Cables are the bane of my life. I love home cinema kit, hi-fi systems, home theatre PC and all surround sound speakers but I hate, really hate cables. The sooner a reliable wireless power source is brought out, the better in my opinion, for the time being though cables are here to stay and the only way to deal with them is cable management systems.

I’m really going to be focusing on home based cable tidies in this article. There are a lot of office based systems that really wouldn’t look good in the home. They are meant for heavy duty commercial applications and as such the majority are bulky and unsightly, but they do the job.

The back of my home AV system used to be an absolute mess, and I didn’t even have a complicated set up. My system was consisted off and AV Receiver / Amplifier, DVD, a Sky box, a LCD TV, 5 satellite speakers and one sub woofer all of this resulted in a lot of cabled congregating in a small space. Over 20 in fact. Not only did it look unsightly but they also collected a lot of dust a dog hair. Not very hygienic it at all. There was also the problem of getting the cables from my TV (which was on the wall above a gas fire) to the ‘central hub’ of all cables.
 

It was obvious from having a quick scout around on the net that sorting out the mangled web of wires around the back of my Amp wasn’t going to be ordered by the same system that I would use to get the cables from the TV to the Amp.

Cable tidies can be separated in to two distinct groups - aesthetically pleasing and functional. For round the back of the amp I would need to use the ‘functional’ sort.

Well, there are a number of different cable management systems out there. Some come as a cable tidy kit and some come as just come in lengths. IKEA do what is essentially a bit of flexible pipe with a split running the hole length of it. They come in grey, white and black. These are the cheapest cable tidies I have found. Now, the problem that I found with these is that they do not have a very big diameter in which to fit cables and they also have a very thin wall. If you try to house an unwieldy scart cable along side a couple of other cable these weaknesses soon become apparent. There is not enough strength in them to hold the cable securely. Having said that, they are not completely useless, if you only have a thin cables such as a mouse and keyboard then this type of system is ideal as a desk cable tidy.

The next step up in the functional cable management group is the jml cable tidy type. This comes as a kit, this is a heavy duty bit of plastic tubing that comes with a tool that in effect zips and unzips it making it easy for you to put cables in to it. This cable tidy does do the job on virtually any cables you chuck at it. It can easily manage a couple of Scart cable and power cable all in one swoop. Needles to say this is what I have round the back of my amp.

So now the functional bit has been done lets take a look at the aesethetically pleasing version. If you live in a home with hollow walls then you probably won’t need to use a cable tidy. You can easily hide the cables in the walls. If you have solid brick walls then hiding the cables in the wall becomes more difficult. This isn’t the only reason for using a TV cable tidy though, if you live in rented accomotion your landlord may not want you to go channeling out the wall!

At any hardware store you can find standard cable trunking, this does do the job and looks better than having cables across the wall but it doesn’t look great. There have been specific TV cable trunking developed that looks much better than the plastic sort and is easier to use. The one sort has clips that fix to the wall the cables then clip in to the clips and a semi-circular extrusion clips over the top. This is a good solution that looks much better that plastic trunking. There is a type of cable management sytem that fixes to the wall and then had a hinge on it that opens to allow you to put the cable in it. In my experience if you’ve got to put cabling from the TV down the wall this is the sort I would go for.

Some of this type of trunking allow you to fix shelves to it, this means that you can put your set top boxes below your TV.

Most LCD TV stands have some form of cable management built in to them, so if you are looking at buying a new stand then check that it has this facility.