Two founders and a cable specialist.

Sommer Cable is a German company, and a young one by the standards of its trade. It says Sommer cable GmbH was founded in 1999 — it gives the date of incorporation as 9 March 1999 — by Rainer Blanck and Friedhelm Sommer, whose surname the company carries. They started it, the company says, with “a team of inventors led by cable specialist Pascal Miguet,” together with musicians, sound engineers, electronics engineers and event technicians. Its own summary of those beginnings heads its “about us” page: “Musicians became cable experts.”

The founders’ own pages keep that musical framing. Blanck, the company’s chief executive and full-time managing director, is described as a part-time musician who sings and plays guitar; Sommer as a cellist with “a very good instinct for good sound.” Miguet, now an authorised signatory and the company’s sales and product manager, is responsible for developing its cables and, according to the company’s team page, has worked in the cable and audio industry since 1990.

The company is based in Straubenhardt, a municipality in the Enzkreis district of Baden-Württemberg that German Wikipedia places where the northern Black Forest meets the Kraichgau. Its earliest website, archived by the Internet Archive in October 2000, was in German and described the firm as a maker of audio and video cable, offering bulk cable by the metre and cables assembled with connectors from Neutrik and Deltron. Its first catalogue followed in 2000, the company says, at around 60 pages; the current one runs to about 550.

From bulk cable to systems.

Sommer Cable built outwards from cable sold by the metre. By its own timeline, it began developing connectors under the HICON name in 2001, and now sells them alongside its cables as a single connection range. From 2004 it released signature series developed with professional musicians, the first with the bassist Hellmut Hattler. In 2005 came SYSBOXX, a modular system of connection boxes, later joined by floor, wall, desk and trunking versions; since 2017, the company says, customers have been able to configure one online with a 3D view.

The range then widened into other markets. In 2008 the company launched Excelsior, a hi-fi cable line it describes as handcrafted and “100 % ‘Made in Germany’,” sold in two finishes, a burgundy braided sleeve and an ocean-blue “BlueWater” version. The same year it began the CARDINAL DVM brand for conference and presentation equipment, whose electronics and mechanics it also calls “Made in Germany.” In 2015 it introduced Aqua Marinex, waterproof cables with polyurethane jackets, some braided with aramid fibre, which it says were developed for amusement parks, large sporting events and open-air concerts.

It also spread abroad. The company says it opened a French branch in Alsace in 2005 and an American one, Sommer Cable America, in Santa Rosa, California, in 2015. It launched a business-to-business web shop in 2013 and an automated small-parts warehouse in 2017, and says its range now runs to more than 20,000 items and modules. Its jobs page names Roger Hodgson and the guitarists of Rammstein and Die Fantastischen Vier among musicians who use its products; we give that as the company’s claim.

Cables and connectors.

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.

“Simply good vibes.”

Sommer Cable has stayed a private company. It is registered as a GmbH, a German limited company, at the local court in Mannheim, and its legal notice names Rainer Blanck, Maximilian Blanck and Marie-Kathrin Huber as its representatives. Register notices summarised by the business-data service North Data record that Friedhelm Sommer was no longer a managing director from December 2023, and that Maximilian Blanck and Huber were entered as managing directors in October 2024. A shareholder list is filed with the register, but we have not seen it, so we do not name the owners; we found no record of a sale in the sources we checked.

On manufacturing, the company says, “We develop, produce and sell” cables and connection components, and that it assembles cables to order “just-in-time in our partly automated production.” Its registered business purpose, as summarised by North Data, includes the industrial manufacture, development and sale of electronic signal transmitters, especially quality cables for industry and the audio sector. The company calls HICON “designed and made in Germany” and Excelsior “handmade in Germany”; we give those as its claims. It does not say, on the pages we read, where its bulk cable is made.

Its identity is informal by design. The company describes its logo as a zig-zag, and since 2019, it says, a green squeaky-duck mascot called Cablo has carried that logo to trade fairs and around the world. Its motto, “simply good vibes,” was published as a German word mark in 2019, and register summaries list further marks including Sommer Cable, HICON, Excelsior and Cardinal DVM. It holds ISO 9001:2015 certification and says its solar panels and combined heat and power plants now produce more electricity than it uses.

For a design guide, Sommer Cable shows how a supplier of an unglamorous product can build an identity from its founders’ musical backgrounds and an informal tone. Compare Neutrik, whose connectors Sommer offered on its first website, and RME, another German pro-audio maker. For this guide we use a deep green, black and copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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