XLO Electric is a company that has very rapidly come to the forefront of its field. Since 1991, when the company was founded, XLO's products have gained enthusiastic acceptance by audiophiles around the world and been the subject of an ongoing series of rave reviews in the world audio press. XLO Electric Company has been nominated for DuPont's prestigious Plunkett Award for Technical Excellence and the Golden Note Award of the Academy for the Advance of High End Audio.

XLO Electric was started by Roger Skoff, who, like a number of other High-End luminaries (Conrad and Johnson, for example), is an economist by training. He was educated at UCLA; has been Director of Business Analysis for four divisions of International Industries, Inc., and has consulted to various companies, including a number listed on the Fortune 500.

Since the age of twelve Mr. Skoff has had an active and growing interest in sound and its transmission and reproduction. Besides a life-long commitment to the very finest in High Fidelity sound, he has, in addition to his regular professional career, worked as a recording engineer, a radio announcer, an audio equipment reviewer for Sounds Like... magazine, and as Editor of Sounds Like ... News.

Mr. Skoff's active involvement in the design of high-performance audio cables began as a recreational math exercise in late 1986. This rapidly passed from a purely abstract theoretical study to the stage of concrete experimentation, and by 1988 the first of his cable designs; which was known as XLO Electric Type 1, was completed.

Other designs followed, and by the time he started reviewing, most of the cables now comprising the XLO Electric Reference Series had been built and were incorporated into his Reference System for evaluating the performance of other High-End audio components. Because of the strict ethical requirements of reviewing, however, and because Mr. Skoff had no intention whatsoever of offering his cables for sale, the cables were identified in his system only with a misleading "codename", they were never written about; and their source was kept strict secret, even to most other reviewers.

Some reviewers though, close friends of Mr. Skoff, not only knew the cables' source, but were even given some for use in their own reference systems. From this use, the word spread that a new "mystery cable" -- of unknown origin, and not available at any price -- was on the scene, and it quickly became the talk of audiophiles across the United States.

When the truth finally leaked out, in November of 1990, at a meeting of the Audiophile Society in Westchester County, New York, Mr. Skoff received, within just a few weeks, nearly a hundred phone calls from enthusiastic audiophiles wanting to buy his cables.

The rest is history: In December, 1990, he took a leave-of-absence from the magazine, to prepare sample cables for trial introduction at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show of January, 1991. The response at the Show was immediate and overwhelming: Dealers in the United States and Distributors abroad WANTED the cables. The result was that Mr. Skoff 's departure from the editorial field became permanent and in March of 1991, XLO Electric Co., Inc. was formed.