasing number of “boutique” home theater audio and video cables always stirs debate amongst home theater and audio experts. The debate centers upon the question of how much difference do “boutique” home theater audio and video cables make and are the worth the extra expense. Despite the risks in even discussing this subject, I am going to try to add some comments with regards to this topic.

The most important thing to recognize is that a cable cannot improve the sound of a home stereo system any more than an electrical wire can create extra electricity when you plug it into the wall. That’s actually a very good example, because when you’re listening to audio for instance, what we’re hearing is an electronic representation of acoustic sounds that is to say, the actual sounds have not been captured and stuffed into a compact disc like fireflies in a child’s jar they have been copied, imitated, and a representation stored on the disc as a series of numbers.

These numbers are then scanned and transformed into electrical signals which travel to the speakers to nearly produce the original sounds. With that in mind, it makes sense that poor quality wires don’t physically change the sound instead it’s like a game of ‘telephone’, in which the band tells the CD, the CD tells the player, the player tells the wires, and the wires tell the speakers, with something being lost at every step so that the message “Aunt Betty baked a pie” is altered to “Fat Eddy wants to cry” or what should be a great live recording sounds tinny, distant, or otherwise just plain wrong.

Selecting the proper home theater cables is significant and cable characteristics like gauge size of the copper, a tough but flexible outer cable sheath and whether the cable safety standards for home theater cables in your local area are have been satisfied are the most significant cable features you should remember when choosing your home theater audio and video cables. A good cable will change the signal as little as possible, but all cables do damage your signal a bit it’s simply a matter of degree. To the extent as to which home theater audio and video cables are the best? That’s up to you or your local audio guru to decide much is up to personal preference, with the rest probably being left up to your budget to decide.