As owners of 19-month-old Cobalt Cable LLC, a maker of premium audio and video cables, John Coleman and Zia Uddin are happy to debate customers about such geeky technical stuff as resistance, capacitance, and signal loss.


At heart, though, they say they themselves are consumersmuch like their customerswho know subjectively what sounds and looks good to them.


Both of us have very strong passions for high-end audio and video, and have transferred that energy into expanding the Spokane venture and catering to fellow enthusiasts, Coleman says.


Cobalt Cable designs and sells a range of cables for home-theater, high-definition TV, digital-audio, speaker, and other home uses.


It also recently introduced a line of cables for musicians and professional-audio applications. Its standard cables range in price from around $35 to several hundred dollars, depending on type and length, which is higher than the low-end cables found in some stores but substantially less, they claim, than what some major manufacturers charge for comparable quality.


Cobalt Cables products are sold exclusively through its Web site and a toll-free number. A contract manufacturer in Chicago produces all of the cables by hand to Cobalt Cables specifications, tests them individually, then ships them directly to customers.


Uddin says the Spokane companys return policiesa 90-day money-back guarantee and a lifetime no questions asked exchange offerallow enthusiasts to literally audition our cables, which has generated a lot of positive word-of-mouth advertising.


Cobalt Cable started out with eight products and now has 22. It had sales of $225,000 last year, and its owners say they expect that figure to triple this year.


Operated initially out of Colemans home, Cobalt Cable moved two months ago into a leased 1,500-square-foot space at 114 E. Trent.


The companys as-yet meager furnishings in that older, unmarked building, owned by Washington State University, include computer workstations and related equipment in one room, a few audio-video components and a pair of speakers in another room designated for product-testing use, and a ping-pong table in a third room.


Coleman and Uddin say they plan to step up their efforts to build awareness of the company in the Spokane area, which currently accounts for only about 1 percent of its sales, and may expand its services to include home-theater system installations and consulting. Although they envision possibly hiring employees in the future, they say theyre content for now operating the company entirely by themselves.


Both Coleman and Uddin are Spokane natives and graduates of the University of Washington. Coleman graduated in 1998, worked for a while in business computing, and founded Cobalt Cable in July 2001 after having gotten into making his own audio-video cables as a hobby. He is president and majority owner of the company.


Uddin joined Cobalt Cable last August. He says he and Coleman met at their wives 10-year high school class reunion.


I have a strong background in international marketing, and Im a musician as well. We just hit it off and had the same tastes in music. Were both audiophiles and started talking about all kinds of new gear and specs, Uddin says. We started meeting on a weekly basis and discovered we really have the same ethos, the same philosophies. It just developed from there.


One of the things the two men say they share is a consumer-driven dissatisfaction with the quality and price of the premium cables sold by major manufacturers.


Theres a lot of voodoo and mystery and pure old-fashioned snake oil that goes on with selling audio-video cables, Coleman asserts. He contends that the premium cables made by major manufacturers are overpriced, particularly given that theyre produced mostly overseas now and their build quality can be lacking.


Its really an area where sheer quality unfortunately has just been eroding over the last 10 to 15 years, he claims.


Cobalt Cables products include features such as heavy-gauge copper wire and gold-plated connectors for optimum signal transfer, strain-relief boots around the connectors for added cable longevity, and doubled-braided polyester shielding around the cable for protection and flexibility.


To be sure, the cables that Cobalt Cable sells arent inexpensive, compared with those that come packaged with some audio-video components or that economy-minded consumers might pick up at a neighborhood electronics store.


For example, its 1-meter-long Ultimate Audio Interconnect pairdesigned for analog use with high-end audio equipmentsells for $64.50, and its 2-meter-long Ultimate Component Video Cabledesigned mostly for DVD and high-definition TV usesells for $99.40. A 3-meter Ultimate Speaker Cable pair made by Cobalt Cable sells for $122.08.


Coleman and Uddin say, though, that the cables are designed to meet high performance and durability standards, and they claim that competitors prices for comparable products often are three to 10 times higher.


The companys customers, he says, range from high-school students to retirees, who own audio-video systems that range widely in sophistication and cost.


The industry rule of thumb, he says, is that 10 percent of a total audio-video systems cost should be in cabling, because the cabling can have a substantial impact on sound and video quality.


What it is really is just understanding the physics of what a signal does as it goes down a wire. The majority of our cables are built on designs that are 20 or 30 years old, but they just really work, Coleman says.


Some companies build cables that have sonic characters of their own, meaning they change the sound, he says. We want cables that are sonically transparent. They shouldnt be adding anything to a system. We want to provide as true and honest a connection as we can.


Coleman says he taught himself how to make audio-video cables when he took up the hobby in late 2000. After starting Cobalt Cable, he continued making some of the companys products by hand, while turning over more complicated assemblies to the contract manufacturer in Chicago. He says he and Uddin then decided that it made more sense financially to outsource all of the companys production, so they could focus on administrative tasks and growing the business.


Getting Cobalt Cable prominent placement on some of the Internets top search engines has been the most challengingand continues to be the most challengingcomponent of the business, Coleman says.


There are certain things you can do to make yourself rank better. I could probably spend every minute of every day working on that, he says.


His and Uddins efforts in that regard have been rewarding, though, with a large percentage of the companys Web site visits now coming via the popular Google search engine, the two men say.


I would say right now two-thirds (of sales) come with no contact with customers whatsoever, Coleman says. The rest of the orders come in by phone, or involve some phone contact, which he and Uddin handle personally. The companys computers organize the orders received each day and e-mail then automatically to the manufacturer.


The two owners say one of their goals is to make customers as comfortable as possible with online ordering, but they also feel strongly about being accessible to customers who want to chat with them about the companys products.


I think personalized service is a key component to what we do, Uddin says.