Is Bigger Always Better?

Sad but true. Most folks never have experienced outstanding AV reproduction, and not very many are even familiar with very competent AV reproduction. Of course, while crappy cabling and speaker wire, of the type typically included with general-consumer-level gear is just plain crappy, period, the megabuck stuff fanatics go for and salespeople hype benefits only the finances of its purveyors and the egos of its purchasers. Well-made brand name analog or digital interconnects, including optical, of second or third tier upgrade level, running from around $20 to $50 per yard/meter, will provide all the shielding and signal transmission capability even very high-end gear can use, and no credible, objective, validly conducted test ever has indicated exotic speaker wire performs audibly better than common 2-conductor, multi-strand household electrical wire of suitable gauge (higher power and/or longer runs calling for larger gauge - smaller gauge number) for the given application. A $500 wire isn't gonna do a thing for a $100 component, and a $20 wire will handle just about anything a $5000 component can throw at it.

I'm well aware of analog cabling issues, but digital doesn't have these problems. If you experience a shielding problem with digital (non fiber) cabling, you will see whole chunks of the screen disappear, or you won't see anything at all.

Poor quality digital coax can - and does - introduce a variety of transmission error artifacts, arising from shielding, connector construction and attachment, conductor composition, gauge, lay, and integrity, bandwidth capability, attenuation, propagation velocity, impedence and reluctance, capacitance, and assorted other considerations, presenting symptoms ranging from jitter to scaling levels of signal loss/cancelation. Poor quality optical digital cable layers a whole separate category of negative impacts. You pretty much get what you pay for in either case, though once the cost goes much above that $20-$50 per-meter/yard range, the law of diminishing returns sets in real quick, and the cost/benefit curve just about flatlines; after a point, the more you spend, exponentially the less additional benefit you realize.

timber- My husband made some speaker cables out of some tinned anealed copper wire that he found in this big closeout electronic parts store.
They really sounded great. Some friends brought over their multi-megabuck cables, and we compared, and the homemade ones blew them away.

This store had only so much of this wire. All of a sudden people were coming into this store asking for some of "Mr. Phoenix's wire". I think that the store finally ran out of it!

Digital coax, sure. But not HDMI or DVI. Oh, nevermind.