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Defunct Audio Firms :
Tambalan Limited
Trading under the name of Ross Consumer Products and based in Farnworth-Bolton in the Greater Manchester area in England but also had manufacturing and a sales office in Hong Kong. Started selling audio accessories, personal stereos and suchlike in the late 1970's under the Ross brand, quickly established itself as something of a budget headphone specialist. Bought in February 1997 by Recoton after having been run at a loss for years and operated as a subsidiary of that company and as its UK distribution arm until their demise in 2003.
Tandberg
Norwegian manufacturer of a long standing that started manufacturing radios as Tandberg Radiofabrikk in 1933 but in the end manufactured high end separates and open reel tape recorders under the name of Tandberg Audio Products A/S. Also owned the Radionette trademark. For the last few years it was stationed in Oslo and was closed down on the 31st of December 2000 (i.e. on the last day of the millennium, neat touch). For spare parts and service contact Dalens Elektronikk Service, for repairs in the USA contact Approved Audio Service or Soundsmith, but the latter can also supply spares and upgrades. A full history of the company can be found here (in Norwegian).
Tangent Acoustics
British company started up in the 1970's that is best known for manufacturing loudspeakers although they did make some amplifiers and at the least one model of a turntable. Note that TA did not produce as many models as it may seem at first, rather they had a tendency to put different model numbers on their USA bound models that what where on the original ones. Company disappeared in the early 80's and there is some info on their products available here.
Tangent See --> GTRC Services (USA - PA products - 2000's)
Tapecorder
Early Sony trademark, some of their first open reel tape recorders are only branded with this on the front although the full company name is usually on the identity label (Totsuko or Tokyo-Tsushin-Kogyo). Later on this name was used on recorders as a line brand but fell out of use in the 70's.
Telefonaktiebolaget L. M. Ericsson
Although these days this Swedish electronics giant is primarily known as a manufacturer of communications equipment they did for large parts of the 20th century operate in and around the audio sector, primarily in the PA field were they supplied both systems and individual units but they did also supply home audio equipment and in the 50 for instance had a tape recorder factory in Örebro, the company was something of a symbol of over engineering and reliability and their systems were some of the most expensive you could get. The company also owned the legendary hi-fi manufacturer Sonab for a while. -- Official homepage. - Swedish homepage
Tape Services
USA based manufacturer of accessories for consumer recording formats such as the Compact Cassette and the 8 Track Cartridge, bought by Recoton in 1976.
Tech HiFi See --> Stereo Component Systems
Teledyne (Acoustic Research)
Teledyne was formed in 1960 by Henry A. Singleton and George Kozmetsky as a manufacturer of communications equipment for the military market. Highly profitable from the word go and this led to a series of acquisitions, most of the in the field of exotic metal manufacture as a backbone to their defence business, but also a host of fledging electronic manufacturers including Acoustic Research (AR) in 1967 which was run as a separate division called Teledyne Acoustic Research from then on, but in 1968 the company also bought Olson Electronics and Packard Bell. They continued to market PB audio and TV products for a few years as Teledyne Packard Bell but the product designs were outdated and manufacturing cost were high, the company moved television production to Mexico but sales were slow, the division lost 1.8 million USD in 73 and 500k in 74 and was closed as early as 1976.
TAR remained relatively healthy however, they branched into audio electronics with the introduction of the Amplifier in 1967 and later the same year started exporting audio products (AR had only been active in the USA market prior to that), opened a factory in Houghton Regis, near Dunstable in Bedfordshire in the UK in 1972 and a little later in Amersfoort in Holland, it should be noted that except for the first few months each factory produced different loudspeakers for the most part, the design team for the UK division were independent from the USA one and so on. The European divisions also acted as a distributors for other hi-fi brands, for instance the UK division distributed ATRON in the mid 70's (and may have owned that brand) and in 1975 took over the distribution of German label Neue Akustische Dimension (aka NAD) from Pyser when the latter decided to focus on Marantz/Pioneer/Nakamichi.
The AR division could make use of the parents company's high tech R&D and manufacturing facilities and was thus along with some of the larger British and German companies one of the first to use computer based FFT analysis and CAD in the design of loudspeakers in the 70's. Interestingly the company did introduce some premium priced products in the 70's under the Teledyne name rather than AR and may have had a different distribution arrangement in the USA for those products, these were primarily receivers sourced from Japan, but equally strangely the company also sold low budget Japanese sourced products under the Teledyne/Olson name in their Olson Electronics stores, these were built to a price and did an enormous damage in the long term to the Teledyne brandname, in particular the loudspeakers became notorious, the company had them made so cheaply and with such a high mark-up that it was less costly to replace the whole speaker under guarantee that to repair them, so the company never bothered to stock any spares for those models.
Olson Electronics failed in or around 1980 but after that fiasco the company marketed some of the Asian sourced products they had been selling in Olson as Teledyne/Olson to dealers under the Teledyne Packard Bell name but it was not a success and the company sold the Packard Bell name for less than USD 100k to a computer distribution company in 1986, that company was later renamed Packard Bell Computers. All in all the time for the company from the late 70's to the early late 80's was a disaster and in the mid 80's Teledyne started to sell off assets.
The TAR company was sold to International Jensen in or around 1985, and while it is believed to have been profitable for most of its lifetime it had lost market share, when Teledyne bought AR in 67 it was the world’s second biggest supplier of branded loudspeakers (e.g. rather than OEM or driver supplier) but by the time they were sold they languished in 5th place despite having expanded heavily into export markets. This was partly due problems in the USA side of things in the 1970's and early 80's, but the company got a lot of flak from their smaller dealers for giving them lower margins than their competitors and being inflexible in other financial respects, this meant that specialised dealers stopped selling TAR products and most sales ended up with discount warehouses and mail order stores, this left the company's more expensive product lines a bit exposed and therefore some of them more often seen in Europe than in the USA but the European arm had wildly different distribution arrangements to the home side with emphasis on specialised dealers.
This is especially true of the company's line of audio electronics introduced in the 1980's, AR had withdrawn from the USA electronics market in 1973 and thus decided to re-enter it with a splash, these new models where visually distinctive units being all black with a tilted front facia and where competing in the lower mid range of the market, these were by and large made in the USA but are quite rare there but reasonably common in parts of Northern Europe. Note that the link here is to Teledyne Technologies which is an offshoot of the old Teledyne corp. rather than of the original company itself which no longer exists in its original form. -- Official homepage.
Telefunken
Originally founded on the 23rd of May in 1903 as Gesellschaft für drahtlose Telegraphie mbH (or the Wireless Telegraph Co.) and was initially a vehicle to pool the radio related patents held by Siemens and AEG with each company holding 50% of the ownership. Became one of the most innovative electronics company of the 20th century, amongst their achievements in the field of audio are the tape recorder, HighCom and TelCom noise reduction systems ( at the time much better than their Dolby equivalents), Direct Metal Mastering (DMM) technology used for pressing LP records, the PAL colour TV system (it and variants thereof used everywhere except in North America and Japan) and indeed the concept of the hi-fi separates was thought up by engineers of this company in the 1920's. Siemens shares in the company were bought by AEG in 1941 and Telefunken was run as an independent subsidiary of that company from there on. By the early 80's the Telefunken consumer and professional AV products were incorporated into the AEG product lines and the consumer side of the business and trademark was sold to Thomson in the mid 80's who used by them for the German market for a while, the company was then sold do Gradiente, although for non-consumer products the company still exists as a AEG subsidiary.
Tensai
Budget consumer A/V brand used to brand mostly Asian sourced broduct, in the late 80's early 90's there where some reasonable hi-fi components released under this brand but by the late 90's this had become an out and out budget operation selling white and brown goods but fizzled out in 2003 or thereabouts, brand owner based in Israel with a front end in Switzerland. Some support available from the company via the website listed but that is mostly for the white goods. -- Official homepage.
Teslar
A company that was based in Litovel in Czechoslovakia (now in the Czech Republic) that normally traded under the Tesla brand, formed in 1948 when a number of factories were nationalised (over 20 in all distributed all ower the country) who had been mostly owned by German, Austrian and Dutch concerns, unlike the East German nationalisation drive a couple of years earlier the owners were not usually compensated however with the possible exception of Philips. A huge company by Eastern European standards it manufactured anything from light bulbs to tape recorders, but was especially famous for it's turntables that occasionally turned up in the west under a variety of names including Thorens. When the company was broken up in the early 1990's the turntable manufacturing part continued and produced the original Pro-Ject turntables. The turntable division was actually later taken over by Pro-Ject and serves as their main factory and parts of the Teslar valve manufacturing operation survive as JJ Electronic and KR Audio Electronics. P.S. Not to be confused with the Yugoslavian Tesla electric manufacturing company (More appropriately named since Tesla was a Serbo-Kroat).
Texas Instruments
For a time they sold radios and other consumer products, entered the calculator market in 1972 and was very successfull for a time although they remain best known these days as a manufacturer of semiconductors, but the company is still a minor player in the calculator market. -- Official homepage.
Thermionic Products
Small British company based at the Hythe in Southampton, UK that made the Brush Soundmirror and Mail-A-Voice voice recorders under license from the Brush Development Company company in the late 1940's and early 50's but sold them using their own Recordon trademark. The company later manufactured or assembled other recorders from Brush but those were sold under the original Brush labs brand rather than as Recordon's, these were mostly professional recorders intended for specialised voice and data applications with the target market being airport authorities etc. The company also made a few other hi-fi products under license in the mid 50's but does not appear to have done any R&D of it's own, at the least no original products have been found. Allegedly the original owner of the company founded it on the proceedings of a novelty product business and he was by all accounts quite a character and we would appreciate it if someone out there actually remembers his name or has more background information on the company. Note that their early products sometimes say that the company was based in London, but that seems to have been "cosmetical" and the company was definitely in Southampton although they did open a London sales office in 1956, we are not sure about the timeline but it was apparently operating in 1949 and still alive in 1957, as far as can be gathered this company has no relation to any of the companies that currently operate under this name.
Thordarson Electric Manufacturing Company
A transformer manufacturer founded in Chicago, USA in 1895 by Icelandic immigrant Hjörtur Þórðarson (1867 - 1945), better known by the anglicised form of his name : Chester H. Thordarson. Hjörtur had worked for the Edison company as an armature winder but felt he could do better on his own and indeed quickly became the worlds largest manufacturer of transformers and gained notoriety in the audio world in the 20's when electrical amplification began to take hold and the company became the primary manufacturer and designer of audio transformers, or any transformers for that matter, even during the height of the depression there were as many as 1800 employees at the factory. Hjörtur died in early 1945 and the company has been sold a few times since but the last company to bear the Thordarson name seems to have disappeared in the late 1990's. Interestingly despite putting in a lot of work in designing and improving audio transformers etc., the man seems to have had no interest in sound reproduction or in fact in music at all. An old catalogue from the company is reproduced here (ca 1937).
Thorn
English electronics conglomerate, owned a large number of CE companies such as Baird and Ferguson.
Thule Audio ApS
Danish manufacturer of high end audio founded by Anders Thule, Harald Brixen and Anne Holdt in 1989 and was based in Herlev, a town/suburb just outside of Copenhagen. Had an unusually large line-up for such a small producer but their products included DVD and CD players, amplifiers, analogue and digital tuners and D/A converters. All of their products were solid state and from 1996 the company ran its own automatic SMD soldering production line for both for its own use and as an OEM and contract manufacturer, but Thule designed and manufactured products for TEAC and Avance and also did some work for Primare and others but is is not known if that was an OEM deal or subcontracting.
but the company was best known for two things; a superb class A/B amplifier circuit that they called "virtual class A" and excellent software controls for some of their products, some of their CD players had so well tuned firmware that they were mostly silent in operation. In 2006 the company seems to disapper, the reasons mostly often given were that they had subcontracted out most of their work to Asia and the subcontractors were not redy for the introduction of RoHS, given that the company itself worked as a subcontractor that seems somewhat unlikely an explanation. There has been talk in Denmark about re-starting the production of their designs in particular the amplifiers but that seems idle speculation
Resources : Thule audio Facebook page.
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