Home Theater Myths: Part One

Myth: You need fancy speaker cables to get better sound
This is going to make all the vendors cringe, but spending tens of thousands on fancy teflon coated, silver stranded, and other BS that is marketed by reputed manufacturers is not really of any use. We hear frequencies only from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, so stuff like skin effect etc. does not even matter at such relatively low frequencies. The only thing that matters practically is resistance per foot, which is controlled by the gauge we choose, and the length of cable used. Even capacitance and inductance can be neglected at our audible spectrum of sound. Just do not buy the cheapest speaker cable, as the quality of copper in the wire is important. This too does not vary so much, so just getting a medium priced branded cable, but one with a thick gauge, will do.

Myth: DVDs cannot have HD video.
They can. This is actually a simple one. Studio produced DVDs have been made with MPEG2 compression, which has video in 480p( NTSC) or 576p( PAL). But the story does not end there. A regular DVD has about 4.7 GB of space, and a dual layered DVD can double that. Thus DVD-RWs can be recorded with HD video, but what matters is the codec. So downloaded and recorded HD content can use MPEG4 compression techniques which can be stored on DVD. Now here is the catch, not all players support the codecs, but newer ones do, and of course you can watch it on your laptop or PC.