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Defunct Audio Firms :
Fair Mate See --> Asahi Corp.
Fane Acoustics Limited
Company founded on the 11th of February 1993 in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, UK as Raftmill Ltd. but changed its name to Fane Acoustics after buying the trademarks and other assets of the bankrupt Fane Loudspeakers company. Restarted production of loudspeaker drivers in the Leeds, Yorkshire factory that Fane Loudspeakers had been using but with a slightly simplified product line that emphasised pro-audio and instrument amplification products and ignored the hi-fi market that the older Fane company had occasionally ventured into.
Under the guidance of managing director and shareholder Ian Gair that took over the helm in 1997 the company moved parts of their production to China, with somewhat disastrous results quality wise, but more interestingly made a series of flat panel loudspeakers under licence from NXT and Layered Sound Technologies. These flat panel speakers reused motors from more traditional drivers to make hybrid flat panel drivers that were much more powerful than the competition with power handling capacity of up to 200w and had bass response under 100Hz unlike most NXT based units, the MiniPro driver for instance had a response of 60Hz to 21KHz , an 80w power handling and 114dB output.
Fane factory and warehouse ca. 1999.
By the end of 2006 the company was basically bankrupt and taken into insolvency administration in January 2007. Fane's assets and IP was sold to Precision Devices while some of the staff went to RMJ Loudspeakers and the large “superwoofers” Fane had been showing shortly before its demise ended up as a Royal product.
Fantasia
Trademark used by Lucky Goldstar (LG) in the mid 90's in a misguided attempt to create a better brand name in the west, their current use of LG is much better.
Felt & Tarrant
Company founded in 1887 in Chicago, USA in order to manufacture the Comptometer, a key driven adding machine that the company is believed to have invented, a concept copied widely later on. Incorporated in 1889 but remained something of a one product horse until the late 1940's when they attempted to diversify by making other office machinery including the Comptometer dictation recorder. The company's name was changed in 1957 to The Comptometer Corporation, taken over in the 60's by the Victor Adding Machine Co. to become the Victor Comptometer Corp., later just Victor Corp. (of Victor 9000 fame) which went out of business in the 1980's.
Fi-Cord
British company that sold tape recorders and related accessories such as microphones, quite successful for a time with their miniature recorders both in the UK and the USA and later with a variety of microphone models, but appears not to have made any products themselves. Started in the mid 50's and disappears in the 70's.
Fidelitone
USA based company started in 1929 by Arthur Olson as a manufacturer of phonographic needles that it sold under it's own name in addition to the Permo brand, after it introduced one of the first diamond stylus it became one of the largest suppliers of needles and stylii in the world with factories in both USA and Scotland. In later years it ceased manufacturing products and focused on distributing audio accessories and parts sourced from OEM suppliers under their own brandname and in fact as early as in the 1930's they sold radios made for them by Wells-Gardner although the company quicly exited the radio business in the 1940's. In the 70's they branched into electronic parts distribution and as this grew more profitable than the original business they ended up selling the audio division to Recoton in 1980. The company is now primarily a logistics company and an electronic parts distributor with close links to Sears. -- Official homepage.
Fidelity
British manufacturer of budget brown goods, mostly active from the early 60 to early 80's..
Fidelity-Research
Legendary Japanese producer of tonearms and pickups founded in 1964 by a former factory manager at Grace by the name of Osamu (Isamu) Ikeda, and introduced it's first product in the form of the Fidelity Research FR-1 moving coil cartridge in 1965, the company was formally named Kabushiki Kaisha Fidelity-Research and they were based in Tokyo (K.K. = Limited company). The company made phonographic products that had an excellent reputation in particular their tonearms and MC pickups but company ran into financial difficulties in 1984 and was forced to close down in 85 or 86 (accounts vary). Ikeda-san however bounced back with his Ikeda Sound Labs company that makes specialised phonographic products with some influences from the earlier FR designs and Yazuo Osawa who worked as a designer with the company from 1982 till it's demise went on to found Shelter but the products of that company also show heavy FR influences in particular the Shelter 411 II. There is more info on the company, it's founder and it's products on the web site of the FR Fan Club (In Japanese), noticably there is info on that page on how to repair some of their tonearms. We have some information on their models including Fidelity Research Pickups and Fidelity Research MC transformers.
Final Sound Solutions
Dutch manufacturer of electrostatic loudspeakers based in Veghel. Company formerly named Finalsound Corp..
Fisher
Founded in 1937 by Avery Fisher and Victor Brociner as Fisher Radio, a store based on Third Avenue in New York, USA, that sold radios and phonographic products. The store was only moderately successful but managed to survive through the troubles of the early 40's that put a lot of the competition out of business, this was in no small part due to the sales capabilities of Mr. Fisher but he was known to have pulled potential customers from the pavement when necessary. Started manufacturing a hi-fi amplifier called The Fisher in 1947 and when that product took off shop was closed down and the company continued as a manufacturing concern. Fisher was sold to Sanyo in 1975.
Fisk See --> Amalgamated Wireless Australasia Ltd. (AWA)
Flare Technology
A company founded in 1986 by Martin Brennan, Ben Cheese and John Mathieson and based in Cambridge, UK. The aim of the company was commercialising technology developed by the team for the Loki project while working at Sinclair Research, but the Loki was an advanced replacement for the ZX Spectrum that used a Z80 for household tasks only while the main processing, graphics and sounds capabilities where done by custom silicon. The company showed a number of prototypes, some of them very impressive, most interesting of those was a model designed to integrate and interface into a TV or hi-fi rack, this model had some game playing facilities but what was immediately attention grabbing about it was that it had prototype software that was designed to make the machine function as home entertainment centre with interactive capabilities, mind you much of this software was designed to appeal to kids and teens and somewhat uninteresting from an adult standpoint, but it had capabilities such as digital video playback with basic editing, while the resolution was low the videos where more realistic than what the competition had to offer since they had some colour depth, competing computer models like the Amiga did have reasonable colour dept only in graphic modes that where unusable for the playback of video. To put this into perspective it should be noted that the playback of video on an IBM PC compatible at the time was possible only with 4 colours or so at a low resolution and a very low framerate unless you had very expensive hardware accelerators and even then the hard disk subsystem was so slow that the framerate was dreadful.
The audio side of the Flare was at the time even more impressive and featured in addition to the now ubiquitous digital audio capabilities one of the worlds first analogue modelling synthesiser but rather than using digital synthesis techniques the Flare team decided that the more familiar subtractive synthesis would appeal more to users, the company demonstrated these AV capabilities by playing an (admittedly rather dreadful) music video while allowing people to toy around with some of its parameters, an unique feature at the time and nota bene most video players of today do not have any real interactive features. The Flare was never released as a consumer electronics device although it was used as the basis for some arcade machines and some of the technology is believed to have showed up in the Atari Jaguar games computer, one of the problems surrounding the machine and the company appears to have been the lack of focus on the marketing side, one day it was touted as games machine to compete with the Nintendo, the next day as a home computer to take on the Atari ST and the third as a home entertainment centre etc..
Fonofilm See --> Ortofon
Fonica
Polish electronic manufacturing plant based in Lodz and probably best known in the audio world for the turntables that they supplied both under their own name and under the Unitra brand. Early history unknown but the company was state run even after most of the other similar local manufacturing companies had been privatised, had enormous financial and labour problems in the early 1990's which culminated in the plants workers occupying the factory building for 20 days in June 1991 to demand higher wages and ultimately the company was liquidated by the government in April 1992 in despite strong protests from the locals. The factory was then taken over by Korean trading house Kyung Bang in 1996 and run as Kyungbang Fonica but was sold to Daewoo Electronics in 1998 and under their control operated as a television sub-assebly plant under the name of Daewoo-Fonica but finally closed in late 2002 after years of losses.
FR See --> Fidelity Research
Futterman
Tiny USA based manufacturer of valve amplifiers run by Julius Futterman, but Mr. Futterman had during the late 50's developed an OTL design that was sought after by certain audiophiles. The timeline is not certain but the company was certainly active in the mid 50's and still there in the early 70's, more info on this page.
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