Fair Mate See --> Asahi Corp.
Fantasia
Trademark used by Lucky Goldstar (LG) in the mid 90's in a misguided attempt to create a better brand name in the west, their current use of LG is much better.
Felt & Tarrant
Company founded in 1887 in Chicago, USA in order to manufacture the Comptometer, a key driven adding machine that the company is believed to have invented, a concept copied widely later on. Incorporated in 1889 but remained something of a one product horse until the late 1940's when they attempted to diversify by making other office machinery including the Comptometer dictation recorder. The company's name was changed in 1957 to The Comptometer Corporation, taken over in the 60's by the Victor Adding Machine Co. to become the Victor Comptometer Corp., later just Victor Corp. (of Victor 9000 fame) which went out of business in the 1980's.
Fi-Cord
British company that sold tape recorders and related accessories such as microphones, quite successful for a time with their miniature recorders both in the UK and the USA and later with a variety of microphone models, but appears not to have made any products themselves. Started in the mid 50's and disappears in the 70's.
Fidelitone
USA based company started in 1929 by Arthur Olson as a manufacturer of phonographic needles that it sold under it's own name in addition to the Permo brand, after it introduced one of the first diamond stylus it became one of the largest suppliers of needles and stylii in the world with factories in both USA and Scotland. In later years it ceased manufacturing products and focused on distributing audio accessories and parts sourced from OEM suppliers under their own brandname. In the 70's they branched into electronic parts distribution and as this grew more profitable than the original business they ended up selling the audio division to Recoton in 1980. The company is now primarily a logistics company and an electronic parts distributor with close links to Sears. Official homepage.
Fidelity
British manufacturer of budget Brown Goods, mostly active from the early 60 to early 80's..
Fidelity Research (FR) See --> Fidelity Research
Fisher
Founded in 1937 by Aver Fisher and Victor Brociner as Fisher Radio, company sold to Sanyo in 1975.
Fisk See --> Amalgamated Wireless Australasia Ltd. (AWA)
Fonofilm See --> Ortofon
Fonica
Polish electronic manufacturing plant based in Lodz and probably best known in the audio world for the turntables that they supplied both under their own name and under the Unitra brand. Early history unknown but the company was state run even after most of the other similar local manufacturing companies had been privatised, had enormous financial and labour problems in the early 1990's which culminated in the plants workers occupying the factory building for 20 days in June 1991 to demand higher wages and ultimately the company was liquidated by the government in April 1992 in despite strong protests from the locals. The factory was then taken over by Korean trading house Kyung Bang in 1996 and run as Kyungbang Fonica but was sold to Daewoo Electronics in 1998 and under their control operated as a television sub-assebly plant under the name of Daewoo-Fonica but finally closed in late 2002 after years of losses.
FR See --> Fidelity Research
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