Cables, Columbus, and Thanksgiving


Minding the grill today, I took advantage of a brief lull to look on the webpage of my local audio store. I spotted a Siltech Ruby Mountain AC cord, used, for $1,495. Original retail was $5,950. I then got to the Siltech website and saw the following, which of course put me in mind of the New World, Thanksgiving, and the heroic character of our forefathers and foremothers on whose shoulders we stand. Evidently the giants still roam among us, if only in Holland.

"Siltech is made exclusively in Holland by a tightly-knit team of skilled technicians. They are lead by Edwin Rynveld, who not only founded Siltech more than 25 years ago, but who has continually supplied his cable know-how to the fields of medical science (micro cables as part of inner body probes) and aviation (Boeing). Siltech has determined that no supplementary platform, no matter how sophisticated, can equal the competence of the core Siltech team. That is why every Siltech product is 'made in Holland' and nowhere else. Cable research is a costly though exciting endeavour, as the exploration of the Earth must have been in the 15th century. And there is always the risk of misinterpreting your findings or being led in the wrong direction. Columbus called the Native Americans ‘Indians’ for he thought he had landed in India. This proves the importance of checking and double-checking, using the most advanced measuring equipment and the latest insight. If Columbus had a sextant or, even better, a GPS, he would never have made that mistake. We at Siltech believe that making a high class cable is based on a lot of science, craftsmanship, some exploration, a little improvisation and, of course, a bit of luck as the icing on the cake. And where the latter factors are not easily controlled, all the other factors are: speed, jitter, distortion, magnetic field interference noise, microphony, dynamics, micro signal handling and so on."

Happy Thanksgiving one and all.
stewie