Monster Cable Connections: Making the complex less confusing

In recent years, two-channel stereo audio systems have rapidly evolved into multi-channel audio/video home theatre systems. But this evolutionary process, while advancing the cause of a heightened entertainment experience, has inadvertently spawned an organizational monster: a tangled web of interconnections that can make installing and hooking up a system your worst nightmare.

Fortunately, this monster can be tamed. In this and future columns, I will show you how to connect the various components of your home theatre system quickly, accurately, and, best of all, easily. Along the way, I'll give you some helpful hints on things that I have learned and products that I've personally tested.

Let's get right into the issue of accurate hook-up. It can be confusing to connect a stereo pair of loudspeakers correctly, and even now, with clearly labeled connections and properly marked cables, we still often seem to get it wrong. Nevertheless, using the correct cables and properly hooking up a system is understandably crucial to how that system will sound and perform; especially when it comes to surround sound.

With a matrixed four channel (Right, Center, Left, and Surround) Dolby Pro Logic system, which uses sophisticated algorithms to derive four channels of sound out of a two channel feed, proper phase and channel identification is critical. In normal stereo, reversing the right and left channels is no big deal. In multi-channel surround, such errors can seriously degrade the system's overall sound and performance. And with the new discreet five or six channel digital sound of today's home theater systems, the chances for error increase exponentially! The possibilities become mind-boggling once you begin to seriously contemplate them: left reversed with right, center instead of left or right, surrounds reversed, or any of the connections (including the subwoofer) wired out of phase ("+" reversed with "-").

Given the complexities of today's multi-channel surround sound systems, this schematic, using the same color-coding system (i.e., red and black) that was developed for yesterday's two-channel world rapidly becomes a brain-twisting exercise. So unless you're especially fond of this sort of mental gymnastics, or have plenty of time to spend unraveling the ensuing Gordian knot, you'll deeply appreciate the "official THX Home Theater" color-coding system that I developed with the folks at Lucasfilm's THX division to eliminate this perplexing problem.

Our coding system enables at-a-glance identification of all six channels, even by the most inexperienced users. You can easily tell the difference between positive and negative channels by the color of the rubber insulator boot. Negative channels have black insulator boots, and positive channels have white or color boots. The "Monster Home Theatre" cables even provide identification inside the cables after you strip off the outside jacket. To make things even easier, the cables are also labeled with channel, positive and negative markings on the outside cable printwheel.

Now, you may say, there's nothing very revolutionary about this: it's all very simple. And that's the point: to make your life and your home theater run a little more smoothly. For this reason, I hope that our color-coding system will be adopted across the industry, not just in THX systems, so that one standard can be established to minimize confusion for years to come. And that, my friends, would certainly be a monster of a different color.