By Jared Norman

Setting up your home theater involves a lot of new equipment: speakers, seating, Blu-Ray players, amps, consoles, and of course…the all-important TV or projector. However, there are some (less exciting) things that people usually don’t think about when they are installing their new home theater. Here are 5 things to think about that can make your home theater that much better.

Cable

Cable is usually one of the last things people think about when installing a home theater system. In reality, it should be one of the first. You can have the highest quality equipment and still have poor quality sound and video if you have bad cable. Not only do you need good quality cable, you also need your cable to meet safety requirements. Check out these articles to learn more about electrical safety and understanding cable safety regulations.

While there might be various different types of cables speaker cable and HDMI cable are probably the two most commonly needed in any home theater setup.

Speaker Cable

All speaker cable is not created equal. Make sure to buy quality cable that matches your application. At Sewell we have all kinds and lengths of high quality speaker wire to fit your needs, from 16 AWG to 14 AWG to 12 AWG. Check out this article to learn more about how to choose the best speaker cable for your surround sound setup.

HDMI Cable

It’s also important to get high quality HDMI cable, especially if you need long lengths of cable. Sewell’s 100 ft HDMI cable comes with a repeater built in, ensuring no signal loss even over long distances. We also offer many other lengths and styles of cable including various lengths of high quality cable, premium quality cable, and swivel cables for tight applications.

HDMI Over Ethernet

The HD Link HDMI over Ethernet extender allows you to transmit HDMI over Cat5, Cat5e, or Cat6 Ethernet cable. Because of the nature of digital transmissions, HDMI has specific distance limitations. Because of this signal boosters are required for long cable runs. Add the boosters to the cost of HDMI cable, and that can get expensive. By using the HD Link, you can transmit HDMI signals over Ethernet cable over distances of up to 200 ft. Since Ethernet cable is so much cheaper than HDMI cable, and is often already installed in many modern homes, this is a much less expensive solution for long cable runs.

Banana Plugs

Traditional speaker wire connections work by connecting the bare wire in a clumsy screw-down or clasp-down connection. Not only are these connections time consuming and annoying, they are also unreliable. Banana plugs come in many different varieties, but they all serve to simplify your speaker installation process and give you a much better connection. We have a bunch of different banana plugs that you can choose from to find just the right one to fit your needs. To learn more about how banana plugs work and how to install them, check out this article.