What kind of cables should I use to connect my home electronics?

What kind of cables should I use to connect my home electronics?

Jeff Colen (President, A Sharper Home, Inc.) gives expert video advice on: How far away from my TV should I sit?; Is it safe to mount my new TV over my fireplace?; What is the best way to position speakers in my home theater? and more...

The primary cable that you're going to use to connect up all of your home audio/video equipment is a component video cable, what they call a coaxial cable. It has an RCA end on it, and that's the most frequent cable. You use it for audio, you use it for video, you use it for some types of digital audio.The second most important cable you're going to see out there is a what they call toslink, which is an optical cable that's used to transmit an audio. It has an interesting little connector on it, and it essentially transmits audio via laser light. So when you plug those into your receiver, they'll glow red on the ends. Don't look at them because you could burn your eye.The third type of cable that you'll see out there is what they call HDMI, which is the high definition media interconnect which you'll need. It's not an option, you'll need to be able to view the highest definition content and material. Those carry both the audio and the video. Another type of cable you'll see out there but it's fading away a little bit is what they call DVI, which is a digital video interconnect. It's only video, it does extrordinarily high rates of video transmission, but, it is not used as frequently anymore because of the size and the bulk of the cable.