| |
EAD See --> Tara Labs
Eaton's. 
Formally incoprerated on December 8, 1869 as the Timothy Eaton Company, Ltd. but traded mostly as Eaton's, this company was Canada's largest mail order outlet and later also became a chain of department stores. The company used their own Viking brandname for CE products and for a long time had a close relationship with the Electrohome company which was their main OEM provider of such products, interestingly unlike their USA based rival Sears which very much focused on cheap products with their own brands, much of the Eaton's brown goods range were real quality stuff and priced above average in the marketplace. Ironically enough the company went bankrupt in the 1990's and were bough by Sears and in fact that company has let the Eaton brand lapse into obscurity to a degree and has slowly been renaming the old Eaton stores as Sears, they have also licensed the Viking brand to companies such as Viking Range but the brand is no longer connected to the audio industry.
Homepage: http://www.eatons.com
Eben (Firma Ing. Franz Eben)
German electronics manufacturer based in Dachau, manufactured tape recorders from the late 50's until the latter half of the 60's mostly as an OEM but later also sold transcription equipment, telephones and answering machines, etc. The company still exists in the form of Eben-Elektronik GmbH but has long since left the audio business and is currently situated in Petershausen.
Homepage: http://www.eben-elektronik.de
Eben (Loudspeakers, Denmark) See --> Aavik Furniture (1998 to 2002) and Raidho Acoustics ApS (2003 to 2009)
EbEn Acoustics Lab
Manufacturer of hand crafted loudspeakers for hi-fi audio and home theatre usage originally based in San Francisco, USA but towards the end of it's life located in Berkeley in the same state. Note that the company sometimes referred to itself as just EAL and is believed to have been started up in the latter half of the 90's.
 |
But the true oddball in the bunch was the G01, a guitar cabinet loudspeaker that looked like and was built like a hi-fi speaker including the use of a sealed, wood veneered cabinet that looked seriously out of place sitting next to the traditional guitar cabinets that all feature open baffles and black vinyl coverings. The G01 used 2x Celestion PA/Guitar amp speakers rather than hi-fi units though. If you needed more than one, you were meant to stack them sideways rather than on top of each other as with normal guitar amp cabinets
All contact with this company was lost in early 2002. Not to be confused with Danish high end loudspeaker manufacturer Raidho Acoustics ApS that traded under the EbEn name.
Edison Price (Binding posts) See --> Eminent Technology
E-Fabrication
Furniture manufacturer founded in 1995 and based in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Specialised in manufacturing bespoke or customised hi-fi, AV, office and recording studio furniture under the thedeskE brand, although they did some more general furniture work and had some models that appeared to be more or less stock. Disappears in the latter half of the noughties, but Eric who was the main motor behind the company appears to be still using the brand and offering bespoke cabinetry services, see: his Smugmug site, last phone no we had for him was: +1 770 451 9536.
EICO See --> EICO
Eldeen Manufacturing Corporation
USA based manufacturer of phonographic stylii, taken over by Recoton in 1952.
Electra Co.
USA based manufacturer of arcade machines, did in the 1930's manufacture coin operated radio-gramophones that where a kind of precursor to the jukebox. Started out in the 1890's and was operation into the early 1940's at the least.
Electra Glide Audio
Company based in St.John's Island, South Carolina, USA but later in Charleston in the same state. Pretty much specialised in manufacturing high end power cords but did manufacture some interconnects as well. Run by William Scott Hall the 3d and is believed to have been started up in the latter half of 1990's and disappears around 2005 amidst some controversy , but turns up in a few years later with a new website, but alas they list a multitude of locations (Miami, Florida - Atlanta Georgia) and do not answer emails so?
Resources : Stereotimes.com - A review of the Electra Glide Fatman 2000, borders on being funny if you read the posts linked to below.
Audio Asylum - Discussion about their products on Audio Asylum, similar material to be found on other audio discussion sites.
http://www.myspace.com/number1cables.
Electra Radio Corporation
Japanese company that manufactured mostly radios and similar communications equipment primarily for the semi-pro market, but did for a while also make consumer products such as portable radio receivers and tape recorders and on a smaller scale music centres. Timeline is unknown but appears to be roughly late 50's to mid 70's. Note that there was an unconnected USA based company called Electra Radio Inc. that appears to have been a store rather than a manufaturer.
Electro-Devices
A company that was based in the Lajpat Rai Market area in Delhi, National Capital Territory, India in the 1970's. Nothing is known about the company except that they retailed electronic parts and tools in addition to having a huge range of audio related DIY kits. While most of the kits were very simple, there was a number of them that attempted quite surprisingly ambitious things with fairly basic circuitry such as cassette recorders and quadraphonic amplifiers. Lajpat Rai Market is in Old Delhi rather than New Delhi and is the primary retail trading area for technical products in India, so lots of electronic, electric and watch related stores are based there and the district is the closest thing the country has to an Akihabara.
Electrohome
Originally started in Kitchener in the province of Ontario, Canada in the spring of 1907, by Arthur B. Pollock and Alex Welker as Dominion Electrohome Industries Limited to manufacture Gramophones and entered the radio manufacturing business in the 1920's, initially testing the waters by using the guise of Grimes Radio Corporation. Company was active in the white and brown goods markets from then on and up to the 1980's, although some AV and communication equipment was sold with this brand name right up to the year 2000, those were all rebranded Japanese and Asian products, most of them sourced from Mitshubishi. The company still exists as a holding company but is no longer active in the consumer market. The company was for a long while Canada's biggest manufacturer of brown goods and as such manufactured audio products that were sold under other brands such as Viking that was owned by Eaton's. Company's name was sometimes shortened to DEIL, their furniture workshop traded as Deilcraft for instance. The brand name has been licensed to a company called Jutan International Ltd. (JIL) since 1999 and any queries about equipment bought since then should be referred to that company.
Homepage: http://www.electrohome.com
Elektro Akustik
Small Swedish maker of high quality audio kits such as valve amps etc., timeline ca latter half of the 90's to 2003.
Electromophon AG
Grammophone manufacturer based in Stuttgart-Vaihingen in Germany, formed I believe in the 1910's (accounts differ on the exact year) and took over Albert Ebner & Co. in 1921 which gave them an access to electric motor technology. The company was unusual in it's day since it specialised in producing high priced standalone gramophones, in other words it was one of the first high end audio companies out there, it failed sometime in the depression probably in 1930 since the last models I have seen from them are from 1929. A picture of one of their models from 1929 can be found here at an Austrian radio museum and a slightly earlier model here (scroll down to the middle of the page)..
Electronic Instrument Company (EICO). 
Based in New York, USA and started in 1945 to manufacture electronic test equipment in kit form but later in that decade also started offering their products lines fully built (or "pre-wired" in EICO terms). Test equipment remained the company's mainstay during the whole time it was in the electronics business but EICO augmented their product lines whatever electronics were fashionable at each time as for instance in the late 40's it partook in the Geiger counter fad that was for a short time all the rage in the USA when people wanted to get rich prospecting for uranium similar to what fuelled the metal detector fad in England 3 decades later. In the 50's and 60's they offered ham radio equipment but exited that market segment when interest in amateur radio died down in the 1970's, and in the 80's EICO made electronic security equipment, but their biggest secondary market was audio equipment. They appear to have started producing hi-fi products in the early 50's with a line of tuners and amplifiers, these where available both in a kit form or fully built, early models were not considered very good but models produced in the late 50's and early 60's where amongst the better offered at the time, in particular their loudspeakers and valve amplifiers but the company had hired freelance designers to design some of those. In the latter half of the 60's EICO introduced a line of solid state audio equipment referred to as Cortina's but in the 70's the only audio products they sold where kits made for them in South Korea and EICO exited the audio market in the late 1970's and the electronics market altogether a little later. The company continued to exist as a property management company until 1999 when it was liquidated apparently at the request of the shareholders rather than due to bankruptcy procedure (EICO was a NASDAQ listed company BTW). There is a mailing list on Yahoo that discusses EICO valve amplifiers.
Electrophonic See --> Morse Electro Products
Elektrotechnische Fabrik Ing. Ludwig Neumann GmbH (Ingelen)
Austrian company based in Wien (Vienna), was founded in 1907 as a porcelain workshop, started making passive electronic components in 1924 with the introduction of an innovative porcelain loudspeaker (that was actually sold under the Hornyphon brand), and commenced the manufacture of radios in 1926, the name of the company was changed to Radiofabrik Ingelen Figer & Co KG after WWII and was taken over by C. Lorenz in 1966 and continued as one of their main hi-fi & radio manufacturing plant but the Ingelen trademark was only used on their products in Austria and for some reason on a few of their top of the line hi-fi products in the rest of the world. Use of the trademark was discontinued in 1988 and the factory itself closed, a year after it had bought out by Nokia, the trademark has since then been used by HB Austria on rebadged Asian low end AV products.
Elektrotechnische Werke Carl Sevecke See --> Generalvertrieb d. C. Sevecke Fabrikate
Elfunk See --> Agon
Elite Gramophones
Tiny manufacturer of turntables based in Hersham, Walton-On-Thames, in Surrey, Britain. Founded in the late 70's to commercialise an unusual high end turntable/tonearm combination that was developed at the Cranfield Institute of Technology, but it appears that the company in the end only shipped the turntable in the form of the Elite Rock as no information has been found on the arm ever entering production. Changed it's name and address in the mid 80's to Elite Electronics (EEl) were in addition to making the Rock the company was also selling the Elite Electronics Pickups. Disappeared in the latter half of the 1980's and the rights to the turntable design were sold to Townshend, some of the older Elite products appear with the Elite - Townshend name.
Eminent Audio
British company that manufactured Croft branded products including vavle amplifiers, loudspeakers and so on, timeline is not certain since there are at the least 3 different companies, each dissolved in series but belived to be from the 1980's to ca 2007 when Glen Croft left to form Croft Acoustics.
Empire Scientific 
Started in the late 50's as Dyna-Empire Inc. and made quite a splash with the Empire turntables and loudspeaker ranges, but later became one of the biggest manufacturer of phonographic pickups. The spares and stylus supply operation was sold to Russel Lind, the pickup manufacture operation to Benz Micro AG and the company itself currently only assembles batteries for camcorders and mobile phones.
Homepage: http://www.empirescientific.com
EMTEC Magnetics
German company formed in the early/mid 90’s when BASF wanted to get rid of its media division, BASF had in fact struck a deal with Raks to offload the media division to them as a whole, but since that involved moving the operations to Izmir in Turkey and thus causing the loss of thousands of jobs in Germany, BASF hit unusually hard opposition from the German trade unions who threatened industrial action against the company. In the end a new entity called EMTEC was formed that took over all the old Ludwigshafen manufacturing and R&D facilities of BASF’s Media Division (the old Division III) and was initially owned by the Korean mini-conglomerate Kohap Inc. EMTEC was underfunded from the start however since Kohap ran into financial difficulties immediately after acquiring EMTEC and in Sept. 1998 the company was taken over again, this time by venture capitalists Legal and General Ventures Ltd., from England. Problems followed the LGV takeover however and in 1999 Dr. Jürgen Langeheine was forced to step down as CEO of the EMTEC, something that many saw as an ill omen since he had been credited with singlehandedly turning the media divisions of BASF and Agfa from loss making operations into profitable concerns a few years earlier. The company actually never made any profits under the control of LGV and was hit especially hard by the death of VHS but EMTEC was the world’s largest provider of such tapes, and in the end was forced to close its doors in 2005 or thereabouts. The trademark was sold to MPO and they use it to brand their consumer products but the patents, technical matters and much of the technical staff went to Dutch company RMGI that is the current manufacturer of the products that EMTEC used to make. Note that EMTEC had the rights to use the BASF trademark until 2002 and most of their products were cobranded BASF/EMTEC up until that point.
Next Page : Defunct Audio Companies - En to E9 -- Previous Page : Defunct Audio Companies - De to D9