Two musicians, a bank loan and a London supply business.

Van Damme is a cable brand, and the company behind it is VDC Trading of London. VDC’s own history says the business was started in October 1987 by Niall Holden and Marcus DeFigueiredo, two music enthusiasts in their mid-twenties: one a bass player, the other a guitarist who had contacts from working in guitar shops. The plan, the company says, was a music-equipment supply business in London, funded by five thousand pounds borrowed from a bank.

The first sale VDC records was modest: 38 microphone stands for Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox’s Church Studios in Crouch End, north London. From there the firm says it built contacts in the studio market, including Abbey Road Studios, and became known for supplying and building cable rather than general equipment. VDC quotes Holden as having owned the whole company since 1994, when his partner left the business.

The brand and the company are easy to confuse. Van Damme is the name on the cable; VDC Trading is the firm that sells it, builds it into finished leads and looms, and handles distribution. The company’s official website is vdctrading.com; the similar-looking vandamme.com has nothing to do with the cable maker.

Studios, tours and stadiums.

VDC’s reputation was built where cable gets the hardest use. The company says the recording studio and the “band on tour” together set its standards, and it describes three priorities: sound quality, reliability and value for money. On its website it lists users including Abbey Road, the Royal Albert Hall, Glastonbury and the BBC, and says its cable connects mixing desks for many touring PA hire companies; those are the company’s own claims, though several are backed by dated project reports it has published.

The best-known line is the Silver Series, which VDC describes as aimed at low capacitance — 55 picofarads per metre, according to a case study about an installation at a Toyota site in Berlin. The company also says the range has been used by Jeff Beck and Dave Grohl. Beyond the studio range it sells multicore, speaker, digital audio, video, data and fibre cable, and says it stocks more than 8,000 products. Recent additions include the Purple Patch PPE56, a patchbay with programmable normalling and a steel and aluminium chassis, and the VDC Integrator Series of installation cable for commercial AV, sold on reels.

Its news pages give a dated record of where the cable goes. In July 2024 VDC reported that the PA on the live stage at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, supplied by Entec, was connected with Van Damme multicore, speaker and Cat 6A cable. In March 2021 it reported that Van Damme had been specified for Google’s offices in Kraków, following its Dublin, London and Tel Aviv buildings, and in August 2021 that it had worked with AB Acoustics on PA systems for the cricket competition The Hundred. In August 2025 it appointed a distributor for Georgia and Armenia. Studio stories feature too: Bizzy Studios in Cologne in 2022, and Duo Mastering in Hamburg in June 2025.

Touring engineers supply its most vivid testimony. VDC quotes Ian Nelson of LEE Engineering, front-of-house engineer for Placebo, saying that over more than 200 shows, more than 60 freight moves and at least 90 festivals, the tour did not lose a single line — “not one mic cable, one XLR, one multipin line.” It is a customer’s quote, published by the company, but it shows what the brand wants to be known for.

The customer list is broad. VDC says no single client accounts for more than about 4% of its turnover, and that its products are found in studios, venues, stadiums, cathedrals, homes and superyachts.

Design and documentation.

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.

Made to order in north London.

The company’s turning point, by its own account, was property. In 1997 VDC bought its home and factory in Tufnell Park, north London — a near-derelict building that it refurbished and that, it says, has been central to its ability to make and deliver from stock in the middle of the city. VDC describes its own technical and manufacturing departments and says bespoke products are hand-made by its team, and its YouSpec configurator lets customers choose the length, colour and labelling of a finished cable assembly online.

That is the documented part of where Van Damme products are made: the assemblies, looms and custom builds come from VDC’s London site, according to the company. Where the raw cable itself is manufactured is not stated in the sources we checked, so we do not say. VDC remains a privately owned company; we found no record in the sources checked of it being sold or of outside ownership.

Van Damme also shows how a cable brand can grow out of a supply business. VDC began as two musicians selling microphone stands, and its own cable brand came later. Its testimonials come from working engineers and studios rather than from hi-fi reviewers, and its range covers both the studio and the installation trade.

For a design guide, Van Damme shows how a trade brand earns its name through reliability in use rather than through advertising. Compare Mogami, another cable brand used in studios, and Nordost, which approaches cable from the hi-fi side. For this guide we use deep indigo and a patch purple with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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