I recently helped someone do a quick install of a moderately inexpensive Onkyo 6.1 system in their living room. A minor upgrade suggestion was the speaker wire. Besides having 12 gauge stranded speaker wire by the foot, or meter/metre as Jeff points out, some home improvement supply stores also had 250-foot rolls of the same stuff at a significant savings over the manually measured segment method. If you’re installing in an average living room, but you have to run cable the long way around because you can’t use the most direct route from amplifier to speakers, running a 6 or 7 speaker set-up will probably use up 150 to 200 feet of cable. Do the math before you buy. You might come out ahead and you could end up saving another trip to the store for more if your initial length needed estimates were off a bit.