There is a truly amazing diversity of cost for interconnects that you can buy for your home A/V systems. For my home theater I needed a 35′ HDMI cable to connect the Blu-ray player to the projector, and some short RCA cables to connect my audio sources to the receiver. Here are a few options I could have chosen:

AudioQuest Copperhead 1.5m (4.9 ft) (Pair) Analog Audio Interconnect Cables – $111.99 – A fancy 4.9′ dual-RCA cable with “Perfect Surface Copper (PSC) conductors” and “unique Hyperlitz Shield geometry”. Note that these are “analog” cables, so digital signals apparently won’t work over them. Hah! These marketing terms are total BS.

Monster MC 1000HD-35 Ultra-High Speed HDTV HDMI Cable (35 feet) – $279.95 – For this cable Monster apparently couldn’t come up with any good BS marketing terms because they actually have some good points about supporting higher HDMI bandwidth and solid cable construction. That doesn’t justify the price though!

Rite AV RCA Stereo Audio Cable – 6 ft – $0.99 – Rite AV is my favorite cable vendor. I get nothing from referring you to them, I just love getting a decent value from my cabling purchases. Not only are their products cheap, but the shipping options and prices are fantastic. Note, there is no gold plating or huge conductors in this cable, but you DON’T need them! The electrical signals that travel on the wires don’t care if it’s a gold connector or a stainless steel one. The cables just need to conduct. Keep them clean and plugged in and they will work very well.

PREMIUM – HDMI Cable – 33 ft - $26.49 – Another great value from Rite AV. Note that this cable is not HDMI V1.3 certified, so it probably won’t support the super-fancy things like Deep Color or future resolutions greater than 1080p. These limitations don’t affect me since my projector doesn’t support those things anyway!

If you buy cheaper interconnects, trust me, you won’t be disappointed. There might be some super-small fraction of a quality difference, but things like room lighting, speaker tuning, background noise, and may other factors have a FAR greater effect on quality than fancy cables. Save the money and take your spouse out to a nice dinner.

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