There’s no way I can advocate solder to make connections. the name of the game in a car is "preserve the value of the vehicle", not "make the best connection that’s humanly possible". there’s a reason that the vast VAST majority of high end shops out there use t-taps rather than solder, and its not entirely speed! Its far more important to have a high resale value on the car five years from now than a connection that will last forty years rather than twenty years! if your taps are falling off after two weeks, its not a sign you need to solder, its a sign you should be working harder on making a solid tap!

cables themselves. there is no way I can advocate buying kimber cables over radioshack gold series every time. noise floor in a car is ridiculous as it is, but even with the car off, in a quiet neighborhood, I get ZERO noise in my own car. I don t have kimber, I have el-cheapo!

now, I can definitely see instances when high end cabling would be needed. I was routing some RCA's in my car in a previous install right across the fuel pump. got some noise! throw in a higher shielded cable, and everything was fine. does that mean I needed to buy $70 rca cables to get from the radio to the rear seats? no way!

as for the connections, its all about long term reliability, and nothing else. are you gonna unplug your RCA's three times a day? will they be tweaked this way and that, will there be pressure on them by a trim piece, or when stuff gets thrown into your car? you’d be a fool to buy radioshack cabling! My own amplifiers are in their own designated areas, foreign objects cant access them, and I don’t tug on the cables. why should I buy cables with burly and bulky ends?

as to those cables themselves, I was doing a mustang a couple years ago. we had two cables in the car, monster and audiopipe. the monster turned out to be noisy as heck! they were routed in the SAME spot, and the monster cable induced more noise than the audiopipe! haws that for high end! so sometimes, a cheaper cable can really be the better one from a noise perspective!

as for the head durability problem, another friend and a ford ranger, with knu top end rca cabling. Every time we unplug the cables, the heads start to unscrew! talk about annoying! if he bought the uber UBER cheap cables from radioshack, he wouldn’t have problems with the heads coming unscrewed! not that I am advocating the ultra cheaps in this case, I think he would have had a great deal of problems with noise and connection reliability with kids crawling around the back of the truck to have radioshack rca back there, but when you are paying triple digit numbers JUST for rca cables, there is NO reason I should have to threadlock the heads on!

so what IS better? radioshack? monster? kimber? audiopipe? well, I think its gotta be application based with a heavy emphasis on budget. It definitely surpasses the help a one sentence tip could give on the matter, unless that tip said "when in doubt, let your budget do the talking"!