Atomic official guide to AV cables, cabling and tech

Atomic Guide: A guide for everything you ever wanted to know about how to cable your home theatre setup.

What cables should you buy for your AV setup? Who will guide you? What is it even all about?

In the end, it all comes down to pixels.

Little dots of red, green and blue, smaller and more of them every year, are what drive us to upgrade and overclock, tweak and customise, whether it’s a PC, home theatre, or some weird alien hybrid of the two. In the focus on tech specs and eyeballs though, it’s easy to overlook just how those lovely, lovely pixels manage to get from there to here.

These days, digital is all the rage. This wasn’t always the case. Back when Peter Molyneux was obsessing over Pong on the Atari 2600 that he stole money from his own grandmother to buy, a simple analogue RF cable was all you needed for pure gaming bliss. Since then, video signals have been beefed up and pandered to with ever more capable signal standards and connections, and today digital signals dominate. Despite all the changes that have been made over the years though, video today is essentially the same as it has been ever since the introduction of colour. Red, green and blue signals are captured at one end, sent through a variety of media of varying bandwidths, and approximations of those same red, green and blue signals light up our displays at the other end. How they get from one to the other, though, really is a kind of magic. Magic of the ‘maths and electrical engineering’ variety, sure, but magic nonetheless.