A pianist, an engineer and a second brand.

Crystal Cable was founded in 2004 as a second brand alongside Siltech, the silver-cable maker in Elst, in the Netherlands. The company credits its founding to Gabi Rynveld, a concert pianist, and describes her husband, Edwin Rynveld, as chief executive and chief engineer of both brands. Reviews from the period also call her Gabi van der Kley, and Ultra Audio in 2009 described her as the president of Crystal Cable.

Gabi Rynveld’s background is in music rather than electronics. The company says she performed as a professional pianist from the age of nine; the Dutch site FWD, in a 2024 interview, adds that she is Hungarian, spent her first 25 years in Budapest, entered the conservatory at 14 and graduated as a concert pianist at 19. A 40th-anniversary history of Siltech says she became involved in the company in 2002; FWD reported that she started on packaging, brochures, marketing and press.

The technical starting point came from Siltech. In a 2020 interview with Enjoy the Music.com, Edwin Rynveld said a “groundbreaking discovery” in 2004 made it possible to build high-quality cables from ultra-thin wire, and that this was “the start of our second brand.” FWD describes it as know-how in drawing pure silver very fine, which allowed thinner and more flexible cables at a time when, as Rynveld put it, high-end cables were expected to be thick. The company says the brand was introduced at the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Clear jackets and a glass speaker.

Gabi Rynveld took charge of the new brand and gave it a different look from Siltech, FWD reported: coaxial cables in a transparent jacket that leaves the silver visible, which the site calls a hallmark of the brand. The name caused an early problem. According to FWD, the worldwide rights to “Crystal Cable” were held by Matsushita, the Japanese company behind Panasonic, and Gabi Rynveld travelled to Japan and persuaded it to sell the mark. We give that as the couple’s account; we did not find an independent record of the sale.

The range has kept its thin-cable idea. Early models such as the Piccolo and Micro were sold on what Edwin Rynveld called a “small diameter, big sound” concept; today the company lists the Diamond Series 2, the Art Series — named Monet, Van Gogh and Da Vinci — Future Dream 22 and Infinite Dream. The company has described its Dream cables as the first made entirely of monocrystal silver; that is its claim, as are its statements about how the cables sound.

Crystal Cable also makes loudspeakers. The first, the Arabesque, had a faceted cabinet made entirely of glass. The company dates its launch to 2009; Ultra Audio reviewed it in September that year at $65,000 a pair, reporting that, according to Crystal Cable, only one company, in Germany, could cut the glass precisely enough, and that the strips were bonded with an adhesive that sets only in a vacuum. The Audio Beat called it the brand’s “first foray into the loudspeaker market” in 2013. Smaller models followed — the Arabesque Mini, Arabesque III and Minissimo — and the current Minissimo Forte received a 2024 Golden Ear award from The Absolute Sound, which the company says later named it the 2025 mid-priced loudspeaker of the year.

Design and documentation.

The Low Countries have a long record in consumer audio. Philips, founded in Eindhoven in 1891 by Gerard Philips and his father Frederik to make light bulbs, introduced the Compact Cassette in August 1963 — developed, English Wikipedia says, by a team led by Lou Ottens in Hasselt, Belgium — and co-developed the compact disc with Sony; the first CDs went on sale in Japan in October 1982.

Philips is also part of the story of Dutch class-D amplification. The Belgian engineer Bruno Putzeys spent ten years at Philips’s Applied Technologies lab in Leuven, where he invented the “UcD” circuit, which Philips patented. Hypex, a Dutch company formed in 1996, began producing it in the early 2000s after Philips declined to use it, and in 2005 Putzeys left Philips to divide his time between Hypex and Grimm Audio, according to English Wikipedia.

The makers in this guide are spread across the Netherlands: Kharma in Breda; Grimm Audio in Veldhoven, beside Eindhoven; Siltech and Crystal Cable at the same address in Elst, in Gelderland; Hypex and Mola Mola at the same address in Groningen; and Dutch & Dutch in Capelle aan den IJssel, next to Rotterdam, according to their own websites.

A Dutch address does not always mean Dutch manufacture. Hypex has its own production facility in Malaysia, English Wikipedia says, and Dutch & Dutch buys its drivers and amplifiers from outside suppliers, The Absolute Sound reported in 2024.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Sister brand, shared factory.

Crystal Cable has never had a factory of its own. 6moons, in a feature from around 2008, said the brand had been run separately since it was set up, but its writer listened at “the Siltech/Crystal Cable factory in Elst”; today the company says it “shares all resources and production facilities” with its sister brand, and both give Edisonweg 8 in Elst as their address. Both belong to International Audio Holding BV, which also owns the cable brand HMS Elektronik and the loudspeaker brand Sphinx Audio Engineering, SoundStage! Global reported in 2025.

Ownership above that has changed. In 2016 hi-fi+ reported that the Cadence Group, an Indian-based company led by the Pune industrialist Ajay Shirke, held controlling interests in Siltech and Crystal Cable as well as Britain’s Spendor; more recent Dutch reporting describes the business as led by the Rynvelds, and SoundStage! Global named Viktor de Leeuw as managing director in 2025. We could not confirm whether Cadence remains a shareholder. The division of labour has also blurred: FWD reported in 2024 that the old split, with Gabi on Crystal Cable and Edwin on Siltech, had long gone, and that she now works on global sales, press and marketing for both.

The company says its cables are “hand-made by our skilled production engineers in the Netherlands,” with materials tested before production and each finished cable tested twice, by the engineer who made it and by a quality engineer. The 2025 SoundStage! visit described a shared production floor where cables were soldered, braided, tested and packed.

For a design guide, Crystal Cable shows how a brand can be built on looks as much as engineering — clear jackets and a glass speaker. Compare Siltech, the older brand it shares a factory with, and Kharma, another Dutch maker of high-end loudspeakers. For this guide we use glass, silver and a deep teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Crystal Cable’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.