Design Principles

Noël Coquet, Founder of love cable / Tonmeister. Four decades of listening, building, and refusing to compromise.

Where It Began

Noël Coquet was born in Belgium in 1964 into a household where music was a constant presence. Not background noise, but something taken seriously, listened to attentively, and cared about. That early environment shaped everything that followed, instilling a sensitivity to what faithful reproduction actually means.

As a teenager, he began building cables for his own audio system, for a pirate radio station he operated, and for live drive-in events he ran. Necessity was the driver, not ambition. The available solutions did not meet his standards, so he built his own. That practical, results-driven mindset has never left him.

Four Decades in the Industry

Over the decades that followed, Noël built a career across both sides of the audio industry. In high-end consumer audio sales, he developed an understanding of how serious listeners relate to their systems. In professional audio, working where recording engineers and producers depend on their equipment without sentiment, he encountered a different kind of rigor: one where the question is never what sounds impressive, but what tells the truth.

This dual exposure shaped a disciplined approach, combining critical listening with measurement, and rejecting the notion that cables should act as tuning devices. A cable is not there to improve or embellish, but to pass signal without interference.

That philosophy underpins both brands. love cable serves as the OEM and professional audio branch, focused on robust, application-driven solutions. Tonmeister is dedicated to the audiophile high-end sector, applying the same engineering discipline to systems where ultimate transparency and musical realism are the priority. The distinction is in application, not in principles.

A Shared Conviction

His involvement with Lipinski Sound reflects the same alignment of values. Prof. dr Andrew Lipinski's approach to active monitoring — building amplification with proprietary Class A operational amplifiers and a signal path completely free of coupling capacitors, resistors, and coils — represents exactly the philosophy Noël has applied to cable design: remove obstacles rather than add character, and trust the recording to speak for itself.

It is a collaboration that works precisely because both men share the same fundamental conviction: that the engineer's job is to get out of the music's way. Noël represents Lipinski Sound across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and France, with worldwide sales available.

"I do this out of passion, not out of a business plan. The day it stops being about the music, it stops being worth doing."

The Philosophy Behind the Work

love cable and the Tonmeister brand was established formally on 1 October 2013, though the knowledge and experience behind them had been accumulating for the preceding four decades. The decision to operate direct-to-consumer, without dealers or distributors, was deliberate. It keeps the conversation honest. There are no intermediaries to satisfy, no retail margins to absorb, and no requirement to produce cables that photograph well.

What there is, instead, is a brief conversation with every customer before any order is placed. Not as a sales technique, but because context matters. A cable does not exist in isolation. It operates within a system, in a room, with specific equipment on each end. System context, room acoustics, and component matching are treated as essential variables, not afterthoughts.

Production remains deliberately limited. Each cable is assembled and verified individually, tested before it leaves. This is not a romantic affectation. It is a practical requirement for consistency.

• Experience: Over four decades of cable design and OEM manufacturing
• Background: High-end consumer audio, professional audio, radio, live sound

Today

love cable and Tonmeister remain a small operation by intention. The conversations, consultations, design decisions, and assembly all pass through one pair of hands and one set of ears.

The underlying motivation has not changed. Not market trends, not brand positioning, but the simple conviction that music deserves to be heard without obstruction, and the persistent belief that hearing it clearly is worth the effort.