A soldier’s side business, started in 2004.

Lava Cable began in 2004 as the side business of Mark L. Stoddard, a career US Army officer and trained electronic assembler. Different versions of the company’s website give the month as May and as June, but they tell the same story: within weeks of forming the business, Stoddard deployed to Afghanistan with a Special Forces battalion, taking a roll of Canare GS-6 cable and some Neutrik plugs with him and making cables for fellow soldiers in his off-duty time. The 2008 website described him as stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and as a semi-professional guitarist; a later version said he retired from the Army as a major in 2011.

The first product was simple. A 2004 version of the website described hand-built guitar and instrument cables made from Canare GS-6 and Neutrik quarter-inch plugs, each “built and individually tested by a professional electronic assembler,” with a lifetime warranty, and priced at roughly half the cost of the high-end cables it named as competitors, from George L’s to Mogami and Planet Waves.

Lava then became something unusual: a cable shop that built leads to order from other companies’ cable. By 2008 its website listed van den Hul, Vovox, Kimber Kable, Zaolla, Evidence Audio, Cardas, Sommer, Klotz, Van Damme, Gepco, Canare, Mogami, George L’s and Gotham among the cables it assembled, and the company later said that by January 2006 it had added twelve brands, bringing “more than 80% of the world’s instrument cable designs” into the shop. From studying those, it said, Stoddard developed cable and plugs under the Lava name. In 2011 the website called Lava “veteran-owned” and said it sold through more than 300 dealers in more than 25 countries.

ELC, Ultramafic and the solder-free kit.

The first proprietary cable was the Lava ELC, for “Extreme Low Capacitance,” announced in a press release carried by the Audio Masterclass newsletter in November 2006. The release described a 20-gauge oxygen-free copper conductor, foamed polyethylene insulation and a 95 percent braided tinned-copper shield, quoted a capacitance of 17 pF per foot, and said the cable was “made in the USA.” Profiles followed in Vintage Guitar in October 2006, in Musician’s Hotline, later renamed Premier Guitar, in December 2006, and in The Music Trades in June 2008, the company’s website said.

The range grew into a vocabulary borrowed from volcanoes: Magma, Ultramafic, Tephra speaker cable, a Caldera power cord and a snake called the Lava Tube, alongside names such as Blue Demon, Pink Diamond, Soar, Vintage Tweed and Clear Connect, and coiled cables including the Retro Coil. Archived versions of the website from 2013 to 2017 show this catalogue, along with a 2016 guitar clinic featuring the Nashville guitarists Guthrie Trapp and Josh Smith.

The pedalboard kit is the product the brand is best known for, according to a 2019 press release from its later owner. Lava sold a solder-free pedalboard kit by 2013, and later the Tightrope and Piston solder-free systems, in which the player cuts thin cable to length and fits the plugs without a soldering iron. It also developed a Tightrope DC plug for powering pedals; its current owner calls it a “patented DC power plug,” and says Tightrope cables and solder-free DC kits “are used on thousands of pedal boards around the world.”

Cable makers for players.

An instrument cable looks like the simplest thing on a stage, yet the brands that make them differ widely in age, ownership and in what they say about where their cables are made. Six of the seven in this guide are based in the United States and the seventh belongs to a North American group; they fall into three rough groups.

The catalogue suppliers are the largest. Hosa was founded in 1984 by Sho Sato, who had moved to the United States from Japan, and he has since handed it to his daughter, Mayumi Allison; it is based in Buena Park, California, the company says. Kirlin says Kirlin Industries was founded in 1997 and sells in 35 countries and regions from Ontario, California. Pig Hog, of Petaluma, California, dates itself to 2011 lists more than 300 cables, adapters and accessories, and appears among the brands of Ace Products Group, which also owns Reunion Blues.

The specialists sell on engineering. George L’s, the Madison, Tennessee, company of George L. Lewis, built its name on a solderless system: cut the low-capacitance cable and tighten on the plug, its website said in 2005. Evidence Audio was founded by Tony Farinella and says its cables are hand-built in the USA from American-made material. Lava Cable is now a brand of ACT Entertainment, whose other names include RapcoHorizon and ProCo, and which says Lava brings boutique materials to a wider audience.

The braided cable has its own claimant. Spectraflex says it has made its nylon-braided “Original Braided Cables” since 1988; its website gave an address in Clifton, New Jersey, in 1996.

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.

From a veteran-owned shop to ACT Entertainment.

The company changed hands in 2018. Wire Journal International reported on June 19, 2018 that RapcoHorizon, an RHC Holdings company based in Jackson, Missouri, had finalized the acquisition of all assets of Lava Cable, and that Stoddard would join RHC as Lava Cable product specialist. A January 2019 RHC press release said the brand’s assets had been bought “last spring,” that the range had been streamlined to its best-selling products, and that new packaging would begin with the Tightrope Solder-Free Pedal Board Kit; RHC showed the line at the NAMM Show that month. Later releases from ACT Entertainment say it acquired Lava Cable “in 2019 under RHC Holdings,” so the year differs between sources; the reports from the time point to 2018.

Lava is now one of fifteen brands listed by ACT Entertainment, which calls itself North America’s leading supplier of entertainment technology and whose other brands include RapcoHorizon, ProCo Sound, Rat Distortion and MA Lighting; the old lavacable.com address now redirects to ACT’s website. ACT announced a new Lava logo, packaging and marketing materials for the January 2024 NAMM Show, saying the products would stay the same and that the aim was to present Lava “as a boutique audio solution”; the rebranded cables were shipping in time for NAMM 2025. ACT’s current range lists Ultramafic, ELC, Magma, Soar, Vintage, Blue Demon, Clear Connect, Tephra, coiled cables and Tightrope DC and line kits, sold through dealers.

On where the products are made, the evidence is the company’s own wording. The 2006 release said the ELC cable was made in the USA; the RHC-era website spoke of using “U.S. manufacturers”; and ACT’s releases describe “America-made materials” in 2024 and “American made materials” in 2025. We give these as the company’s statements.

For a design guide, Lava Cable shows how one naming idea — volcanic rock and heat — can carry a cable range through a change of owner and a new logo. Compare Canare, whose GS-6 cable Lava’s first leads were built from, and Pedaltrain, the Nashville maker of the boards such kits are wired across. For this guide we use basalt black, an ember red and a lava orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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