Quick Note: Before I even get into what may be a long-winded post, in November-December of 2019, when the Hart Audio Cables world was getting crazier and crazier, we found out that my wife had cancer. Naturally, already being unprepared for the amount of orders I was getting in addition to that at the time, it caused some disruption in being able to keep the business going and getting orders out. I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for their understanding, their kind words, their advice, and general correspondence. Not only through that time but the whole step of the way here. I’ve been so impressed by the community and everyone’s understanding and patience throughout this process. It’s really been a faith-in-humanity-restoring type thing. So yeah, thanks. Also, I’m posting this on HFG as that’s where I’m most comfortable, but feel free to share to other communities if you feel so inclined. Onto the unimportant stuff…
So some of you may know I own Hart Audio Cables. A small business I started last year. After sending a few members here a few things and going from there, things got crazy with it pretty rapidly; in a way that I was definitely not prepared for, and up until recently, I have not had much of a moment to post on here, especially not as much as I used to. As I’ve always considered HFG “home-base” for me, posting an update of this nature has been on my to-do list since January, and while it is coming in a little late, I figure why not make it happen now that things have finally settled down at least a little bit.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this post as I type this, but I’ll try to give a hopefully halfway decent update on the state of things here, and maybe shed some light on future stuff.
To begin I guess I’ll say that I started HAC out of my house (Day job, wife and a couple kids etc. etc.). I worked as a product development engineer for a company (not in the audio industry) you’ve probably heard of previously, and would work on cables in my home office after my kiddos went to bed. It has now become my full time gig, which I’m really excited about. Without getting bogged down on how it started (I can certainly do that in a separate post if people are interested in that I guess?), Hart Audio Cables has a few core things that make up the ethos of the brand:
- High Quality / Reliability
- Reasonable Prices
- Speedy Lead times (The goal being to ship within 2 business days from the time ordered, which we’ve finally gotten down to!)
- Humanity First approach
I know a fair few of you have tried our products and I hope these things are reflected in the experience you’ve had with it/us. I chose to have the core product offering focused around the modular system, as it helps to make the things listed up there more of a reality. And then on the actual customer facing side, I tried to make sure the website (1) looked nice (2) was relatively easy to navigate and (3) made clear to customers that, if our modular system wasn’t their thing, they could still get whatever they specifically wanted by going through our custom shop. When it started, the stable of products was pretty slim. Since launch here are some things that have been added:
- Dual 3.5mm headphone cables
- A balanced [Female] 4-pin mini-XLR cable for the Drop DT177X Go
- A balanced 90° 3.5mm headphone cable for balanced Argons
- Dual 4-pin mini-XLR headphone cables for Audeze / ZMF, and that monolith can with the annoying pinout.
- A solution for the Vokyl Erupts
- Mr. Speakers push / pull locking style connectors.
- Some patch cables for 4.4mm input and outputs
- Added versions of our headphone cables where the female adapter serves as the split, and then you’ve got a longer interconnect serving as the rest of the cable.
In addition to this the cable design has been rev’d a few times, each time an upgrade over the previous. Most notably, about a week ago we started shipping the newest design that is more flexible / has less memory. This was one of the - thankfully - only complaints I’d see about our stuff so I’m excited to get it out there. No we did not change the cable we use, still using the same oxygen free ~japanese copper~. It also includes this new splitter that I like much more than the old carbon fiber one we were using. And we upgraded the connectors going to the headphones.
Original Design:
Current stuff:
Around April May June and early July, I really started to get overwhelmed with the amount of correspondence I was getting through email, and I would frequently fall behind on being able to answer quickly enough to keep up and still manage to get some sleep at night (not a lot of sleep to be had over the last 11 months!). Glad to say we’ve got some help on that front now, so if you guys have previously sent me something, and it went unanswered, I’m very sorry that happened! And please feel free to reach out again.
As for what’s coming up, it is a very long list, but in the near future, you can expect:
- At least one new multi-kit very soon
- A new default color option available on products listed on the site
- Easier to use variant selections on our headphone cable product pages
- New interconnects
- A cable for the Focal Utopias that is affordable
Further out from that, here are some general things I really want to do:
- Some sort of way to give a discount or free shipping or something to HFG users on a regular basis. Hard to do with it being public. Looking into it.
- I notice we get a lot of the same questions (or see the same technical misunderstandings) pretty frequently, so I’m working on some stuff that will hopefully help with that.
- I’d like to be able to share with you guys our true reliability numbers for our product. I think this is something most businesses refrain from doing, and I see why, but I hope we can do things a little differently. I won’t be able to get this out until 2021, but so far the failure rate on our product is very low so I’m stoked on that, considering how quickly we’ve had to grow.
- Part of why I started making cables was my frustration with how outrageous prices can be in this industry, and along those lines I really want to do a transparent pricing thing. Something where we show you how much it costs us to put the product out, and you can see exactly how much we’re making here. Unarguably stupid from a business perspective, but I like to think customers would appreciate this sort of thing. This may make working with other entities on projects prohibitively difficult, so we’ll see.
- New product lines. Nothing crazy. Not putting out a headpone or dac or amp. Probably just a really cool POGs playmat.
- No ugly fonts on our heat shrink ever
Thanks again if you read this far. Just wanted to give an update. We appreciate everything <3.
