BRAWA Artur Braun Modellspielwarenfabrik GmbH + Co.
German company that is primarily a manufacturer of toy trainsets, and well known as such. They do however own a number of companies in or around the AV business including Braunkabel, Eagle Cable and In-Akustik.
Homepage: http://www.brawa.de

D+M Group
The company that owns Allen & Heath, Boston Acoustics, Calrec, Denon, Marantz and Premium Sound Solutions. Created in March 2002 by the merger of aforementioned Denon and Marantz companies with additional finance from USA based venture capitalists and then known as D&M Holdings Inc., with headquarters in New Jersey in USA but with a strong Japanese presence on the board and is traded on the Tokyo stock exchange.

What made this merger slightly unusual and the reason why the companies are listed separately is that they decided to keep the sales, R&D and management of the companies mostly separate but to rationalise and merge on the manufacturing and logistic side of things. The company bought McIntosh from Clarion in March 2003 and at a slightly earlier time invested in Mediabolic but that company was run separately as well.

The 2 founding companies have a long history of participating in the professional audio market, Denon was for a long time one of the biggest Asian supplier of broadcast audio products and But the increased success of Denon and Marantz in particular in the professional audio sector meant a re-focusing of the company towards the professional market, and in 2007 the company purchased the broadcast console specialist Calrec and divested of its Mediabolic shares to Macrovision.
Homepage: http://www.dmglobal.com

Grande Holdings
Hong Kong based consumer electronics conglomerate, has production facilities all over Asia where it manufactures consumer products including hi-fi product under the Sansui and Akai Electric Co. brands in addition to operating as an OEM. Also owns the Nakamichi company but that is run independently.

JVC Kenwood
Japanese holdings company formed in 2008 but a year earlier the Kenwood and JVC companies had agreed on combining the manufacture and R&D efforts in the car and home audio/AV fields for cost reasons. The cooperation went well enough for the 2 companies gradually increase their collaboration and finally merge in October 2011. The 2 companies marketing and distribution channels are run independently though.
Homepage: http://www.jvckenwood.co.jp
JVC Kenwood , 2967-3, Ishikawa-machi, Hachioji-shi, Tokyo, 192-8525, Japan.

Lyngdorf Finans A/S
Danish holdings company that has interest in companies such as SL Audio and is owned by Peter Lyngdorf, the founder and principal owner of Audionord. The company was founded in 1998 and then traded as TacT A/S, it was an outgrowth of product development in regards to digital room correction and Class D amplifiers done by companies then owned by AudioNord such as NAD and Snell Acoustics.

The digital amplification in the NAD products had been developed by a Danish company called Toccata Technology ApS (Now Texas Instuments Denmark) and while the amps did not sell in any great numbers they generated quite a bit of interest and it was decided to try to make an updated power amplifier version that would be in a more upmarket category and alongside it offer a combination of a pre-amplifier and a room correction device developed in conjunction with USA based company BNK Electronics, but instead of licensing the technology from BNK like they had done in regards to the Snell system they decided to forge a partnership whereby BNK would form a new company in the USA that became TacT Inc., it would make the preamps/room correction devices, while a new company in Denmark would supply the power amplifiers, both companies would share the TacT trademark and they would in turn distribute each others products in North America and Europe respectively.

The partnership worked great initially, both companies released their products to generally excellent reviews and healthy sales but in 2002 some cracks started to appear in the relationship, a number of critical bugs were found in the software of the pre-amps that TacT Inc. was selling and while they did provide a software update to LF, they did not distribute it to end users (and in the end did not place it on their homepage until 2006). This left the Danish company providing support for a device they did not make and generated only distribution income for them in Northern Europe and this lead to some friction alongside the general feeling of a lack of customer support in general by the American concern, in the end the partnership agreement was terminated in 2003 by TacT Inc who at the same time announced they would be starting to manufacture their own Class D power amplifiers.

This created a number of problems since there does not appear have been a proper termination clause in the partnership agreement and coincided with a huge marketing push by Lyngdorf who where in the process of introducing their own loudspeaker products, both companies continued to manufacture and sell products but the USA company had the trademark rights in its home country which was at the time the largest market for TacT branded products while Lyngdorf Finans owned the rights in the rest of the world. This lead TacT Inc. to announce they would be using the "BOZ" brand from now on but in early 2005 LF decided that the TacT brand had suffered too much and they simply vacated the trademark and started selling their products under the Lyngdorf name and alongside the name change introduced their own room corrections systems and source components.

The brand change turned out to have been a excellent decision even though it meant that the company had to start their brand marketing anew, but more recent events concerning TacT Inc.'s customer service, or lack of it, have tainted that brand irreversibly. Lyngdorf Finans entered an agreement with Steinway Musical Instruments in 2006 to develop and sell high end audio systems under the Steinway brand, and in the wake of that agreement a new company known as SL Audio was formed in 2007 that took over the manufacture of Lyngdorf and Steinway branded products, the Lyngdorf Finans operation is still active but purely as a holdings company.

Marin Audio Technology
A separate IP holdings company that owns all the rights to the software Berkley Integrated Audio Software (BIAS) sold, like BIAS the company is owned by Steve Berkley.
Homepage: http://marinaudiotech.com
Marin Audio Technology, 95 Convent Ct.,San Rafael, CA 94901-1333, USA.
Tel: +1 415 320 2181. Fax: +1 707 782 1874..

Music Group
Company based in the Philippines that owns a number of pro-audio companies. Formed out of the Behringer Holdings Co. also based in the Philippines, that took over the back office functions of the Behringer company from China/Macau and Germany a few years back. In addition to owning the the Behringer/Bugera operation it also owns British companies Midas/Klark Teknik and Turbosound.
Homepage: http://www.music-group.com
Music Group Macao Commercial Offshore Limited (Philippines) ROHQ, 11th Floor, Trafalgar Plaza, 105 H.V. Dela Costa Street, Makati 1227, Manila, Philippinles.

Smartwares
Dutch holdings company that owns a number of trading companies, all with the same basic business model of buying and distributing low budget Asian consumer products using both their own brand names and licensed brands. Four of their companies operate in the consumer electronics fields at the least to a degree, namely Elofer, Roos Electronics, Tevea and Tristar.
Homepage: http://www.smartwares.nl
Smartwares, Innovatie 1, 6921 RN Duiven, Holland.
Tel: +31 (26) 319 44 44. E-Mail: info :at: smartwares.nl.

Steinway Musical Instruments
USA based holdings company, founded in 1993 as Selmer Industries when investment bank Kirkland Messina bought the bankrupt assets of Selmer USA in a leveraged buy out. (LBO = they did not pay for it but got loans in the company's name for USD 95 M.), note that Selmer USA was actually the old Vincent Bach company renamed, (the French Selmer company technically owns the Selmer branding rights). Selmer Industries purchased Steinway & Sons in 1995, also via an LBO and renamed itself to Steinway MI shortly thereafter since Steinway was considered to be a stronger brand.

The company was made public in 1996 to raise money as the heavy LBO debts were in danger of dragging the company down. After a successful public offering SMI, now flush with cash, bought a number of other MI manufacturers, notably Swedish holdings company UMI in 2000, and in 2002 merged the assets of Selmer and the assets it bought from UMI into a new company called Conn-Selmer. In 2006 the company entered an agreement with Danish company Lyngdorf Finans A/S to manufacture high end audio products to be sold under the Steinway and Sons brand, in 2007 a new company called SL Audio was formed in Denmark that actually makes the hi-fi products as "Steinway Lyngdorf". SMI also owns classical music retailer ArkivMusic.com and with it the Listen magazine.

After the flotation in 2006 South Korean piano manufacturer Samick slowly built up a large stake in the company and was by 2011 its biggest shareholder, with other large owners including aforementioned Kirkland Messina and a number of institutional USA inventors. In August 2013 the company was taken private again when hedge fund Paulson & Co. bought the operation for 512 million USD after a bidding war with another hedge fund.
Homepage: http://www.steinwaymusical.com

TC Group International
Danish holding, sales and logistics company set up by TC Electronic in 2010 to gather into one organisation all the sales and distribution activities of the companies they are involved in while still keeping the design and manufacture independent. In addition to their own products and brands such as TC Helicon they own a few other companies in the pro-audio field such as Tannoy and LAB Gruppen and with them other brands such as Lake and White Acoustics, on top of that TC has for more than a decade handled the worldwide distribution of Dynaudio Acoustics and has added the European distribution of Baltic Latvian Universal Electronics (BLUE). The new company has funnily enough inherited the initials of the old Tannoy-Goodmans group (TGI) and is therefore usually shortened to TCGI to avoid confusion.
Homepage: http://www.tcgroup-international.com
TC Group International , Sindalsvej 34, DK-8240  Risskov, Denmark.
Tel: +45 8742 7000. Fax: +45 8742 7010. E-Mail: info /at\ tcgroup-international.com
TC Group International UK, Rosehall Industrial Estate, Coatbridge, ML5 4TF Lanarkshire, Scotland.
Tel: +044 (0)1236 420199. Fax: +44 (0)1236 428230.
TC Group Americas, 335 Gage Ave., Suite 1, Kitchener, N2M 5E1, Canada.
E-Mail: info (at) tcgroup-americas.com.

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