Advice on installing home cinema cables when a room is being built or refurbished

We often give advice to customers who want to cable a room for a home cinema installation while the room is being built or refurbished. This means that they have the luxury of being able to achieve a really neat and professional installation by hiding all the cables in the walls and ceiling. At this point they have often not chosen their home cinema equipment and are looking to implement a once and for all 'future proof' installation with cabling that can accommodate any future needs.

We thought it would be useful to summarise the advice that we have given in the past and make you aware of some of the issues that you may not have anticipated.

What equipment to plan for?

You should plan for the following equipment at a minimum:

Plasma screen or Projector - and you obviously need to decide which from the outset
Speakers - whilst 5.1 is currently most common we suggest you plan for 6.1 so you will need a front and rear pair plus a front and rear centre speaker. In addition you will need to cater for at least one subwoofer and you could plan for a left and right pair.

• AV amplifier
• DVD player
• Digibox or Freeview

What cabling will I require?

Plasma/Projector connection

You will require a long video cable taking the video signal from your AV amplifier to the wall or ceiling where you plasma or projector will be installed. Don't forget the these will require power so don't forget to install a power outlet in the appropriate position. Our advice is that you should install a video cable that leaves your options open in the future to use Component YUV, Component RGB or S-Video as your video signal. You should anticipate that in time you will be wanting to use Component YUV with progressive scan. On this basis we suggest that you install a cable with six screened 75ohm video conductors.

We sell a number of cables such as the cable shown on the left that are ideal for this and can handle long runs. They are sold by the metre unterminated and can be purchased from here. It is not feasible for us to terminate it as you are going to run through walls so you will need to get someone to terminate it after it has been installed. We can also supply wall plates for SCART, S-Video and Component YUV which can be purchased from here.
Once you have installed your cable and sockets we can supply cables to connect between the wall outlet and your equipment.

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