Origins · engineering
Analysis Plus was founded in 1993 in the Detroit area by Mark Markel, an engineer whose company spent its first years as the contract test lab for the largest cable manufacturers in the industry. While running computer simulations to model how current actually flows through audio cables at varying frequencies, Markel and chief engineer Qinwei Sun discovered that the accepted academic answers to current distribution in a wire are simply wrong — that round conductors produce high levels of current bunching, skin effect, and frequency-dependent imbalances that degrade signal integrity, and that a hollow-oval geometry redistributes the current in a way that measurably solves the problem. Analysis Plus patented the hollow-oval conductor design and built the entire product catalog around it. Mark Markel passed in 2020 but the company continues under the engineering team he built, and every cable that ships still uses the same hollow-oval geometry.
What Definitive carries
The line spans the full cable catalog. The Silver Apex sits at the top — pure silver hollow-oval conductors in the company's reference flagship configuration; described by reviewers as brimming with resolution, tonal honesty, and dynamic life. The Big Silver Oval is the volume-line reference — pure silver over a stabilizing strand of OFC woven into the patented hollow-oval geometry. Below those sit the Solo Crystal Oval interconnects and the Black Mesh Oval power cords, both extending the same hollow-oval engineering at more accessible price points. Analysis Plus also supplies the OEM segment heavily; several major boutique brands's in-house cabling is Analysis Plus geometry built to private spec.
Where it sits in the room
In the measurement-led cable conversation Analysis Plus sits alongside Nordost and Transparent — the small set of cable manufacturers whose product designs trace back to actual measurement work rather than marketing claims. The differentiation is the published research and the patent on the hollow-oval geometry. For dealers carrying a measurement-defensible cable line, Analysis Plus is the answer.