The vaunted home theater. Long a mainstay of the rich and famous, the privilege of a theater room is creeping into more and more homes. With it, a market of products have sprung up trying to convince every would-be home theater owner to spend outrageous amounts on everything from stereo equipment to cables. Rather than spend as much money as possible, we'll break down the parts of a home theater that are worth spending the money on to get results, and where buyers can shave some dollars and still get primo performance.

Earlier, we looked at exactly which cables are needed for "regular" HDTVs that occupy places in the living room or bedroom and have a few components connected. Home theater setups are anything but regular. They're a mess of cables bundled together to produce an audio-visual experience. Rather than simply point out the cables needed to complete a home theater experience, we'll talk about the infrastructure necessary to get the most money out of a home theater purchase.

A/V receivers

A/V receivers are the nerve center into which all cables flow. The A/V receiver is a complement to a good HDTV, and a quality A/V receiver can make up for an HDTV without a lot of native inputs.

While the price might set some people back — up to $1,000 for a quality unit — buyers of A/V receivers should future proof themselves as much as budget will allow. Spending a little bit extra on the right A/V receiver can really pay off, since it might be the one component of a home theater that can outlast a TV or set of speakers and still fit nicely into a setup 10 years from now.

While we won't be able to determine every user's exact setup, we do have some guidelines that we follow when we're purchasing an A/V receiver. We recommend setting aside at least four or five HDMI inputs to ensure future proofing. Right now, we expect three devices to be connected to most TVs (DVD player, game console and cable box) but if history has taught us anything, it should be that the devices will expand. Blu-ray players, networked video devices like AppleTV and yet-to-be-created devices will slowly add into home theater racks, and buying another expensive receiver will seem less appealing. Five HDMI inputs will connect a solid array of devices well into the future.

As far as being backward compatible, a few S-Video inputs, component inputs and composite inputs should do the trick. We'd expect those older analog inputs to share input slots, so we'd expect three legacy input spots.

With A/V receivers, we encourage people to spend what they can and don't skimp out on an A/V receiver. The more you spend with big brand names like Onkyo, Denon or Pioneer will generally net you a better receiver. Less expensive A/V receivers will do the job of switching inputs, but likely won't process the signal, leading to either compatibility problems or signal degredation. At bare minimum, ensure that your receiver can output every source to a TV through HDMI. An A/V receiver should clean up the mess heading to the TV and keep it in one place. Some of the less expensive receivers won't output analog signals over HDMI, which means you'll have to connect the receiver in more than one way, which is not only redundant but messy. Spend the extra cash and eliminate the cables if you can.

Cable quality

In recent years, big box retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City found their margins shrinking on big budget items like HDTVs and other consumer electronics. To make up the difference, the big box retailers now overcharge on common cables. Cables that used to cost under $20 can now be found upwards of $50 or $60.

We're certainly no fans of overpriced cables from brands like Monster, and would advise saving your money for the most part. There are a few places where spending extra money could be noticable, and many places where it simply won't make a difference.

When connecting a speaker to a receiver, the quality of cable will contribute to sound quality. We're not saying the cables need to be made out of platinum, but finding a high quality cable to connect speakers is important. We've always fared well with cables from Monoprice (this is our professional endorsement, no cash was exchanged) but we're sure there are other vendors out there who sell reasonably priced cables.

The dirty little secret that no salesperson will tell you? If you're buying HDMI cables, find the cheapest one possible. HDMI is a digital format, which means as long as the signal loss is above a certain threshold, the signal from a cheap cable comes out the same as an expensive cable.

To be clear: HDMI cables should cost less than $30 for lengths up to 40 feet. Any more than $30 and the store is making large amounts of margin off of the top of the purchase.

HDMI wherever possible

 

We've gone to great lengths to encourage people to use HDMI whenever possible. The primary benefit of HDMI is it requires fewer cables to transmit more information. HDMI transmits the video signal at resolutions up to 2560 x 1600, which is about 1.5 times greater than 1080p. In addition, HDMI bundles up to eight channels of audio without having to string any other cables. By comparison, 7.1 channels of audio and HD video would take 11 cables per device. Obviously HDMI is a better way to go from the Avoiding Cable Soup perspective.

Now you're up to speed on getting a home theater together. Keep in mind the basics: high quality A/V receiver, fairly priced cables, and using HDMI wherever possible — and your home theater's cabling should turn out just fine. If you've got any tips that you think we missed, make sure to leave them as a comment, or if you've got any questions we didn't answer, head to our tips page and we'll do our best to get them answered.

[Images: Chunkysalsa, e-magic, Victor de la Fuente]