How much should I budget for cables, accessories and installation on top of the equipment?

A pattern in every system we quote.

Keep 5 to 8% of the equipment budget aside for cables, accessories and installation. That is where it consistently lands on our real project quotes, and I would rather you plan for it than discover it.

What sits inside that block. Speaker cable runs: a 5.1.2 living room regularly eats a full 100-metre bundle once you count fronts, centre, surrounds routed around the room and the height pair up through the ceiling. The long HDMI to the projector, which is the priciest cable in the house, especially an active optical run for 4K at any real distance. The subwoofer cable, plugs and banana terminations, wall and ceiling mounts, brackets, and professional installation with calibration.

The trap is distance. A projector across the room and surrounds behind the seating add up to far more metres than the mental picture, and a route that goes around a door frame rather than through it doubles again. Marble floors and finished walls make retrofitting expensive, so in an occupied home the labour side grows even when the cable side does not.

Where not to spend: exotic cable. Speaker cable of adequate gauge for the run length (thicker for longer runs, particularly to low-impedance speakers) does the job; beyond that you are buying jewellery. Where to spend: the HDMI run to a projector, and mounts that hold a speaker at the correct height and angle rather than "roughly there".

Calibration belongs in this block, and it is a paid service at three levels because the work differs; a quick AVR tune-up and a full measurement-based correction are not the same afternoon.

Insist that your quote itemises this block. A quote silent on wiring is not cheaper. It is incomplete, and the missing amount arrives on installation day, in cash, with a shrug.

Send us the room plan with the projector and seating marked and we will estimate the cable runs before you commit to anything.