Badische Anilin & Soda-Fabrik (BASF)
Founded by Friedrich Engelhorn in 1865 to manufacture aniline dyes and quickly became the one of the larger producer of coal based dyes and shortly thereafter one of the pioneers in the manufacture of synthesised dyes along with Bayer (néé Agfa), by the 1890's it had become the worlds leading manufacturer of synthesised dyes which transformed the world of cloth fabrication since prior to that most dyes were natural substances with a large part of them imported from exotic locations at costs which meant that they were really only for the richest portions of society. The production experience they gained in synthetic manufacture lead to the introduction of nitrogen fertilisers which in turn revolutionised farming in central and northern Europe were prior to the introduction of synthetic fertilisers was constantly on the brink of famine due to overpopulation. The economic chaos of the Weimar republic along with war reparations placed directly on German industry forced the larger German chemical companies to merge into an amalgamated company called I. G. Farben in 1925 (along with BASF it included Hoechst and aforementioned Bayer) however apart from management and finance they did operate completely autonomously and it's was the high tech, Ludwigshafen based Division III of BASF that developed the recording tape in the early 1930's replacing the prototype paper based tapes with more robust synthetic materials, the paper tapes actually worked fine in a studio environment but did not have a lot of tensile strength which made them unusable in the field, Division III also improved the basic formulation of the magnetic layer and this lead to the introduction of the tape recorder in association with Telefunken in 1935.
The company was de-merged from I. G. Farben in 1952 and quickly started to reap the benefits of many of the research projects that it had undertaken in the 1930's, but the intervention of WWII meant that they were never commercialised, this was despite the fact that the French and American authorities had confiscated most of the company's intellectual property and rights but with the exception of the magnetic tape (magnetic tape IP was handed over to 3M) no serious attempt was made by either authority to make any commercial use of it. This meant that innovations like Styrofoam quickly got the company back onto the forefront of the chemical industry and the company had become the leading manufacturer of audio tapes merely a year after they restarted it's production, both in quantity an quality. BASF absorbed the media division of Agfa in 1990 but decided in 1993 to get out of the media business altogether and negotiated to sell the magnetic media division to Raks in 1994 but due to pressures from the German labour unions a new company called Emtec was formed to take over the operation. We also have a tiny bit of info on BASF Records. Official homepage.
Barnatt & Oswald
Small UK based manufacturer of bespoke hi-fi and AV furniture, also did manufacture a limited number of loudspeakers and at the least one model of a turntable. Operating in or around the year 2000, we have not been able to find any functional contact address since 2002.
Beam Echo Ltd.
A small manufacturer of cinema projectors (hence the name) that branched into the manufacture of low budget amplifiers to OEM accounts in the early 50's and later in that decade introduced mid/high end valve hi-fi amplifiers under their own Avantic brandname and quickly followed them up with loudspeakers, tuners and other audio gear. Company was run out of Witham in Essex, England by Henry Michael Rahmer also known by the name Andre Rahmer and a few others, a gentleman that is often referred to as a "colourful character", note that the company marked their products for cosmetical reasons as "made in London". The company was bought by Thorn-EMI in the early 60's and closed shortly thereafter, more info on the history of the company can be found on this page.
Benytone See --> Marubeni
Bercor Inc.
Run by Richard Berger and based in La Mirada, California, USA. Prior to their purchase of the assets of the Craig company in 1985 the company operated mostly as a local distributor, subsequent to that the company used the Craig name to brand a variety of cheap Asian CE imports and market them in the USA, much like the original company had done in the last years of it's life. Changed it's name to Berel Industries in 1989 and changed it's name again in 1997 to Craig Consumer Electronics but filed for bankruptcy on Aug. 1 the same year. Following an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into financial irregularities Mr. Berger was forced to pay a $25,000 fine and was barred from serving as a corporate officer for five years afterwards, in 2000 Mr. Berger and 2 other former Bercor executives were charged on no less than 34 separate counts of fraud and related activities in relation to the bankruptcy. The Craig brandname was sold by the bankruptcy court to New Tech Industries.
Berkley Testa Electronics
Australian manufacturer based in Templestowe, Victoria that manufactured high end hi-fi products under the Symfonia brand. Founded by communication engineer Stanley Berkley and hi-fi salesman Vincent Testa in 1992 to manufacture the Opus 10 power amplifier designed by Berkley but soon thereafter introduced more amplifiers and other products such as power supplies and crossovers, branched into AV with the introduction of a 6 channel high power amp in the late 90's and announced a new high tech class D PWM amplifier at the same time based around technology developed at the University of Melbourne. Disappeared in late 2001 and we have not been able to find out any more since then, except that Vince Testa is now apparently a beekeeper in his native Templestowe and indeed functions as the president of the local Beekeepers club! For background information read this interview.
Berel Industries See --> Bercor
Berlant Concertone
USA based hi-fi and audio company run by Bert Berlant, originally the trade name was Berlant, later Berlant-Concertone and finally just Concertone, primarily known for their open reel recorders and of those early designs were by Berlant himself and manufactured in the USA but later recorders from this company were rebadged TEAC products, company fizzled out in late 60's early 70's. Not to be confused with the French amplifier manufacturer named Concertone active in a similar/slightly later timeframe.
Boland Acoustics
Company founded by Peter Boland in or around 1987 in the town of Waihi in New Zealand to manufacture loudspeakers, initially funded by a government grant to ex-PYE staff as a part of a job stimulation plan, but the employment situation in the town got a bit grim in Waihi when a large Pye plant closed down in 1986 and those grants funded a host of small start-up audio companies including Lambert Audio. Only products we have seen from the company were the BX series of standmount speakers, these were very similar in external and internal design as British speakers had been a few years earlier, but we have heard of bookshelf and large high end models as well. I have not been able to establish when the company stopped manufacturing speakers, but the last mention I have been able to find is in a NZ business directory from the late 90's were a defunct company by the name of Phaze Electronics Ltd is listed as the Australasian distributor. As far as I can gather although they no longer do serial manufacture they do make custom designs and repair speakers and drive units including models from other manufacturers, no address available but try : +(07) 863 7545 or +(07) 863 6956. Not to be confused with USA based video equipment manufacturer Boland Communications.
Bongiorno Designs
Founded by James Bongiorno in the late 90's to manufacture an updated version of the Ampzilla amplifier that he originally designed for GAS (Mr. Bongiorno was also one of the primus motors behind Sumo and worked for SAE as well), additionally he performed updates to most of his older amplifier designs. The manufacture of his amplifier designs was taken over by Spread Spectrum Technologies in late 2003/early 2004 but it is unclear if the amplifier update service is still on offer. For background information on BD read this article.
Braun
German consumer products company, financed pioneering research into visual and user interface design of consumer electronics at the Ulm university in the late 50's and early 60's cumulating in the company being the first to standardise their product design around ergonomic and usability principles. Dieter Rams, the professor that was responsible for the research work was later hired by the company to handle the industrial design of a range of hifi products including the LE 1 electrostatic loudspeakers and later the System 300, these Bauhaus inspired designs quickly became classics and Braun and Rams stuck up a long term relationship that lasted until the company exited the audio market. The Rams designed products are highly collectable and as with other such products do not look out of place in a modern home despite being up to 40 years old. Braun was bought by the USA based consumer products behemoth Gillette in 1967 and since then has placed more and more emphasis on personal care products and kitchen appliances, and less on AV products and the while the company made some high end statement audio products in the 90's (designed by the same Hr. Rams) they seem to have left the market segment altogether in the latter half of the decade. You can still get the LE 1 from Quad Musikwidergabe though. Official homepage.
Brenell Engineering
English company based in London that started manufacturing tape recorders in the 50's, these were considered better than the average at the time, bought by the mixer manufacturer Allen & Heath and a few recorders were made under the Allen & Heath Brenell name until the mid 80's, mostly Mini-8 multitracks at the AH&B factory in Cornwall. The Allen & Heath company removed the Brenell part from their name in the late 90's. More info on the company's history can be found here.
Brother Industries
Like so many Japanese consumer electronic manufacturers Brother has made a stopover in the audio market at the least once in their lifetime, namely in the early 70's when they made and sold the cheesiest music systems you ever will see, complete with a 8 Track Cartridge and may also have made some portable audio products at the same time. Official homepage.
Brunswick
A company founded in Cincinnati, USA in the 1830's as a horse carriage maker by Swiss immigrant John Brunswick and expanded into the manufacture of billiard equipment in 1845. The company who by that time were named Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company decided at the turn of the 19th/20th century to further utilise their expertise and factories by starting to manufacture exclusive wooden furnishings of all sorts mostly as an OEM, one of the fastest growing niche markets that the company supplied to was the manufacturers of bespoke gramophone cabinets to the upper crusts of society, which took commercially made mechanisms and put them into elegant furniture so that they did not look out of place in living room or hall, these were the predecessors to the latter day Cabinets. Brunswick started to make their own gramophones in the mid 1910's that not only featured the sort of high quality enclosures as they had been supplying to other makers but also incorporated a number of techniques to improve the sound quality and/or the ease of use such as unique reproducers that allowed you to playback almost any type of record that was available on the market, more info on this page. The company started manufacturing radios in the 1920's and started their own record label around that time as well, in 1930 Brunswick was forced to sell the musical division to Warner Brothers in order to survive. The company is still around and does indeed still make billiards equipment, see a short history of the company. Official homepage.
Brush Development Company
Originally founded in 1919 by Charles Francis Brush Jr. as Brush Labs, but that was a research company based in Cleveland, Ohio, USA and was started with the intention to develop phonographic products that utilised piezoelectric crystals. Mr. Brush died prematurely in 1927 but some of his work bore fruit and hence his backers founded the Brush Development Company in 1930 to commercialise the inventions of Brush Labs, the newly formed company became the USA's biggest manufacturer of instrument recorders and other test and measure instrumentation in the latter half of the 30's. Due to their status it that market segment they were chosen by the US Army to work on recording technologies during WWII, while the company continued to work on magnetic recording technologies after the war they were not made privy to the improved technologies behind Telefunken's WWII era Magnetophon by the US Army like most others working in that field, it has been hinted that this was possibly because the company had been exclusively handed the research and manufacturing secrets pertaining to the manufacture of high quality crystals that had been developed in Germany during the war and had even been given access to the German scientists that had developed the techniques, and that it was felt that they had got "their share". Whatever the reason it meant that Brush managed to release the Mail-A-Voice dictation recorder in 1946 and the first USA built tape recorder in 1947 with the Brush Soundmirror but those were designed with an eye on the outdated 1928 and 35 German patents which meant that the Soundmirror was rendered outdated as soon as later that same year when machines built around the Magnetophon technology started to arrive on the market and the company never gained the market share in the recording business it had hoped for although it did for a time in the early 50's become the primary supplier of automated tape recorders for businesses such as aviation control and telephone exchanges. Companies such as Sonotone managed during the late 40's to successfully market piezoelectric phonographic pickups, a market that Brush Dev. had set it's sights on ever since the founding of Brush labs but never had any success with, to add insult to injury the most successful company in that sector was Astatic which was founded by an ex-employee of the company. Brush Development Co. merged with the original Brush Labs and the Cleveland Graphite Bronze company in 1952 with the resulting new company named Clevite but audio products continued being sold using the Brush trademark as late as 1960. The Clevite company exited the audio market altogether in 1963 and was taken over by Gould National Battery in 1969.
Burne-Jones & Co. Ltd.
A company based in Cheam in Surrey, England and active in the early 50's to early 60's time frame, made quite nice cartridges (for their time) but are best remembered for their oddball products such as pivoted tonearms and the separate treble units for loudspeakers.
Next Page : Defunct Audio Companies - C