Giant-Killer Cables See --> Alister Staniland (ca. 2011)

Glass Audio Tube Engineering Ltd. (GATE)
A manufacturer of valve amplification based in Chelmsford, Essex, England. Believed to have been a daughter company of the Chelmer Valve company that specialises in selling valve components. Active in the latter half of the 1990's and not heard from since 2001/2.

G. L. Products See --> Grant Lumley

Goldbug See --> Mark Corp.

Golden Tube, Golden Audio, Golden Theatre See --> Solo Electronics

Goodmans Loudspeakers Limited
Founded in 1991 when the Tannoy Goodmans Industries Plc. group decided to make the OEM part of their business a separate entity and to withdraw the use of the Goodmans trademark from the consumer sector (which also resulted in the consumer trademark rights being sold or licensed to Alba). The GLL company was based in Havant in Hampshire, UK and initially made a fairly generic range of loudspeaker drivers with focus on supplying the then burgeoning TV market (the UK was for a time in the 80's and 90's one of the largest manufacturer of TV's in the world due to a number of Asian companies that opened up assembly lines there in order to gain a manufacturing base inside the EU) but during the 90's increasingly focused on the lucrative automotive loudspeaker sector and in the latter half of the 90's the company was one of the main supplier of drivers to General Motors Europe, Volkswagen, PSA (Peugeot & Citroen), BMW and Honda, the drivers from the company being ideally suited for this purpose being made almost entirely out of synthetic materials. In order to refocus on the auto market and gain a lower cost manufacturing base the company leased the manufacturing plants of Videoton in Hungary in 1999 and formed a strategic alliance with the Malaysian company Foremost Audio the year after and in order to be able to supply the South American sector they formed an alliance with the Brazilian company Thomas KL which was prior to that primarily a supplier of after-market solutions, they had also increased the portion of bought in Asian parts from companies such as Sound Source to drive costs down.

GLL had been quite profitable during the 1990's unlike some other parts of the TGI group but in 2001 the competition from cheap Chinese imports suddenly and quite dramatically turned the fortunes of the company around and it posted it's first yearly loss, TGI was acquired by the Danish company TC Group in 2002 and they decided to actually take the company forward in a similar fashion to the rest of the group with emphasis on using high tech solutions and image, plans were indeed made for OEM DSP based amplifier solutions partly based on technology from the TC Group which would have been the company's first foray into the auto electronics market. There was also a notable image change with a new logo that emphasised that the company was by now a primarily a car audio manufacturer and the reintroduction of the Goodmans name but the company had been using the GLL brand prior to that with it's logo that depicted a home hi-fi loudspeaker. In 2002 GLL also opened a new manufacturing plant in Monterrey in Mexico and a technical centre in Detroit, Michigan, USA with a view to supplying the North American car manufacturers (although I gather that in the end the Mexican plant only supplied VW Mexico). The new strategy was to a degree a success with the company becoming the favoured supplier to a number of car manufacturers that recognised their products as technically superior and in addition to their traditional European customers the company had major design wins in the USA, but it was also a double edged sword since GLL had to match or at the least be fairly close in price to their competitors and at this time the market was bombarded with cheap Chinese speakers, so GLL in effect had to supply a technically more advanced and more expensive solution on the same price resulting in further and growing losses, additionally it had been costly to move manufacturing outside of the UK, more so than originally thought and with less benefits than expected and to add insult to injury it also proved more expensive to shut down production in the UK than was expected, just the employee termination liabilities would come to more than 1,4 million £. As the prospects for the company going into the black in the near future being bleak the TC Group decided to exit the car audio market altogether and to sell GLL, attempts to sell it as a going concern failed so it went into administration on the 10^th of March 2004.

Grace See --> Shinagawa Musen Co.

G. R. Acoustics
Tiny high end loudspeaker manufacturer and loudspeaker parts dealer based in Edson in Alberta, Canada. Run by and named after Gregory Roth, active in the latter half of the 90's, not to be confused with USA based GR Research which is active in the exact same business sector.

Grant Amplifiers Ltd
Founded in 1983, in Hampshire, UK by Roy N. Grant following the acrimonious breakup of Grant Lumley. The company made updated versions of the amplifiers Grant had designed for Grant Lumley but unlike the earlier Grant Lumley designs that were usually point to point wired they partly utilised PCB's and were in general more modern in design. The company and its products were never marketed well and may have been underfinanced, the Grant products were for instance better known in Canada than they were in their UK home market. Like the GL products before them all, all amplifiers were push-pull designs with some claiming that the early products sound better than the latter, but that may simply be due to the use of high-vacuum Telefunken valves in early models that had become unavailable in production quantities by the late 80’s, interestingly his previous company Grant-Lumley made a virtue out of using only British valves and this use of better components may explain why the Grant amps were deemed by some to sound better than the G L amps. Grant Amplifiers also made an unusual (for the time) valve moving coil head amp but it is very rare with only a few examples being built, the company appears to go out of business in the early 90’s although it is difficult to nail it down exactly.

Grant Lumley Electronics Limited
Company run by Roy N. Grant and Ray Lumley and founded in the UK in the 70’s, the actual date and location unknown at this point in time but believed to have been based somewhere in Hampshire. Early models have the “Grant Laumley Audio” name printed on them and look like DIY projects while later model have just “Grant-Lumley” and look quite professional. The company is mostly interesting since it was probably the first example of the English valve renaissance that bloomed in the late 80’s and early 90’s, the actual products are a bit more problematic, early products, in particular the pre-amplifiers, both control amps and phonographic pre-amps where ravaged by those that tested them at the time of introduction with both noise and microphony problems that made them seem archaic next to the transistorised examples of the age, the power amps fearing somewhat better.

Later product showed marked improvements though and by 1980 the company had moved upmarket, was getting good and even great reviews for their power amplifiers and their products were being distributed as far away as Japan and Singapore. The company changed its name to Grant Lumley Audio (Products) Limited The power amps from the company all had for the time unusually large output transformers, the GL-100 model for instance was almost 34 kilograms on its own, this made them for a time popular amongst owners of Apogee loudspeakers since it meant they could handle difficult loads and the Apogees ribbon speakers that at 2 ohms and even less were notoriously hard to drive. The company split effectively up in 1982 when the 2 owners could not agree on the future direction of the company with amplifier designer Grant wanting to make mid/high end products and more business oriented Lumley wanted to spend more money on the casework and presentation and move upmarket in price to take on the then emerging high/ultra high end markets. This ended in Grant leaving to open Grant Amplifiers the year after while Lumley changed the name of the company to G. L. Products in August 1983. After the split-up both companies continued making basically the same designs, G L Product initially branding them with variations of the Ray Lumley name but later as just Lumley, but the price difference was a something of a revelation, with the admittedly better looking Lumley’s costing almost 3 times as much as the ones from Grant. The company went out of business in 1993 but Ray Lumley came back almost immediately with Reference International

Resources : Pics and specifications of the GL-50A and GL-100A - Both ca. 1980, courtesy of audio-database.com.

Gray Research & Development Co.
Company based in Hartford, USA that supplied broadcast audio and video equipment such as transcription turntables and colour monitors (for the experimental colour TV transmissions of the 50's), although they also made tonearms for the consumer market in the late fifties and early 60's and were quite successful in the dictation market in the 50's with the Audiograph. Earliest products we have seen from the company date from the 40's and the latest products appear to have been made in the late 60's or early 70's.

Great American Sound Co. (GAS)
Company based in Chatsworth, California, USA and founded by Adam Zareba, James Bongiorno (formerly of SAE), Andrew Hefley, Bob Hefley and Ed Miller in 1974, the company was founded around the Ampzilla project, a high power amplifier that Bongiorno designed and was published as Popular Electronics project, the sales of kit's of this design was the basis of the company but it was soon replaced by the designs that were only available as a fully built units. Bongiorno left the company in 77 to found Sumo but he is still involved in making amplifiers based around the same basic design with a company called Spread Spectrum Technologies. The Gasworks Industrial company specialises in repairing and upgrading products from the company and have more information on their pages. Company went bankrupt in 1982, last CEO of the company was Bob Hefley but it appears that Andy Hefley bought the name and he was trading using this brand selling inexpensive electronic kits in the mid 90's, more recently he has been designing high end amplifiers for Monarchy Audio. You can read about the Godzilla amp that the company designed for the Grateful Dead here.

Greenwave Audio
Company based in Budapest in Hungary, first heard from in the latter half of the 90's as a manufacturer of valve amplification but introduced a line of horn loaded loudspeakers in 2000 and later showed a loudspeaker with a "magnet to magnet" set-up not unlike the old Sinus speakers, disappeared from our view in 2002, printed here is the last known address.
Greenwave Audio Ltd., Köhalomu 4, Budapest, H-1118 Hungary.
Phone : +361 319 7141 or 319 3463. Fax : +361 319 5200.

Grigsby-Grunrow Co.
A radio manufacturer based in Chicago, Illinois in USA and founded originally in 1921 by financier Bertram James Grigsby and William Carl Grunow to manufacture aftermarket automobile sun-visors. Shortly thereafter started to manufacture horns for radios using the same manufacturing techniques as they used to make the sun-visors and when that venture proved successful Grigsby-Grunrow entered the radio aftermarket sector with a line of products including battery eliminators.

This eventually lead the company to introduce their own line of radio receivers that they sold under the Majestic brandname and despite being in the early years of the depression the company was very successful in that market and by 1930 GG was the USA's biggest manufacturer of radios, this was in no small part due to the perception that the company's products were some of the best sounding and loudest out there.

GG was a publicly traded company and was listed on the Chicago exchange and was for a while the darling of the speculators and small investors, the value of their stock went from 25 USD to 1100 USD and was split twice. With trouble looming on the horizon in the radio market in the form of the monoply that RCA was gaining by buying up all outstanding patents the company decided to expand into the white goods market in 1930 by establishing a new company called Majestic Household Utilities was incorporated to manufacture the Grigsby-Grunow mechanical refrigerators and freezers, and later vacuum cleaners & washing machines.

The name of that company is interesting since it meant that a company called Grigsby-Grunrow sold products under the Majestic brand while a company called Majestic sold products under the Grigsby-Grunrow brand, what was likely happening was that they were cashing in on the GG name but it had become better known at the time than Majestic due to the spectacular stock performance.

Went bankrupt in 1935 or thereabouts, but unusually enough the company was technically solvent at the time of the bankruptcy proceedings, what happened was a cash flow problem but the whole company was liquidated due to an loan of only 70 thousand USD, this created a stir at the time since a number of investors felt that they had been robbed in an organised way and the furore surrounding the issue eventually lead to a profound change in USA bankruptcy law. General Household Utilities that bought the white goods division itself appears to have gone bankrupt in 1937.

Grimes Radio Corporation See --> Electrohome

G. R. Lawson Ltd. See --> Lawson & Parsons

Groove Tube (Record cleaning products) See --> Artie Lewis Enterprises Inc.

G & S: Speakers
USA based loudspeaker manufacturer originally founded in 1968. Manufactured and sold products under the Quadraflex name. Trademark was taken over by CBS in 1973 but it is not clear to the author if the company was taken over or if G & S went out of business and CBS just bought the name.

Guangzhou Koya Sound See --> Yuantian

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