Only after you've thought out and pre-planned for speaker placement and wiring are you ready to buy speaker wire. You'll need to order at least enough speaker wire to run from the back of your surround sound receiver or amplifier to each of 5 to 7 separate surround speakers. If you will be running any of your speaker wires inside/through the walls, ceiling, or floor, you might as well use the same in wall speaker wire for all of them. Not only will you not have issues with electrical code, a home theater system just simply SOUNDS and WORKS better when you install the same exact wire for all of your surround sound speakers. We recommend Monster Cable's in-wall speaker wire that's been UL approved for in-wall use and also happens to be THX-certified (pictured to the right). When shopping for speaker wire, remember that the lower the AWG or gauge, the thicker the wire. Therefore, 16 gauge speaker wire is thinner than 14 gauge, which is thinner than 12 gauge.

Adhesive flat speaker wire If you anticipate extreme difficulty or expense in drilling or cutting holes in the floor, walls, or ceiling, and/or fishing lots of speaker wires, you might want to check out AR PR398 1350W Microflat Tape-Style Speaker Wire 100 ft. (pictured to the left), which can be run along baseboards, underneath carpet or rugs, even directly on the wall or ceiling and painted over.

Subwoofer cable Unless you're going with a "wireless" powered subwoofer, you'll probably also need to purchase a subwoofer interconnect cable to run from the receiver to your subwoofer's location that's long enough to allow for optimal subwoofer placement. Also, if your sub will be located away from the rest of your component system, you may want to buy a separate power surge protector for the subwoofer. A power surge that reaches a subwoofer can cause serious damage not only to the sub itself, but your entire home theater.