Cobalt Interconnect Cables - Review

Your home theater components are useless without good interconnect cables. Factors such as interference, internal breakage, and bad contact fittings can make an otherwise excellent home theater setup perform in less than a stellar manner. There are many cable makers claiming that their products improve video and audio quality, some are exaggerated, however some are not. Cobalt Cable definitely makes a product that definitely improves your system's performance where its used.

The basic features of Cobalt's cable products center around construction and lack of signal loss over long distances.

Each cable is heavily shielded for resistance to interference. Connector barrels made of heavy-duty, polished metal. Speaker cables can be ordered with choice of connector types, depending on your speaker terminals. Toslink (digital optical) cables have a heavy duty jacket and metal connector to increase durabiity.

Each cable is hand-assembled, individually tested before shipping, is individually packaged, and signed. On the customer service end, Cobalt offers a lifetime exchange policy or 90 day money back guarantee on standard length cables.

Lastly, cables can be ordered in standard or custom lengths to suit any installation requirement.

I received the following cables from Cobalt Cable for evaluation: S-Video (10 meters), Component (10 meters), 5-Channel Audio Bundle for SACD/DVD-Audio (2 Meters), Digital Coaxial (2 meters), and Digital Optical (2 meters).

All of the cables were impressively constructed. The Component and 5-channel audio bundle, although still flexible, were a bit stiff and weighty (you need a bit more space behind your components to fit them into your installation), but their excellent performance more than offsets this minor inconvenience.

Most impressive, however, was the excellent signal strength by the 10-meter long S-video cable. Using a Technics DVD-A10 DVD player in a booth 30 feet from an Optoma H56 video projector (projecting a 10ft diagonal image on a theatrical quality screen), the picture quality was improved enough to be noticable when using the Cobalt 10 meter S-Video or component video cable than a another branded cable. Upon inspection, edge articfacts and color bleeding where decreased using the Cobalt cables. Moving the DVD player closer to the projector and using a shorter 12 foot generic S-Video cable in comparison to the 10 meter S-video cobalt cable, the cobalt was still slighlty better, despite its much longer length.

I was also impressed with the connectivity of the Cobalt's Toslink (digital optical) cable. Such cables often times don't fit well and are usually quite delicate and subject to internal breakage.

However, with Cobalt's metal jacket and metal connection fitting, the Toslink was easily securely fastened and passed all digital surround signals as hoped. I personally prefer using Digital Coax connectors for surround applications, but on components where the Toslink connection is the only option, the Cobalt is an excellent product to use. In fact, the Digital Coax sample that Cobalt sent also had a good tight seal once connected and performed as would be expected.

The only cable sample that was a little unwieldy for me was the 5-channel audio connection bundle used for DVD-Audio and SACD applications. Don't get me wrong, the cables connected and performed well, it's just that the outer plastic channel-identifying sleeves made the cable ends stiffer, once again necessitating more room behind my components to plug them in. It will be great when DVD-Audio and SACD signals can be transfered with a single iLink or other type of cable other than the current need for a separate audio cable for each channel. Obviously, this is definitely not the fault of cable makers (however, they do sell more cable this way).

In conclusion, with the exception of some points outlined above, I found the Cobalt Cable products to be excellent performers under all conditions and definitely worth considering for installations that require the best quality over long distances or where interference is an issue. These cables are not cheap, however, they are less expensive than some other esoteric cable brands. I also found their customer service quite helpful. The fact that you can order custom lengths so quickly and easily was a real plus. If you are planning to install a home theater system, definitely consider Cobalt Cables to connect it all together.