Calibron Industries
USA based manufacturer/reseller of headphones and other AV related accessories, most of them believed to have been sourced from the far east. Taken over by Recoton in 1989.
California Audio Labs . 
Digital specialist based in Blue Lake in Claifornia, USA and founded in the mid 80's. Initially best known for their high end CD players but later diversified into high end DVD players and DAC's etc. and in the last few years of the company's life actually branched into the world of home theatre with the introduction of multichannel amplifiers, processors and the like. In 2001 however its mother company Sensory Science was bought by Sonic Blue who was interested in that company's multimedia technologies but had no interest in the high end audio market and thus closed CAL down in 2002. If you need to have a device made by the company serviced in the USA or are in need of spare parts you can contact Approved Audio Service via E-Mail as : repair at approvedaudioservice.com.
Cambridge Audio
Originally founded in 1968 in Cambridgeshire, UK. Best known for making a line of quality but reasonably priced integrated amplifiers (nicknamed "student amps") in the 70's and early 80's with some of their early models being underrated in the current S/H market due to the brands current use by a budget hi-fi provider, but the company also manufactured tuners and loudspeakers in the same time period. The company went for CD technology in a big way in the 80's and was one of the first smaller audio companies to introduce players that were actually designed more or less in-house rather than offering tweaked Philips or Sony designs, Cambridge Audio was for instance the first company to offer a CD player with an oversampling DAC and the first company to offer a separate CD transport and DAC. The company went bankrupt in 1990 and the name was bough by Audio Partnership.
Candle See --> Jutan International Ltd. (JIL)
Capa Industries Inc.
An audio electronic design and manufacturing company based in Valencia, California, USA. In December of 1997 "selected assets" were bought by Recoton which indicates that the company went bankrupt or out of business.
Carron MGF Co.
A producer of consumer goods based in Chicago, Illinois, USA, made wound components, audio and radio related kits in the 30's and 40's in addition to selling ham radio related assecories via mail order. In the 50's made low budget acoustical gramophones including models intended for children etc..
Carillon Electronics Corp.
An USA based group that owned a handful of audio companies such as dbx corp. in the latter half of the 80's and early 90's, dissolved in 1994 with the pro audio part of dbx being sold to AKG and the electronics division going to That Corp.. Not to be confused with the Carillon company that manufactures "Musician friendly computers".
Casio Computer
A large Japanese manufacturer of consumer products, this company that has entered and exited the audio market so often that just thinking about it makes my head spin.... and it's not just the consumer market, Casio has dipped it's toes into the professional audio market once or twice as well. May still make some budget personal audio such as MP3 players every now and then. Also is the owner of Asahi Corp.. Official homepage.
CBM See --> Commodore
CD Balancer
Dutch company that made an oddball CD accessory, a balancer that cut off tiny parts of your CD (or similar optical disk) to correct small manufacturing defects, a neat design and some CD's apparently did benefit from this product but I have not been able to contact the company for a year or more. Apparently the man behind this invention was Ben Peters the man as designed the Audio Static loudspeakers, but that is actually unconfirmed .
Cecil E. Watts Ltd.
Mr. Watts was one of the pioneers of the stereo age and a few patents relating to the manufacture of LP were issued in his name in the 1930's and 40's including the famous acetate. Started the Cecil E. Watts company in the 50's and began the manufacture of groundbreaking record cleaning accessories originally sold by ACOS under their own name but in the latter half of the 60's they where sold exclusively under the Watts brand. Company ran into trouble with the EU Trading Standards office in the mid 70's and stopped manufacturing in the early 80's after the firm had been run at a loss for a few years, the company is still around though and still in Middlesex but only operates as an investment shell as far as can be gathered. While C. E. Watts products have not been made since the early 1980's, clones of some of them are still being made today..
Christie Design Corporation See --> Recoton
Chubei Itoh - C. Itoh See --> Marubeni
Cinepro Professional
USA company based in San Francisco, California, founded in 1990 by Eric Abraham to manufacture theatre amplification but branched into the home theatre market in the latter part of the decade when that market started to expand and the demand for high end high power AV amplifiers meant that he could sell basically the same product into both markets. Eric passed away in early 2002 and the company ceased production shortly afterwards, and while reports reached our ears about attempts made to revive the company we have not heard from them in quite a while. Note that the trademark for the Cinepro brand was allowed to expire in October 2002 and quite a number of people and companies actually applied to get control over it later that year, the successful applicants were Mr. Panicci and Mr. Cossifos of New York USA, neither of them appears to have any connection to the original company.
C. Lorenz
Founded in or around 1870 in Berlin, Germany by Carl Lorenz, operated for the first few years as a mechanical workshop but expanded into the manufacture of electrical machinery around 1880. Following Hr. Lorenz's death the company was bought by his co-worker Robert Held in 1890 and he expanded the company in the following years both by buying competitor Telegraphen Bauanstanlt C.F. in 1893 and by establishing branches in Germany and even in Petrograd in Russia. Incorporated in 1906 as C. Lorenz A.G. and during the first 2 decades of the 20'th century the company contributes to the development and manufacture of equipment relating to radio and indeed the first commercial radio broadcasts in Germany were done using a transmitter from the company in addition to the companies introduction of the radio beacon in 1907. C. Lorenz AG branched into the manufacturer of radio receivers in the mid 20's and expanded further later in that decade by buying selected assets from Firma Huth and by starting OEM manufacturing of consumer radios. Bought by Standard Elektrizitätsgesellschaft in May 1930 but that company was the German branch of the USA based ITT company but operated independently. The 1930's was a very important point in the history of the company as they started to do some research into manufacturing techniques and one result of that research was the introduction of modular manufacture, prior to that electronic equipment had been either assembled by hand or mass manufactured in a similar fashion to a car, whereby a chassis goes down an assembly line and workers insert and fasten parts into the chassis or sub-chassis one person at a time. This became uneconomical the more complex the products grew since quality testing was really only possible with a finished product and when production errors where found they could often not be corrected except by partial breakdown and rebuild of the product, not a huge problem with consumer products but even in the 20's professional electronic products had become quite complex. C. Lorenz solution to this problem was to manufacture all products in a modular fashion whereby circuits with specific functions where built into die cast boxes made out of a magnesium based alloy called Elektron and then tested to a specification, the sub modules where then connected together and assembled into a finished product and received final QT, despite the added costs of the Elektron enclosures the end product was less costly to manufacture than by using normal methods due to the lower quality control costs and the introduction of standardised modules, but that where modules that had generic functions and where used in a multitude of products and could thus be mass manufactured. Non production related benefits of the modularised construction included faster and cheaper servicing since instead of repairing the unit by switching components you simply replaced the affected module and sent the old one back to the factory to be repaired by specialised technicians, but also the greater electromagnetic isolation.
During the first 4 decades of the 20th century the company saw itself as the main competitor to Telefunken in the field of radio and related techniques the great rivalry between the companies meant that the German government sometimes felt forced to specify when giving out contracts that work could or should be shared at the least partially, but it also meant that the 2 companies had a tendency to "answer" each others product introductions, this lead for instance to the introduction of the Lorenz wire recorder, but prior to Telefunkens introduction of the Reel to Reel the company had no interest or research into that field, but it is important to realise that Lorenz was never known as a particularly adventurous company as far as products where concerned, they had advanced construction techniques but never had the range of innovative products that made arc rivals Telefunken famous and conversely Telefunken never rivalled the generic construction quality of Lorenz. After WWII the company lost it's manufacturing bases in Easter Germany and Prussia and was forced due to practical and political considerations to turn away from the manufacture of professional radio equipment even though it started manufacture of parts and components almost immediately after the year both in Berlin and in their Schaub factories in Western Germany, but due to it's USA ownership it got a permission to do so much sooner than most other German companies at the time. The blockade of Berlin by the Soviet occupation forces forced the company to move it's headquarters to Stuttgart and the continued loss of export markets forced them to look into entering new local markets, in 1949 it entered the manufacturing of railway control and safety equipment for instance, it also resulted in some interesting consumer products such as worlds first consumer off-line recorder which utilised technology from their pre-war Wire Recorders. In 1958 ITT rationalised their operations in Germany by formally merging Lorenz, Schaub and Standard Elektrizitätsgesellschaft into a new company called Standard Elektric Lorenz (or SEL), with the CE related businesses belonging to a business unit called "Rundfunk, Fernsehen & Phono", that division also added ITT to their brandname soon thereafter with most products being branded ITT Schaub-Lorenz from then on. In 1961 the company took a majority controlling interest in Graetz even though that company was operated mostly independently and in 1966 the company took over the Austrian Ingelen factory and both marketed Ingelen products under the ITT Schaub-Lorenz brand and SEL products under the Ingelen brand in Austria. The RFP consumer division suffered losses in the 70's and a reorganisation in 1979 wich amongst other things resulted in the consumer division being renamed "Audio-Video-Elektronik" and the company starting to use the ITT trademark and dropping the Schaub-Lorenz part, in 1986/7 SEL who was by then an extremely diversified company as far as markets and product lines where concerned, merged with French companies Compagnie Générale d'Electricité and Alcatel with the new company being known as simply Alcatel and the German part now known as Alcatel SEL AG, the new company wanted to get out of the consumer market and for that reason it sold the AVE division to Nokia. You can find more information on the company and their products at Antik-Radio.de and at Radiomuseum (Both Sites in German). Official homepage.
Commodore Business Machines (CBM)
Founded in Toronto, Canada in 1955 by Idek Tramielski, a man better known by the anglicised version of his name: Jack Tramiel. The company was actually founded with the express purpose of getting around the stringent import regulations and taxes that the USA govenment had on the import of industrial products prior to deregulation in the 70 & 80's, but Canada had a favoured trading status and industrial goods from there where excempt from most import duties and restrictive usage regulation. This meant that although the company presented itself as a manufacturer it actually only did final assembly of imported goods from Europe and Asia, and then just enough assembly to to make the units classifiable as Canadian as far as the USA authorities where concerned. Initially CBM's products where mostly Italian typewriters but the company soon extended their products lines into other small business related products such as calculators and more interestingly a line of open reel tape recorders intended to be used as dictation machines but the company appears to have exited that market in the late 60's or early 70's. The company later became well known as a computer manufacturer after they bought pioneering PC firm MOS Technology but ultimatly went bankrupt in 1994. Trying to dig up information of the company is actually very interesting, the first Commodore company was actually a typewriter repair shop Mr. Tramielski started in New York a couple of years before he founded CBM, there are also a soup of paper companies, trust funds etc. surrounding the company, many of them in offshore locations that appear to have been founded with the express purpose of keeping CBM's profits out of the hands of the taxman. There are reports of investigations into the company's operations by various authorities almost from the moment it was floated in 1962 and when the company finally went backrupt the Cayman Islands bancrupcy court actually needed 2 years just to trace all those, which should give you an idea of how many there where and how well they where hidden.
Comptometer Corporation See --> Felt & Tarrant
Concept
A trademark used by the CBS consumer electronics division to market a line of hi-fi separates in the late 70's to early 80's, most or all of them believed to have been sourced from Japanese OEM's.
Concert See --> Jutan International Ltd. (JIL) (Canada)
Concertone See --> Berlant Concertone
Cosmocord
British phonographic specialist based in Enfield in Middlesex, manufactured cartridges and tonearms from the early 50's to the early 80's in addition to selling a number phonograph accessories both made by them and products that they bought from OEM suppliers such as Cecil E. Watts Ltd, also from time to time the company made and sold other audio products such as microphones, in he 70's the company also sold quite a few quality OEM products under their own name that later became well known in their own right, notably the original Rega turntables and the Japanese Koshin tonearms. Note that in the they used the ACOS trade name especially in the latter years, the company was by then primarily occupied as a manufacturer of plastic parts and was taken over by Tatra Plastics in 1982 and all audio related business was dropped.
Craig Consumer Electronics See --> Bercor
Craig Corporation.
Located in Los Angeles, California and originally founded in the 30's as Craig - Panorama by Robert Craig to distribute photographic products, in 1952 his son, the economist T. Robert Craig Jr., took over as chairman of the company and quickly transformed the business into an importer and distributor of Brown Goods, although in the late fifties and 60's the company did some of their own design, quality control and final assembly but this was mainly to get around the very stringent USA import tax regulations at the time and by 1972 the company had ceased all local assembly. In 1963 the company changed from a California registered company into the Delaware registered Craig Corp. Although the company traded in all kinds of CE products ranging from alarm clocks through calculators (very high tech at the time) the company's became best know in the 60's for their tape recorder products that they sourced from Sanyo, Pioneer and others, initially these were mostly Reel to Reel but the company expanded into the 8 Track Cartridge market in the latter half of the decade and met with spectacular success in the then emerging car audio market, the end result being that in last 2 decades of the company's life it was mostly known as a provider of car audio products and novelty high tech electronics. The company had for a time very close ties to Pioneer and when Pioneer USA was set up in 1972 a number of top Craig employees left to work for that company. The company's assets including the brandname were sold to Bercor in 1985 but the company itself existed for at least a few years more since it was in litigation with it USA tax authorities as late as 1987 (unsuccessful, I might add).
Cybernet Electronics Corporation
Small Japanese company that was actually an independently run daughter company of ceramic and electronic giant Kyocera. Best known for manufacturing hi-fi and communications products in the late 70's and early 80's which gave lots of bang for the buck especially their integrated units and amplifiers. Was merged with Kyocera corp. in October 1982 and it's products sold under that name after thereafter, the Cybernet brand is still used by Kyocera for solar panels etc.. though, but low key.
Cyrus Brenneman Audio
US based manufacturer of valve amplification, disappeared in mid 2003 and we have had no luck in getting info on what happened. Alas, we read elsewhere that this company is still around but since we are not getting answers from the supplied contact address and have not had for more than 2 years, we are keeping it listed here until we get more concrete information.
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