1991-1992. I was a musician, amateur recording engineer, and an audiophile at 24 years old living in Los Angeles. I had spent a year working for Sound Advice, a stereo company in Florida, and decided it was time to strike out on my own to California to pursue a career in screenwriting after having studied filmmaking and screenwriting at the University of Miami for 4 years.

At that time I also belonged to a pre-internet online fraternity of audiophiles called "The Audiophile Network" which ran a direct-dial BBS out of Van Nuys, California. Among its members were many of HiFi’s now famous names, including John Atkinson, Wes Phillips, Kal Rubinson, Jonathan Scull, Gorge Cardas, Les Edelberg, Rick Rosen, Lonnie Brownell, Jeff Joseph, Barry Kohan, and many others.

During that time, I had purchased an Audio Alchemy DDE and a Luxman transport/CD player. The cable I used was a common RG59 type with RCA terminations. The salesman (a friend) tried to convince me to try Alchemy’s own cable which had some sort of circuit built into a compartment on one end of the cable. I wasn’t going for it, because as far as I was concerned — bits were bits and my cheapo cable was just fine. He let me try it with no risk and I discovered there was enough of a difference to make me notice. I still preferred my RG59 cable, but that experience upset the architecture of my "gloss" - the anatomy of the digital world as I thought I understood it.

That inspired me to look for answers, which I originally sought from a local (Florida) microwave engineer named John. He helped me to understand the concept and importance of impedance-matching, gave me my first Radio Amateur's Handbook (from 1957!), and also helped me to design my first product: DataStream Reference. This was the first truly-true 75 Ohm digital cable, based on a semi-rigid 75-Ohm microwave cable. It used the very fist 75 Ohm RCA ever sold - one which I designed based on what I had managed to learn from John and other sources within that community. That product so easily surpassed the performance of everyone else's "digital" cables that it became an easy decision to want to build a business around this product idea.

So: John, his wife Rose and I founded Illuminati on a tiny budget ($7,500 total as borrowed from parents). We produced cables, connectors, packages (a copper-based ESD bag). I purchased a mailing list from Larry Archibald (then owner of Stereophile magazine), and with the help of my grandmother and my parents we prepared a few thousand mailing brochures in the kitchen and sent them off in the post. In return for our efforts we received only 25 responses with checks for $80 each. A disappointing start, to say the least!

Coupled with a lot of encouragement from my comerades on The Audiophile Network, I adopted a relentless attitude toward keeping my little enrepreneurial dream alive, taking night-jobs and working on film sets for 2.5 years until Illuminati could finally afford to pay me a meager salary. After that time, and once Illuminati had 20 or so domestic dealerships carrying the one product that we made, Ray Kimber of Kimber Kable called me and asked if I thought it would be a good idea to have Kimber Kable become our worldwide distributor. That sounded like an excellent idea to me.

That is the story of the birth of Illuminati Electronic Systems and Cables, and how I originally entered the "cable game."

During the first year or so that Illuminati was being distributed by Kimber Kable (1994-95), Ray challenged me to design a cable that had the same or better performance as the original DataStream Reference in a flexible cable. From that challenge I designed the D-60, which has stood the test of many years as one of the finest digital cables you can own. During that same time I designed the Orchid AES/EBU digital cable, which also set standards for performance during its history and remains a current product in Kimber’s lineup. I designed several other digital/video cables for Illuminati during this time, including the V-21, the DV-30, and the DV-75. Together with the D-60 and the Orchid, these cables comprise the majority of Kimber Kable’s current digital/video cable catalog.

There came a point in our business together when Ray essentially offered to buy my shares of Illuminati and, based on circumstances at the time, it seemed to be a viable choice. I had actually been living in Utah at the time and doing work in the Kimber Kable facility for Illuminati, and I was looking forward to returning home to my life in Florida.

During this time I had also started a recording business with my present partner, Antonio de Almeida. We would travel to different locales and location-record orchestras and other classical music performances with very high resolution equipment. This business began with the recording of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in Russia (December of 1996), and brought us many other opportunities to record some very notable artists and orchestras in the US and abroad. Using a Nagra-D reel-to-reel digital recorder with some Neumann M-149 tube microphones and the occasional Scheops KFM-6, we made some very wonderful recordings.

I continued to experiment with and research the effects of cables, especially analog cables. Some of my experiments based on theories related to skin-effect management for current-delivery yielded excellent results. There came a time when we decided that the recording company should also house a cable company. We decided to loan the company money to more fully develop these ideas into viable products.

That is how Stereovox was created, and in the winter of 1999 we released our first product: the SEI-600 Reference-Grade single-ended interconnect. The first review we received for that product was actually in the Italian internet magazine called TNT-Audio, and that product remained unchanged as our reference single-ended interconnect for 5 years.

I think I’ve told you as much as there is to tell!

The cable industry has become a very difficult place for consumers to distinguish the legitimate from the snake-oil because there are so many hobbyists that are flooding the internet with what appear to be cheap, store-bought wire covered in netting and heat shrink. It becomes extremely difficult for the shopper to identify the real from the fake.

The cable industry for audiophiles is by far the easiest area of the industry to start manufacturing for, if you are willing to simply dress-up ordinary cables and construct fantastic stories about their development. It is, however, much more difficult to work as legitimate cable companies do: actually designing and having manufactured truly custom products that represent a sincere execution of a passionate design philosophy.

My opinion, therefore, is mixed: At its best, the cable industry provides the audiophile with the final touch of resolution and nuance that can often mean the difference to the listener between something very good and something truly great. At its worst, the cable industry provides the unwary audiophile with insincere and poorly made products with fantasy-stories and very few (if any) performance advantages.

The general issue of price (i.e. value) is a sensitive one that is difficult to de-cypher, because how does one place value on things? Stereovox employs a cost-to-market formula that is traditional and we believe it is fair ... but that is not to say we are in a position of judgement over others in this regard. I’m not interested in making such judgement-calls about value because they don't stand up to scrutiny when compared to other things.

This is a high-performance luxury market so the usual consumer formulas for rice, milk, lawnmowers or socks can’t possibly apply. Either you want a $90,000.00 pair of speakers and are willing to pay for them, or not. It really is as simple as that. How does one apply a strict value-formula to such uncommon and specialized things?

Who would ask the artist for his painting in exchange for the cost of the canvas and paint ... what kind of painting could you expect for this price? In this world when we want fine things, we pay for the expertise of the maker as well as for the cost of making.

Here are some interesting notions about value: In common restaurants in my area a glass of iced-tea will sell for nearly $1.50, and yet it will cost only about $0.05 to make. A pint of beer from our local microbrewery, which is actually quite fantastic beer, has a serving cost of $0.14 per pint (I know the brewmaster personally, so this number is good) — and that same pint sells for $4.00. A bottle of filtered water - just water! - will cost $1.00 in a local vending machine and yet the only expense that is calculable is the cost to make the plastic bottle that holds the water.

We calculate value in these items based on a simple formula: How much will the item satisfy us vs. how much we are willing to pay for that experience of satisfaction.

If you want it and you can afford it and you enjoy it, value becomes apparent. This applies to cables, speakers, watches, boats, cars, coffee, cigars, scotch-whiskey, french-fries, iced-tea and beer as well as millions of other things.

There are, as I mentioned before, many people that take off-the-shelf products and dress them up to re-label them and make them appear to be something they are not. This is snake-oil, in my opinion, and you will find the majority of these snakes preying on consumers on the internet auction sites. You will not find their cables in stores or distributed by reputable distributors, so it is fairly simple to avoid them: don’t buy no-name products on the internet. Of course there can be exceptions to that rule, especially if a very reputable and well-known reviewer has given the product a positive reception … that person has a reputation to protect, so they won’t usually risk that for a snake-oil brand. Having a money-back guarantee is also a safer way to go, but often times people offer money back but don't actually give the money back when asked. Garage-made cables are fairly simple to identify and avoid by simply sticking to the rule of not buying no-names on the internet.

In terms of legitimate business: I have my cable designs manufactured in the USA by a military contractor that has very few civilian clients — this is an expensive way to go, but I am interested in very particular processes and high precision. I also design my own connectors, specify my own solder, etc. We assemble and test these cables in-house in my facility in Atlanta, Georgia. Brands like Cardas and Kimber Kable, for example, are also very legitimate. They are not getting their products cheaply made in China and re-labeling them as "Made In USA" (which some famous names are doing) - they are making their products in the USA and assembling them and testing them in their facilities in the USA.

In fact, I do not think that cheap Chinese cable products are anywhere near the high quality that Cardas, Kimber, and Stereovox are producing, but because the products are so much cheaper to make, the companies selling them can spend much more on advertising and packaging to make a sexier presentation. Cheapness is why

manufacturers are turning to China for manufacturing, not for quality. This is fine for very low-priced, entry-level products that are not making any claims about being produced in the USA, but sometimes the manufacturer likes to pretend that their cheap Chinese cables are high-quality ones made in the USA. One famous cable manufacturer was even raided by US federal agents and local police for mis-identifying its Chinese-made products as American made products! The agents took away over $600,000.00 worth of products, computers, etc!

Caveat Emptor!

The future of HiFi cables is nested in the future of HiFi itself. I see the 2-channel market becoming segmented into two basic strata: low end and high-end. On the low-end side you’ll see more entry-level hi-fi products being introduced from China, and this will likely overlap somewhat into what remains of the middle of the market. The competition from Chinese products will drive out the innovators from the American and European markets, or drive them into Home Theater or the very high-end. Audiophile cables for this part of the 2-channel market are already served well by the likes of Kimber, Cardas, Stereovox, DH Labs, Audioquest, Tara Labs, Straightwire, and others. The future for good entry-level cable products remains solid, but there are few innovators in this space.

I actually think that the middle of the market is going to dissolve into the Home Theater market, and cables for Home Theater are typically very inexpensive products that are dispensed from large rolls by the installers. Home Theater clients aren't interested in the same qualities of sound that audiophiles are ... there is a different set of expectations, and cables are rarely considered as an important part of the expenditure-profile for any Home Theater project. Brands like UltraLink, Liberty, Tributaries, Phoenix Gold and others are supplying this part of the market with quality products that are convenient for the installer.

The high-end of the market will remain in roughly the same shape it has been in for the last 4 or 5 years … neither expanding nor contracting, but rather tracking the luxury market in general. Chinese products do not compete here … this is the domain of fine European, American, Australian, and Japanese products that are produced in very small quantities for true connoisseurs. These are very fine, highly precise products built to amazing standards by obsessed perfectionists that believe cost is sometimes an inconvenience but never a barrier. You will rarely hear their names mentioned in traditional audiophile circles, but they do rule the stratosphere for those fortunate enough to be traveling in that space.

These systems are of such high resolution that cable differences are more important to such audiophiles as are fortunate to own them - this is where we really separate the wheat from the chaff. Few cable products will be accepted in this space, so most do not even try to market here. The market is so small and perfectionist that one cannot use traditional business models to justify developing for this niche. You must be one of the crazy few who feel the impossible urge to play at dangerous altitudes for an unfiltered glimpse of the Sun.

The future of my firm is in the approach of "specialized diversification." Stereovox remains a performance leader in the cable industry. I am also presently distributing, through my other company (Signals, LLC), very high end products from Europe and Australia. Our products are built for both entry-level audiophile and high-end audiophile. We do not have any near-term plans to create bulk-reel products for Home Theater.

I think of Stereovox and Signals as very specialized businesses that cater to connoisseurs who care deeply about music as reproduced through the audio system. As long as there are these passionate musical people, I hope to be providing them with products they can rely on for real high-fidelity music.