Sparkomatic (Car audio & accessories) See --> Altec Lansing

Speakerlabs
Small loudspeaker manufacturer based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada that made custom loudspeakers for the professional audio industry in addition to a few serially produced models that where intended for mobile DJ's and musicans. Is often confused with Speakerlab and there appears to be a new USA based company starting up that shares the Speakerlabs name but is no relation.

Speakers Delight
A company run by Stephan Dasbach and based in Dinslaken, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. Primarily a dealer in high end audio products and also acted as a local distributor for East Sound and Phase Style Ltd. but had a line of mid/high end speakers sold under their own name. Initially their products were called the "Delight Line" featuring a standmount/bookshelf model called the "Delight 1", a floorstander called "Delight 2" and a floorstander with a D'Appolito configuration called "Delight 3", these all featured ribbon tweeters and aluminium cone woofers. A cheaper floor standing model called MPX was introduced in 2003 that had a conventional tweeter and a price point below the "Delight line".

Speakers Delight introduced the "Referenz line" in 2004 but these were 2 higher end models based on the Delight 3, namely the "Kleine Referenz" that was very similar to the D3 and the more expensive "Referenz" that was a further development of the concept with a 5 way D'Appolito configuration (The D3 and Kleine-R had a more conventional 3 way one), doing a search on the second hand market is is either of those 2 you are likely too find, I have not been able to find any examples of the Delight or MPX. By 2006 the company dropped all models in their lineup except the larger "Refernz" and concentrated on selling models by other manufacturers.

Belived to have started out in the late 90's and we have not heard from SD since 2008 and Hr. Dasbach offered what appeared to be the remains of his stock for sale on German Hi-Fi sites in early 2010..

Speciality Web Marketing Inc.
Company founded by Fred Whitlock in 2000 and based in South Bend, Indiana, USA and took over the operation of a few web stores that Mr Whitlock had been running since 1997. Most of the shops were oriented towards the hunting community but the owner was a noted audiophile and classical music buff, for a time in fact a well known personality on the Usenet audio forums, so predictably enough, in 1998 he opened up an high end audio hardware on-line retailer under the AudioNow! name.

While Mr Whitlock's other retail operations thrived the AudioNow store never really took off so in the summer of 2001 he decided to add to its product line by selling his own hand made mid/high end audio interconnects and speaker cables from the site under the AudioNow! Brand. These were fairly keenly priced for what they were but did not sell in any great quantities and in the end the store was closed down in the summer of 2002. The company itself is still around though and still retailing under a number of domains.
Homepage: http://www.knifeoutlet.com

Spectra Dynamics Ltd.
A company founded in 1993, in Liverpool, England by Michael Stuart Mason but it took over a moulding business that he had been running as a sole trader since 1991. The company manufactured mechanical de-couplers and acoustic absorbers made out of Polynorbornene rubber under the Deflex brand. Their acoustic panels were in particular unusual, they were not based on traditional acoustic principles but rather thin sheets of PnR moulded into a surface modelled after the optical diffusers used in Fresnel lenses, an idea that gained Mr Mason and his partner John Morris a patent in 1996 (GB2277008, now in the Public Domain since it was not renewed in 2006).

In addition to being much thinner than most acoustic panels the Deflex panels were fairly small as far as such go, the biggest size available was only 340 x 340 mm, presumably because either because the company had difficulty in easily moulding anything bigger or simply they could not get any PnR is bigger sheet sizes. This made the Deflex panels less suitable for the traditional use of covering walls, or large portions of them in diffuser and/or absorption panels, but the idea was that you would actually use only one or two panels behind acoustically difficult apparatus.

Placing rubber mats on the wall is mostly OK in professional situations but for home use ungainly black rubber slab on your wall is not very WAF friendly. But the company found a novel market for their diffusers in the loudspeaker manufacturing sector, by replacing the acoustic foam/wool that is traditionally used to dampen speaker cabinets with 2 or more Deflex panels (one behind each driver), speaker manufacturers could get the advantages of an open box while still getting most of the acoustic dampening that they traditionally got from fillers, this did in particular work well in acoustically suspended loudspeakers.

Throughout the 90's the company added to the product line with more specialised products made out of PnR, such as gaskets for loudspeaker drivers that de-coupled them from the baffle and cones that utilises both traditional metal cones and rubber as a decoupling agent. Around 1999 the company started to look outside the audio business for expansion and started making bushes for the automotive aftermarket, primarily for classic cars, and in 2000 announced that it would introduce a line of audio electronic products that were actually never a shipping product. In 2006 the company was insolvent and had been delisted by 2008, later that year the Mr Mason and his sons however founded Deflex Polyurethane Ltd. that continued the manufacture of most of the Spectra Dynamics products.

Spectral See --> GTRC Services (USA - Multimeda products and cables - 00's)

Spinney
Brandname used by UK retail chain Littlewoods for budget brown goods in the 60's and 70's.

Sprint See --> Recoton (Assecories and land line phones only 1998 to 2003)

S. P. Technology Loudspeakers Inc.
Company formed in 2003 and based in La Porte, Indiana, USA. Initial founders included the husband and wife team of Michael Duane & Peggy Sue Patterson, Robert Allen Smith (ex-Crown Audio, better known in the audio business as "Bob Smith") and members of the Smith family, notably the Patterson's had in the 90's run a company known as S. P. Technology but it is not known if that was in any way connected to the audio business or if it had any direct connection to this company.

The company started out by making a standmount/large bookshelf type speaker called Timepiece 2.0, note that there was no Timepiece 1.0 from the company, it refers to an DIY product from Mr Smith, it was soon thereafter joined by a larger standmounter called Continuum A. D. that is basically A Timepiece 2.0 in a D'Appolito configuration and the company added loudspeakers stands especially developed for their products called "Golden Ratio" to the line-up. The 2 speakers in general got excellent reviews on audio related websites and forums, but never managed to get their products reviewed in the established hi-fi press.

In addition to the home market the company targeted their speakers towards the professional audio market and in fact referred to most of their products as monitors, but that is a bad habit that some speaker manufacturers seem not to be able to shake. The reception in the pro-audio world was lukewarm at best, good reviews appeared but as with the hi-fi market, only on on-line with the more serious publications ignoring the company's products altogether. It should be taken into account that over 95% of the current use of monitors is either nearfield or full size monitors and the S. P. Technology products were not really suitable for either use, the only sector of the recording industry that we see mid-field monitors used these days are in mastering rooms and mastering engineers usually not happy with two way systems like the S. P. products simply because multi driver configurations allow for a better overall tonal balance and less severe crossover jumps, which is vital in that application.

In the latter half of 2005 and early 2006 the company announced a number of new models including Mk II of the Continuum A.D., a model of that speaker with an integral stand effectively making it a tower speaker that they called Continuum 2.5 and sometimes added Mk II to the model designation even though as with the Timepiece there was no Mk I model from the company. Another new model based on the Continuum was the Revelation MR-1, as with the 2.5 the top half is basically a Continuum A. D. Mk II while in this case rather than just a stand the lower half is actually a transmission line enclosure, unusually enough the crossovers were external and the speaker was actually shipped as 2 separate units which you assembled into one once you got it home. The Timepiece also got an upgrade to version 2.1 and a new model that is for all intents and purposes a cheaper variant of the Timepiece in a simpler baffle and featuring cheaper drivers was introduced at the same time and is called Essence AV-1.

This coincided with the start of some serious financial problems for the company, the main investor in S. P. Technology decided in the fall of 2005 that he would not be putting any more funds into the operation which left the company dependent solely on sales income at a time when it was expecting a cash injection and in a similar timeframe the company had some issues with personnel that only exacerbated the problem. As cash flow from the internet based sales model the company was following could be erratic, S.P. Technology started to work with other companies and for instance company designed the S8 and S9 speakers for NuForce and delivered the Essence AV-1 in an unfinished form to Response Audio who made some mild modifications to it and sold it as the Musica Bella SP/AV-1.

The initial marketing strategy for the company was interesting, it appeared to rely mostly on the internet rather than advertising or other forms of publicity, they had long descriptions of their products on their homepage full of technical buzzwords, but also separately provided technical background information and explanations of the terms used in some detail on their site, in addition the company sponsored a forum on Audiocircle.com where the main designer of the speakers was approachable, and usually answered questions in a timely manner. Actually explaining the buzzwords and technical terms that you use is laudable in general, but furthermore this approach to information distribution appeared to hit the sweet spot for the company in some ways. Even though the design of the pages left something to be desired and some of the explanations were a bit myopic it was just the right amount of information get the those interested in their speakers hooked and enough info on the homepage to keep the company from having to repeatedly answer the same inane questions on the forum as often happens when you make claims about your products without filling in the blanks, also it allows the company to control the definition of the terms to a certain degree which is always beneficial from a marketing standpoint. As with any hi-fi manufacturer some of the text was a bit inane, the references to god and "natural law" where a bit too frequent, when you have to make underlined references to "natural law" when explaining why your speaker stands are the size they are, you are dangerously close to being comical, at the least we are not aware of any speaker stand manufacturer that make products that defy the laws of physics, not currently anyway.

After the main investor withdrew in 2005 the company was for all intents and purposes run by Mr Smith and he replaced the original homepage with a new one that was more professional looking but annoyingly enough had no information on the newer models that the company had introduced post 2004, except for a limited amount of specifications and by 2007 all info apart from specifications and prices had been removed from their homepage . At the same time supplies of the S. P. Technology speakers became erratic and although the company continued to introduce new models including subwoofers, but that class of devices had not been offered by the company before, however we have not been able to find any of these post 2005 models on the second hand marketplace apart from Mk III versions of earlier speakers like the Timepiece and Revelation so they appear to have been made in very limited quantities.

The company announced in November of 2008 that all production and staffing problems had been solved and that waiting lists for their products would be cleared by Christmas of the same year, however that did not happen and S. P. Technology Loudspeakers stopped operating at the beginning of 2009 and by early summer Mr Smith started manufacturing the loudspeaker lines he had designed for the company himself under the Aether Audio brand and the company was dissolved in 2010.

Resources: -- Aether Audio/S. P. Technology discussion board at audiocircle.com.

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