First of all: I am physicist, 61 years old.

I got my business experience while working in the development of bigger companies for high power DC and AC drives and RF/FM transmitters. This 8-years-period was followed by a sales job for an international acting company specialized in geophysics, oceanographic and scientific labor equipments, which was under my leadership.

I founded my own company the 1st of July 1975, the 30 years anniversary is very close so far.

HMS Elektronik started with the Representation of US manufacturers of electronic measurement equipment for scientific applications, soon followed by own developments for the same market.

Our customers were — and partially still are — University and Industrial Research Institutes.

The kind of electronic instrumentation we were specialized in was related to so called Lock-In Amplifiers, Ultra Low Noise Preamps and Filters. These instruments allowed the measurements down to 10-12Vand or 10-15A. These signals are deeply covered in man made and thermal noise. The application reaches from basic research in physics, biology-, semiconductor-, medical- to astrophysical research.

Two of the instruments we built gave us a very special help in entering the Hifi-Cable Market. One is a so called Crack-Growth Monitoring Instrument used for Air Plane Fans, in Nuclear Power Plants, for Material Research etc. The speciality is the capability of measuring down to 10-9Ohm conductivity. The second is HTSC (High Temp. Super Conductivity) Measurement Instrument, with a similar resolution for ultra small conductivity changes.

These both instruments required next to the very special electronics a very low loss and stray field inert cabling from the sensors to the electronic. As these were not available commercially, we had to built them ourselves.

After all of this, you must have the question why and how we entered the high end cable market.

As we had built up a larger dependency upon the Governmental Research Funding, we were hardly hidden by the Reunification 19910/1991. All funding available were needed "to repair the Eastern German University Roofs" so to say.

It is al little better now, but not at all good enough to follow this market again with the required big investments for new and today mainly software based instruments. This market is in hands of US and Japanese Companies today.

Today Scientific Instruments is approx. 15% of our turnover. The bigger part is High End Cables and Filters with a further increasing tendency.

The why and how HMS entered the market for High End Cables was by luck or accident depending upon the view point. In 1993 I wanted to buy a commercial Hifi Setup to replace my self built Amps and Speakers out of the early 70es.

The Paper I bought discussed in one of the articles the importance of speaker cables specifications with — for my opinion — very strange arguments. I wrote a letter to this paper (Stereoplay) including measurements results for our cables made for HTSC set up’s.

The answer was an invitation within a very few days. The impedance measurements they made, forced them to the saying "never seen such a flat impedance before".

The sound check — for my ears at that time like two curtains away; -for the editor — he called all his colleagues for a listening session. This success was the beginning of HMS activities in that market, where we knew nothing else about.

We could show very soon with the increasing program of all sorts of Cables requires in that market, that there is no Voodoo argumentation needed to explain the high quality of our offer; strictly physics and the knowledge around the application is all one needs. We deliver an understandable explanation to why and how we do our products the way we do for all of them.

This is not the same with lots of other products in the cable and accessory market. This does not mean that all of the products sold with mystic or wrong explanation are useless.

Since we entered the cable market 1993 we could watch a fast increase in the quality of the market offer of existing brands but an even faster increase in the number of brands. Not all of them have a commercial background, but recruit themselves with the argument "because I like the music".

It shows that this is often not enough. But we are working for a very emotional hobby market, not to say Fun-Club, we cannot and should not use the same strict rules as in other commercial industries.

This automatically leads to quality and pricing artefacts in the market offer. If we would take this away, the scene "high end" and its accompanying press would loose lots of its colour.

After I understood this, I stopped fighting for the "trues" and started to enlighten wherever wished and required. The experience therewith is really good and we will follow this way as long as I can, even after 65.

There are approx. 50% of mystic products, which have an explainable, positive function even if the manufacturers does not give an understandable explanation for. An other quart is borderline, the last quart forgettable — so far my experience.