A Swiss company with a New York name.

Gotham Cables are made and sold by Gotham AG, a small Swiss company in Dietikon, west of Zurich. The Swiss commercial register lists Gotham AG with its seat in Dietikon and a registered purpose of trading in and manufacturing audio and video equipment, accessories and components. In December 2010 it absorbed a sister company, GAC-Trading AG, which had the same seat and purpose. GAC stands for Gotham Audio Cables, the name that headed the company’s website when it was first archived in the late 1990s.

The company dates itself to 1958. Its websites say “Professional Audio Since 1958” and “Manufacturer of Audio Cables and more since 1958,” and an October 2025 episode of the podcast of AXPONA, the American hi-fi show, introduced it as founded in New York City in 1958 and now based in Switzerland, describing its move from distributing Neumann microphones and EMT turntables to making its own cables. A New York company called Gotham Audio was certainly active in professional audio: English Wikipedia says its president, Steve Temmer, commissioned 50 units of what was sold in 1971 as the Gotham Delta-T 101 digital delay, the first product of the company that became Lexicon. We have not found an independent account of how the New York firm and the Swiss company are connected, so we give that lineage as Gotham’s own.

An archived page from 2003 tells more of the story in the company’s words. It said the “Gotham Audio organisation” had been “in the industry for more than 45 years,” that its Swiss office had been selling and installing professional audio systems in Switzerland for “some 18 years,” and that from April 1999 the broadcast-console maker DHD had joined the “Gotham Export Organisation” for worldwide sales. By 2009 the Swiss site was divided into three parts — Gotham Audio’s Swiss distribution business, Gotham Cables for Switzerland and export, and the American photographic-lighting brand Paul C. Buff for Switzerland and export — and the company’s address was already Dietikon. The website today names Franz Ammann as chief executive.

Star-Quad, Reussen shields and order numbers.

Gotham’s cables are identified by type names and five-digit order numbers. The GAC-4/1 is a four-conductor “Star-Quad” microphone cable. Its 1999 datasheet, still archived, describes a soft PVC jacket, low-capacitance polyethylene insulation and “double Reussen shielding” — two spiral copper shields — and gives the order number 11001, the same number the GAC-4/1 carries in the company’s 2026 list. The datasheet gave a 5.4 mm jacket, conductors of 96 strands of 0.05 mm copper and a claimed RF rejection of more than 130 dB; a thicker 6.3 mm version, the 11281, followed in 2021. The range also includes the GAC-1 unbalanced and GAC-2 balanced lines, 110-ohm cables for AES/EBU digital audio and DMX lighting control, GAC-7 and GAC-9 cables for valve microphones, multipair snakes numbered every metre, speaker and mains cables in PVC or halogen-free FRNC jackets, and hook-up wire from 10 to 26 AWG.

Shielding is the selling point. A 2023 announcement described a new 110-ohm snake in which each pair has a fully covering Reussen shield plus a copper-coated conductive polyester layer. In July 2026 the company added a magnetically shielded range using mu-metal tape — an 11401 starquad it calls six times shielded, a speaker cable and a mains cable — which the AXPONA podcast had previewed in 2025 as a launch for AXPONA 2026. Gotham also sells gold-plated XLR, jack, RCA, banana and mains plugs under the Gotham Connector name, which its Swiss site describes as its own production, along with headset microphones and APS active monitors.

Gotham AG is a distributor as well as a maker. Its Swiss site lists brands it handles in Switzerland, among them Lexicon, Sonifex, Pliant, DPA, Clear-Com and Switchcraft connectors.

Cable, measurement and claims.

Cables and connectors are the least visible part of a studio or stage rig, but engineers know the names on them. The seven makers in this guide come from six countries.

Two are Japanese. Mogami Wire & Cable, founded in 1957, is based in Shiojiri, Nagano, and has been a subsidiary of Oki Electric Cable since 2015, its website says. Canare was founded in Nagoya in 1970 by Kimio Kawamoto and now has its head office in Shin-Yokohama; its American arm says it listed on the Tokyo and Nagoya stock exchanges in 2006.

Switchcraft was established in Chicago in 1946 to make jacks, plugs and switches. Its own history says HEICO Corporation acquired it in 2011, and that its Chicago headquarters is the largest of its three manufacturing sites.

In Europe, Neutrik was founded in 1975 by Bernhard Weingartner with two investors and is based in Schaan, Liechtenstein, according to German Wikipedia. Sommer Cable, a private company, was founded in 1999 by Rainer Blanck and Friedhelm Sommer in Straubenhardt, at the edge of the Black Forest. Gotham AG, which says it has worked in professional audio since 1958, is based in Dietikon, near Zurich. Van Damme is the cable brand of VDC Trading of Tufnell Park, London, which says Niall Holden and Marcus DeFigueiredo started it in 1987 and that Holden has been its sole owner since 1994.

Their manufacturing claims differ in scope: Mogami’s American distributor says every foot of its cable is made in Nagano, while Sommer Cable claims “Made in Germany” for particular lines.

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.

Soldered in Dietikon, shipped from three continents.

Where Gotham cable is made is only partly documented. The company says its finished leads — XLR, RCA, speaker, guitar and mains cables — are assembled and soldered in house at its Dietikon headquarters, and sells them as “Swiss made”; its own workshop also handles repairs and custom leads. Bulk cable is sold from stock in Switzerland by the metre, and in standard spools from a bonded warehouse in Ettenheim, in south-west Germany. The websites we checked do not say where the bulk cable itself is produced, so we do not state it.

Distribution has widened recently. Gotham opened a Hong Kong sales office in March 2024, and in August 2025 announced an exclusive North American distribution partnership with Audio Collective Group of Austin, Texas, which runs a US web store for the cables and promotes them on “Swiss engineering” and the double Reussen shield. The company’s own selling points are practical: “no minimum order,” cable cut to length, and orders taken by simple email rather than through an online shop.

For a design guide, Gotham shows how a long-lived trade name can carry a company from distribution into manufacturing. Compare Neumann, the microphone maker Gotham says it once distributed, and Sommer Cable, a German cable maker. For this guide we use graphite, cobalt and copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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