Manticore
English turntable specialist, started trading in 1982 or so and started manufacturing mid/high end turntables a couple of years later, but was as well known for manufacturing power supplies and custom bearings for 3'd party turntables as for their own designs. Bought the rights to the Logic Audio pickup-arm designs when that company got into trouble in the mid 90's. Altered it's name to "Manticore Audio Visual Shareholders Ltd" in 1997 or so with the aim of getting into CD-Rom publishing (?!), but ceased trading in 1999 or 2000. However we do understand that Doug Hewett, it's main designer, is now working for another English hi-fi company. For more background info on the company take a look at this interview.
Maplenoll
USA based company founded by production engineer and ex-fighter pilot Bob Dilger in the early 80's when he agreed to take over a tiny division of the Coloney contracting company that manufactured an high end turntable/arm in exchange for consulting work he had done for them. Mr. Dilger simplified the design of the table, lowered the price and sold it direct to consumers with some success, and through the 80's and into the early 90' manufactured developed various versions of the table but disappeared without a trace around 1994. But not without a legacy, one of the developers that joined the company in the latter half of the 80's was Pierre Sprey later of Omega Micro fame and one of the main distributors of the company in the 90's was Lloyd Walker of Walker Audio who manufacture a table with an obvious lineage from the Maplenoll design.
Maplin
British electronics retailing chain, in the 70's when the company was mostly a seller of electronic components they manufactured a range of electronic products including hi-fi separates and electronic musical instruments, while the design quality varied immensely some of them where actually quite presentable in every sense of the word and couple can only be described as innovative. Most of their products where offered both as kits and as fully built units and where often designed in co-operation with the then booming English electronics magazines. Today the company is thriving as one of Britain's larger CE gadgets and accessory retailer but is has stopped manufacturing and is mostly out of the components business. Since a large part of their products where built by end users from kits and coupled with the fact that people currently associate Maplin with cheap indoor TV antennas rather than their products of yesteryear the second hand prices for their products are extremely depressed with the exception of the EMS inspired 5xxx range of synthesisers. Official homepage.
Marconiphone 
An arm the British Marconi company that manufactured audio equipment mostly cabinets and suchlike but also distributed a number of East-European and Japanese tape recorders in it's own name.
Mardigal Audio Laboratories, Inc.
Founded in the early 80's by Sanford Berlin as an distributor of audio products some of which were sold under the Mardigal name. Entered the audio manufacturing business in 1985 when it purchased the assets and IP of Mark Levinson Audio Systems and restarted the manufacture of some of their best known products and a year later introduced the first Mardigal developed products under the Mark Levinson brand in the form of the Nº20 Reference Amplifier. While these were high end units the Nº20 and subsequent products took a very different design and production philosophy to the earlier Mark Levinson products, the original company manufactured minimalist hand made products that made no compromises toward ergonomics if it was felt that they impeded in any way on sound quality while the Mardigal designed products had convenience facilities and remote controls etc. and the company invested in mass production techniques. The trend towards convenience in use and production increased as time went by and by the mid 90's most Mark Levinson branded products bore no resemblance to their earlier counterparts except in name. Mardigal introduced the Proceed brand in 1989 with the introduction of the PCD CD player in order to provide a lower cost alternative to Mark Levinson branded products, the company also used the Proceed brand to introduce new technologies to the market before releasing them under the Mark Levinson moniker, for instance the first AV product from the company was the Proceed PAV home cinema amplifier in 1993 but soon thereafter we start to see home theatre amplifiers based around the technologies used in the Proceed products released under the ML brand. In order to expand it's operations the company got an investment from Harman International in 1993 and by 95 Harman bought all outstanding shares in the company. Mardigal's own brand survived in the Madrigal Imaging name which they used for video projectors that were designed and manufactured by Joe Kane Productions and Christie Digital Systems and introduced in the latter half of the 90's, further exanishion into the world of home theatre electronics came in 1996 when the company took over the Audio Access company, and in 1998 when they acquired the Revel loudspeaker manufacturer but that company was best known for their multichannel systems. In order to emphasise that the company was by now mostly an home theatre company rather than an audio one they started to use a new advertising slogan : "We define products for your ears, eyes, and mind." In 2000 the company dipped it's toes into the car audio market with the introduction of "Mark Levinson Premium Sound Systems" which were sold as an option with Lexus cars and a year later some of the more upmarket Lexus models featured a ML branded audio system as standard. A decision was made to drop the Proceed name in 2003 and integrate what was left of the product range into the Mark Levinson range in order to simplify their operations,
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Mark Corporation
Japanese company run by Mr. Imamura that was primarily a manufacturer of PA systems and turntables but in the west they are best known for their high end moving coil pickups that were in fact just a sideline product of the company. Note that in Europe their phonographic products were usually sold under the Goldbug trademark probably due to there being a British company with the same name, but Goldbug was originally a name for one of their pickups.
Mark Levinson Audio Systems
Founded in 1972 to manufacture a moving coil Head Amplifier and soon thereafter started to manufacture a range of amplifiers, like so many USA based high end audio companies of the day they copied the looks of professional audio products but otherwise the company was much unlike their counterparts with emphasis on no compromise minimalistic high end audio products at a time when most of their counterparts were busily introducing boxes with more switches than would usually be found on a spaceship control panel, this coupled with the simple fact that most esoteric audio companies in North America had a lifetime of less than 3 years meant that the company had by the late 70's became the best known high end company in the USA. In the early 80's the company widened their product range by introducing Japanese made high end phonographic products but MLAS was also at the same time behind some of the most outrageous audio products ever released, their tape recorder sticks to mind but that was a 2" 24 track Studer professional recorder that had it's heads replaced by specially designed 2 track 2" heads, OK it sounded rather good but it also cost several times more than even the most specialised synchronised recorders of the day. Unsurprisingly perhaps the company never had any real financial stability and finally went bankrupt on October 15, 1984 with the assets being bought by Mardigal in Jan 85. Note that while the company was popularly known as just Mark Levinson it often appeared in trade articles and catalogues listed by it's initials, or MLAS.
Marubeni
Humongus trading company based in Osaka in Japan and originally founded in 1858 as Chubei Itoh, in the 50's and into the 70's used their exporting know how to establish some of the then fledging Japanese manufacturers in the western markets, notably Sanyo but others as well. When the Japanese providers started to handle their own distribution arrangements in the mid 70's Marubeni was suddenly out of a lucrative market and in 1977 countered with it's own budget hi-fi brand called Benytone. As the rise of the Yen in the mid 70's meant that manufacturing low budget consumer products in Japan was not really commercially viable anymore so the company actually sourced their products from Korea, the end result being run of the mill budget audio products like portable stereos etc.., but also a line of rock bottom priced audio separates that represented amazing value at the time, however most of their products were too cheap to be interesting nowadays with the exception of a couple of their turntable models that were half decent and supported the playback of 78's. In central Europe the Benytone name is often spelled as Beniton for obvious linguistic reasons but the above variant is the correct spelling. As we understand it the company is no longer connected with the AV business in any way but as Marubeni has such wide financial interests we could be wrong there. Official homepage.
Mayware
Small British phono specialist that sold Japanese sourced tonearms, moving coil pickups under it's own name in addition to manufacturing accessories such as MC transformers, active in the late 70's and early 80's but disappears in the latter half of that decade. Based in Edgware in Middlesex.
McKenzie Acoustics
A long running English manufacturer of loudspeaker drivers, especially popular with PA and other sound reinforcement manufacturers. Their products seem to have disappears from the market in the latter half of the 90's and we cannot find a trace of them anywhere, a source told us that they had been a part of the Wharfedale group prior to that so it may be that some of their products survive in the Professional division of that company.
Melco
Originally a small Japanese manufacturer of ultra high end audio products run by Makato Maki, started in May 1975 and incorporated in 1978 when the company started manufacturing a high end turntable design, left the audio market for the more lucrative computer peripheral market in 1982 and is by now one of the bigger companies in that market, better known outside of Japan as Buffalo Technology (one of their subsidiaries actually). Official homepage.
Micro Acoustics
When Sonotone was sold to Astatic a couple of ex employers founded this company to make pickups, test gear and loudspeaker drive units. The Micro Acoustic Pickups were ceramics like those of Sonotone but were considered to be excellent at the time and so were their cutting styli. An ex Sonotone employee has a short page with info on the company and on their products but note that he places the time of death in 1984 but they put out a new variant of one of their cartridges in the late 80's so that cannot be correct.
Micro Seiki
A Japanese manufacturer of turntables, used to manufacture mid and high end turntables and electrostatic headphones of almost legendary quality in the seventies and eighties but turned to the manufacture of high end and reference class turntables in the 90's. Company ran into trouble in the late 90's and stopped making turntables and providing spares for their older products in 1999 with the exception of a high end variant of the 8000 turntable that was made to order well into 2001, the company still exists as a precision engineering workshop (much like competitors Avid Hi-Fi and SME ltd. funnily enough, but smaller) but no longer seems to be willing or able to supply turntable products.
Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co. (3M)
Originally founded in 1902 in Minnesota USA with the basic idea being to mine corundum and manufacture sandpaper and other abrasives out of it, sadly it turned out that the material that they were mining was actually anorthosite, however after financial injection from investors the company survived as a manufacturer of abrasive products but has never bothered much with mining since. After a couple of quiet decades the company started expanding aggressively by buying in technology to make improved products and to expand into markets were that technology could be utilised this meant the by the 1940's the company was the best know producer in the USA of abrasive and adhesive products and was one of the very few companies that actually managed to grow substantially during the depression, by that time the company was better known by the shortened 3M. Due to their expertise in manufacturing adhesive tape products the US Army hooked them up with the Brush Development Company in order to develop magnetic recording media and in conjunction with Brush they developed both a recording tape similar to the one described in the original Pfeiffer patents and designed to work with the round magnetic head that the Brush company developed in the early 40's, however 3M actually never produced the tape formulation since it had been given the IP that the US Army had retrieved from BASF and the company actually decided to wait until clones of the Magnetophon appeared and the Brush company was forced to turn to Shellmar in 1946 to manufacture blank magnetic media for the Brush Soundmirror and the Mail-A-Voice thus making Shellmar rather than 3M the first manufacturer of magnetic tape in the USA. 3M did however introduce magnetic tape in 1947 that they sold under the same Scotch brandname that they used for adhesive tape and introduced the worlds first magnetic video tape in conjunction with Ampex in 1954.
The 3M company always had some interest in getting into the hardware side of the business especially the dictation sector which they saw as one of the opportunities to widen the market for magnetic recording products, they were offered the Pierce Wire Recorder Corp. company in or around 1950 but declined and actually decided to develop their own magnetic dictation belt recorder called simply Scotch Dictation Belt but in the end never marketed it. However when their closest hardware collaborator Ampex decided to start manufacturing blank media 3M countered by buying the Revere company in 1960, this was an ideal match for the company since Revere manufactured not only tape recorders but also photographic and home movie equipment which were markets that 3M were entering at the same time. Initially the company continued to sell products derived from the Revere line up although in the mid 60's they phased out the Revere brand in favour of the more upmarket Wollensak brand, but a few recorders were sold branded with both names during the transition, in the latter half of the 60's the company went head to head with Ampex when they introduced professional recorders. The Wollensak division was closed in 1972, but manufacture of professional audio and video recorders continued until 1984. In 1995 the company decided to restructure all it's media manufacturing into a separate public company which is called Imation. Official homepage.
MXR
USA based mauafcturer of professional and semi-professional products for the recording and music industries, went bankrupt in 1984 or thereabouts.
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