Xhadow Corp.
Company founded in 2004 by Chris Sommovigo of The Signals Collection and Stuart Marcus of Sound Connections and was based at the latter company's headquarters in Lutz, Florida, USA. The company started marketing a new design of high end cinch and XLR connectors apparently designed by Mr Sommovigo and based on the connectors he had designed for the Illuminati cables a decade earlier and where manufactured by Sound Connections. These generated quite a bit of interest in the audiophile community and appeared to sell fairly well considering the high price. The partnership faltered in 2009 and the company was dissolved in 2010, Sound Connections now market very similar connectors under their Vampire Wire brand while the Xhadow brand is controlled by The Signal Collection.

XIO Digital Limited
Company based in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, UK that made media servers as an OEM and sold high end sound cards under the Cantatis brand. Originally founded in 2003 by Andrew Clifford (ex-Pace and Psion) and at first announced that it would sell media servers to the public, however it appears that never happened and media server sales, if any, were according to the company in 2009 purely on a OEM basis. Company was taken into liquidation in the summer of 2011 and the sales of the sound cards was taken over by Cantatis..

XLO Electric
Cable and interconnect manufacturer based in Rancho Cucomonga, California, United States that was originally founded by Roger Skoff in 1991. The XLO cables where for a time the favorites of USA audio reviewers in particular the Reference series but the company folded and the brandname was sold to Ultralink Cables in 2002 and XLO's founder was working for that company last time we heard.

X SRE (Accessories) See --> Path Ltd. (ca. 2000 to 2003)

Yakov Aronov Audio Lab Inc.
Company founded in 1991 by Russian Yakov Aronov and his son Michael and was based in Los Angeles, California, USA, but the father and son team had been running a hi-fi repair store in the area since the 1980’s. Introduced an integrated valve amplifier under the Aronov Audio brand later that year and had by the mid-90’s a range of amplifiers derived from the original design including a pre-amp and a stereo and mono power amps.

The company’s products generated quite a bit of interest initially since they represented one of the earliest examples of the 50’s valve amp revival in the USA, but most makers of such amplification at the time where doing quite advanced and often considerably expensive designs while the basic design of the Aronov products is largely similar to a classic Dynaco which tickled the fancy of the forever nostalgic American market. Early models are known to have slightly underpowered supply’s and a slight tendency to hum from time to time. Mr Aronov more or less folded the company in 1998 although there was some minor activity until approx. 2001 but returned to the business in 2011 trading as Aronov Audio and he will handle repairs and modifications to older YAAL products.

Resources: -- A review of the LS-9100 monoblocks by Soundstage

Yamamura Churchill Limited
British company founded in 1994 by Robert William Charles Spencer Churchill and was based in Netherhampton, Salisbury in Wiltshire, please note that the gentleman in question is better known as simply Robert Spencer Churchill and that some write his last two names a hyphen between them. The company manufactured the designs by Japanese musician Bé Yamamura but Mr Churchill met Yamamura-san by chance in Italy where he had designed a line of cables for A.R.T., the first products from the company were the ART Millenium cables re-branded as YC Millenium but a line of horn loudspeakers soon followed, and then a line of electronics that included amps, CD players, power conditioners, turntables and loudspeakers, all notably minimalistic designs that often used custom made components such as Bakelite resistors.

The company generated a lot of interest in its home country since it both produced equipment that was unusually exotic in comparison to their British counterparts but also quite expensive, for instance the Yamamura Churchill Dionisio 32 horn loudspeakers was made out of solid copper, and stands at 2.3 metres tall and 1.4 m wide, you know how some loudspeaker manufacturers sometimes boast about their products being able to "fill a room", well a pair of Dionisio 32's did just that, in the literal sense, and to give you an idea of the prices, the little brother of the 32 was the Yamamura Churchill Dionisio 27 which had a retail price of 25 thousand UK pounds, excluding VAT. All the amplifiers the company made were unearthed, clad in copper skin and their later models were solid state current source devices, the designer maintained that at the impedance range the Yamamura Churchill horn loudspeakers worked at the current source topology offered better sound and efficiency. Other oddball products included a natural oil that you used to treat the surfaces of CD discs with, sounds odd but the people who bought the Q-151 oil in general raved about it.

Things went quiet in 1999 and the company appears dormant by 2001, went bankrupt in 2003 and was disolved by 2004. We have minimal information on the Yamamura - Churchill Requiem Turntable archived but note also that the cables the company sold were actually made by A.R.T. and are still supplied by that company, for more info on them see A. R. T. Millenium Cables. French company MadoTec bought the remains of the stock of the company when it was closed down and they still have a few products available when this was written in 2013, including amplifiers , cables and switches plus sundry accessories, although stocks were running low. Go to the MadoTec homepage and download a price list from by clicking on the Euro symbol at the bottom, the page is in French, the price list is in English.

Resources: -- Background info on the designs of Bé Yamamura in an article by Positive Feedback Online -- An old review of the Q-151 oil treatment -- An article on the products of Yamamura Churchill by British Newspaper "The Guardian".

Yamamura Systems S.R.L.
Company founded around 1990 by Bé Yamamura and based in San Pietro in Cariano, in the province of Verona, Italy although it appears to have later been based in Arezzo in central Italy. Initially continued the manufacture of products that that Yamamura-san had been selling in the UK including valve amplifiers and synthetic carbon based accessories but started the development of horn loudspeakers, transistorised amplifiers and CD players although these hardware products were either sold in very limited numbers under the Yamamura Systems name or not at all but rather ended up being made in the UK by Yamamura Churchill while YS concentrated on the accessories and cable products

Best known for their cable product which were developments of the cables that Yamamura-san had been selling in the UK but now instead of being just heat treated versions of high quality Japanese OEM wires they now unusually enough used cotton as the dielectric, something that we had not seen on commercial cables for a few decades. These and the other accessories sold by the company were also sold under the A.R.T. and aforementioned Yamamura Churchill names. The company also for a time sold some component products that had been manufactured especially for them such as wire wound resistors, Tamura transformers for use in valve amplifier outputs and switched variable resistors. Closed down in 1998 when Yamamura-san moved to the USA and founded Yamamura Systems (US) Inc. (see below).

Yamamura Systems (US) Inc.
Company founded in 1999 by Bé Yamamura and based in Lecanto, Florida, USA. The company continued making and selling the same cables and accessories as its predecessor Yamamura Systems S.R.L. had done in Italy but in addition handled the North American distribution of a number of exotic Japanese hi-fi brands such as RS-Labs. Closed down in 2002 when Yamamura-san was forced to move to Japan for personal reasons.

Youxing
Chinese microphone manufacturer, proper name was Enping Youxing one of many manufacturers that sprang up in latter half of the 90's in or around the city of Enping, in the Chinese province of Guangdong (the local equiv. of Silicon Valley), also operated using the Yayin trademark, disappeared from view in early 2003 and all attempts to contact them have been unsuccessful.

Yuantian
Professional audio and lighting products company founded in 1992 in the Guang Zhou district of Guangdong province, China, and incorporated a year later. Sold products such as mixers, amplifiers, microphones and other electronics under the KOYA Sound brand and when exporting used variations of its trade name and location for a company name, “Guangzhou Koya Sound Co. Ltd.” being the most common but “Koya Guangzhou Sound Co, Ltd” and others were also seen. The Koya Sound brand was mostly used locally and exports were mainly in the form of OEM and ODM deals. The company merged with Liangyin and the trading company Jin Qian Li to form Guang Zhou HuiYing Electronics in 2002.

Yu-min (Earphones & iPhone/iPod accessories) See --> Shenzhen Yu-min Electronic Technology

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