If you want to get into the shlock market with the ever so tiniest shred of decency, you should do a "tube amp replacement", where you carefully program a DSP to add all the distortion and "warmth" that tube people seem to crave, and then just drive things through a regular amp.

Sigh.

For the record, I continue to be a big fan of Home Depot's 12ga speaker wire. The price has gone up as with the price of copper, but it's still only $0.50/foot or thereabouts. Then I hook up some cheap gold-plated banana plugs I bought from Monoprice.

All my interconnects are cheap HDMI cables. I once bought a 3-pack of no-name HDMI cables for a friend, and it turned out that one of them was flawed. It was pretty obvious -- lots of snow and static on the TV. Replace the cable and everything was perfect.