About Us

THE BIRTH OF ZENWAVE


When I started making my own cables, building many different DIY “recipes”, some of them were pretty good – ok but not quite there. It took many years of experimentation to finally solve the problem, to come up with a breakthrough, a cable that was truly outstanding.

ZenWave Audio is owned by me, David Cahoon, a lifelong audio enthusiast and mechanical engineer. I’ve been into music since a young age and started playing musical instruments in elementary school. I participated in my school’s band as well as jazz band until my senior year of high school playing saxophone. Later I picked up an electric bass guitar and played with various rock bands.

I’ve always been into music and listening to music via stereo systems, as a child I was amazed with my Dad’s audio system and how it worked. In my teens I built my first “real” system with Mirage bipolar speakers, NAD amplification, and Acoustic Alchemy DACs… and I first started making my own cables as well. I built many different DIY “recipes” for cables, they were ok but not great. It took many years of experimentation to come up with a cable I thought was very good. During this time I was working for Vestas Wind Turbines in Denmark and the US as an engineer on Vestas project management team. I was involved in designing the manufacturing and assembly of Nacelles and Hubs in Vestas’ Brighton, Colorado factory. Eventually, after the project was done Vestas decided to lay off all of the US engineering team. After doing some consulting work, I decided to offer my first interconnect cable as part of a small audio business venture. This interconnect is the D1 and is still currently for sale!

BUILDING OUR RANGE


I decided to offer my first interconnect cable as part of a small audio business venture. This interconnect is the D1 and is still currently for sale!

ZenWave grew more than I thought possible (or intended!) over the years, and I offered an expanding line of cables culminating in the current D4 interconnect cable and PL power cable. Most recently I built the PSR-14 UPOCC silver ribbon power cable, which worked so well it’s design was modified for use as a speaker cable and interconnect, in both UPOCC silver and UPOCC copper. The ribbon design allows me to have more control over LCR, the inductance, capacitance and resistance of the cable, and dial it in ideally for each cable type. 

The ribbon cables offer the best performance in power and speaker cables I’ve ever tested, is a great companion to my current interconnect cables, and offers another choice for ICs. My current ICs, the D3, D4 and D5, are made using UPOCC silver/gold alloy and the ribbon offers a new option for pure silver or copper. The silver ribbon IC is 17g and offers my customers yet another option that is most similar to Siltech and Wireworld’s top end cables… but at very reasonable prices! And this leads to a discussion about the technology I use to build my cables HERE.