OK I am so new at all this. I just spent several $K on my gear, now what cables should I use to connect it all up? I refuse to use a five dollar Radio Shack cable to connect my equipment. I heard that 10% of what you spend on the equipment is how much should be budgeted for the cables. Is this a good gauge?
Also I don't want to spend good money on cables just because of the name on the packaging. I heard that Monster Cable is not all that great and is very over-priced. What brand is considered to be of good quality?
I may be new at all this but I intend to do this right the first time.
Also, I understand the difference between Coax and Optical connects but which one is optimum. I heard that as with all cables, but especially with optical, runs should be kept as short as possible. In my case it doesn't matter because my interconnects should all be no more than one meter in length. So at short distances which one wins out?
Any information is as always greatly appreciated.
elitefan
Posted on
For analog interconnects the best for the money I have seen are the Phoenix Gold at Crutchfield. I think the 3 footer is only $12.99. Excellent quality and cheaper than Monster. Use coax digital if possible as they are more rugged cables than optical and much cheaper. A $10 coax cable will pass all the signal and sound great. I have even used a $5.00 R. Shack cable and it sounded great. 10 percent on cables is to much. 5-8 is more reasonable.
My understanding of the digital interconnects(coax, optical) is this: The quality of the cable should not matter as much as an analog interconnect would. The digital interconnects are simply passing the raw data in 1's and 0's to the receiver, so that it's DAC will decode it, instead of the player's decoder. As far as the optical/coax issue, there are a lot of opinions on this. Some say that optical is better, because of less signal loss over the cable(glass or plastic strands carrying light instead of copper) and others say that coax is better because the information does not have to be converted to light and then pulled back down.
Also another note, if you have a DVD-Audio player(DVD-A is awesome by the way), you must use analog interconnects. This is because of the way the standards were created, to prevent piracy.
I personally use Monster Cable 300 MK II's for my analog interconnects, and I am very pleased with them. I got mine from E-bay, so I saved a few bucks from retail.