Welcome to audiotools.com, here we archive all kinds of information and tittle tattle on audio and video hardware of any most sorts and the companies that are or have been making them, in fact we consider us to be one of the Internet’s premier source of Uncle Technology on these subjects. You are meant to navigate around using the grey sidebar on the right, which is context sensitive in the sense that if you go down into one section of the site the section you are in moves to the top of the sidebar and you will get an expanded choice of available options.

Information wanted

I am having problems tracing down New Zealand based loudspeaker manufacturer that sold their products under the Ultimate brand in the 70’s and I am still looking for info on defunct English mixer manufacturer Chacadre (sometimes seen it spelled Chacaderance) that also made some reasonable modular synthesisers, it would actually be fun to get background info on M&A company as well, but they made mixer kits (quite good actually) and published DIY tape recorder handbooks as well. There are also brands that I can only find limited information on despite having seen or even owned products by, such as Baume, AIR, Jackson Acoustics and Körting, I am especially interested in knowing why the latter brand showed up on DDR made products in the 80's.

Finding information on small loudspeaker companies is in particular giving me headaches, this is not unexpected since this is by far the most common type of a specialised audio company, they are the easiest to set up and the least regulated since their products use only passive electronics and thus do not need type or electrical approval. I am seeking info on any of the small concerns that sprung up in central Europe and Asia Pacific in the 60's, 70's and 80's since it is almost impossible to find any information on them here in the UK due to a fixation by the local audio press on products made in the Anglo-Saxon language sphere. In actuality I would welcome info on any small loudspeaker company anywhere in the world, unlike companies that made electronics these were often funded by owner/operator and can have a lifetime of as little as a couple of years or less, making them easy to miss.

If you have any information on any of the company's or products here above and would be willing to share them with us, please be so kind as to get in touch via the address at the bottom of the page.

History & Background

The site you are reading now started its life as a links & info Gopher page dealing with hard disk recording on the Atari Falcon in 1993 and in 1994 the site was converted to HTML, was hosted on the old Veda community server in Iceland. In 1996 a section on modular synthesis was added to the site and there were sundry small pages related to semi-pro audio held out on a number of free community servers. These mostly languished until 1999 due to work commitments, but then all of the "open" and "free" Internet resources suddenly morphed into commercial organisations overnight, thus forcing yours truly to look for a new home for the pages held out at the time. The audiotools.com domain had been registered a few weeks earlier with a vague intent of having a site that dealt with computer audio in general rather the sundry DAW related pages held out previously, the Bode (modular synthesiser) pages were moved to the domain and a couple of pages providing info & links on open reel recorders, DAT machines and photographic equipment were thrown up there but behind an empty front page and only linked to from some offsite pages with the intention of moving them elsewhere when convenient.

BTW, this origin of the current site as a links page explains the format of the pages and the modular synthesis stuff explains why the sites logo is a Korg MS-50 and not a piece of hi-fi but it should be noted that none of the pre 1999 DAW, professional audio and synthesis articles are currently used here and probably will never be due to time constraints.

In 2001 I did notice that the open reel links page got more hits that the rest of my domains in total which indicated that there was a lack of such resources out there, and all that despite being seriously difficult to find. Starting to read up on the subject on the Internet all I could find was either audiophile pornography or dubious information although I must admit that things have improved somewhat since, that resulted in me starting to collect and publish information systematically. That continued until the summer of 2002 when the server that contained the site amongst others was stolen by an ex-business associate and when I was trying to resurrect the site on a commercial ISP the hard disk that contained the backup copy broke down, so the site was down for a year and no work was done on it, indeed large parts of the site are still untouched since early June 2002, between mid-2004 and 2009 the author has had no Internet connection due to technical and administrative inaptitude by British Telecom so updates have been slow in coming for the last few years.

As for the quality of the English, it's not my first language, not my second or third either so the end result is bound to be a bit scrappy, and since the pages are automatically compiled it's not possible to spell check on each update.... As to frequent mails asking what the point and/or motivation behind audiotools.com is, the long and the short of it is that there is none, it's just a waste of time.

If you want to sue, the address is :

Site info

Spelling/sorting etc.
Just a few notes regarding the spelling and sorting of the links pages and other lists featured here, combining conjectures like & (and, und, og etc.) are ignored in most cases and the spaces in company/object/personal names are ignored as well, in addition numbers are placed at the end of lists rather than the beginning, traditions vary from culture to culture as to whether numbers are placed before or after so I arbitrarily choose one rather than the other. So BO Speakers is listed after Bospeaker rather than before and B 9 is listed after B Nine.

Another simplification is regarding accented characters, because people used to languages with simplified character sets like US English, Dutch, Afrikaans etc. are clueless as to where the characters missing from their sets actually go in the alphabet they are treated as unaccented, even if they have a corresponding ligature or 2 characters that would in normal circumstances be used instead of the accented character unless the company or individual uses it themselves, such as in the case of Löve/Loeve. Ligatures however are treated as their separate constituent characters, so ø and ö are treated as o rather than oe while æ is treated as ae. Pre-Roman (e.g. runic like þ & ð) characters or symbols taken from a foreign character set but commonly used in variants or in specialised subsets of the Roman one are usually treated as their nearest sound-alike e.g. þ is treated as th, π as pi etc. and characters imported from the Cyrillic set such as in Sámi, are converted into their nearest Roman equivalent.

And due to a high volume of letters from American readers demanding that I fix the spelling on the site it should be noted while I welcome any corrections to the spelling on the pages, which are BTW frequently done in a hurry, it must be understood that the English used here is International English since that is the variant of the language that the vast majority of the world learn.

It should also be noted that in English a slight variation in spelling of the same word can change the meaning completely, expose usually means uncovering something while exposé means an orderly statement of fact, insert appropriate joke here, this is often not understood by native speakers much less those that have it as a second or third language. So we will continue to equalise sounds around here rather than equalize them and writing to me moaning about it is just naïve.

Numbers & Currencies
Prices are usually given in Euros (€) since this is the currency used by most of our readers, however since we are based in the UK the Pound Sterling (£) sometimes creeps in when appropriate or when we forget to convert, note that a £ is roughly 1,4 € or so. For items usually only found in the USA or Japan values are often given in the native currencies i.e. in USD (US$) and Yen (¥), the conversion into Dollars should not present a problem since it's only slightly cheaper than the €, although for how long this remains true is uncertain with the US$ overvalued and the Euro undervalued.

Historical items often have their original prices displayed verbatim, so they might show up in defunct or little used currencies such as DM, DKr, Gs., ISKr, SKr and even Canadian Pesos. Note also that European conventions may be used when prices and other numbers are displayed i.e. 1,59 € is one Euro and 59 cents not 1590, ditto concerning billions, even though the English are rapidly taking up the American bad habit of calling a milliard a billion, we do no such thing, not a lot of hi-fi in that price range though (but does exist in countries with low value currencies).

Internal Linking
Unlike most similar sites all information presented here is consciously atomised, i.e. it is broken down into the smallest and most specific objects possible to minimise multiple instances of the same information and to enable the reader to find relevant information that is contained on other apparently unrelated pages, this method makes extensive use of hyperlinks but less use of other HTML constructs. Currently there are over 20.000 links on the site, or were the last time we counted them in mid-2002, and most subsections have a HTML A NAME tag, so if you want to link to a specific subsection or item you can do that by looking at the HTML source for the name tag and link to audiotools.com/pagename.html#subsectionname. In the near future all subsections will have their own name tag,that is anything that has a bold text attribute will have an anchor.

Copyrights And Trademarks etc.
All textural material on this site is copyrighted and you may not distribute or reproduce it or parts thereof without a written consent of the owner (Contact Ólafur Gunnlaugsson if you need further info on that). Most pictures are also the property of Audiotools.com and the same principle applies there, some pictures are taken from publicity material made available to us (or the public at large) by the manufacturers themselves, in those cases the copyright is owned by the manufacturer of the device in question. Some visual material has been sent to us by various contributors and they are displayed here with their consent, the copyright of those objects is owned by the contributor (and their name is noted underneath each picture, if you need to contact the owners of those we can usually pass e-mail's to them via the address noted above). Finally were we have been unable to find any other sources of pictures we make use of pictures taken from a variety of auction sites such as Ebay, QXL or Ebid, in those instances the pictures were displayed there without a copyright clause and thus considered to be in the public domain, however if an owner of such a picture sees it used on this site and disapproves of its use, we would be willing to remove them as a courtesy move

All trademarks used here are the property of their respective owners and referred to as such, if you see a trademark used as a generic term here it will be down to ignorance on our part and will be rectified if you just drop us a line.

Linking to and from the site
If you have a site that has anything to do with audio just send us a line and a link to it will (eventually) appear on this site, you will have to understand that we decide on what page it is placed and that while the scope of the site is reasonably broad it does not cover all aspects of audio by a long shot so a contextual placing is often not possible but we usually at the least add you to one of the linklists on the grey sidebars and create a new section there if need be

Be aware though that we have a 2 year to-do list of some 10000 plus items to go through and it may be difficult to find the time to fix or insert your stuff.

Thanks list

Thanks to everyone that has sent us new or updated links and or reports of dead ones, due to a lack of time, resources and even an Internet connection in 2002 and since 2004 it has not been possible to answer all these mails and some of them have been lost but I do appreciate all the info and the time you have taken and beg forgiveness for those that I have been so rude to as not to at the least aknowlegde reciept......... Thanks to Michael Gammon for the info on Audio Linear Turntables. The information on the Tesla and ZK tape recorders from Jan Rudziñski was appreciated.

And finally ........

..... Audiotools.com was "banned" by a few "children friendly" web filters in or around 2003 due to the occurrence of the word pornography here above and possibly due to references to nude phonographic stylii (nude = whole)........ weird