Vector Research See --> Damark Industries (USA) Crown Radio (Rest of World)

Veda Products
British trading and distribution company founded in 1980 by John Gay and based in Bishops Stortford in Herefordshire. Handled the local and or worldwide distribution of a number of well known audio companies such as Linn and Grado but started in the latter half of the 80’s to acquire companies and trademarks of smaller British operations in the manufacture of audio/video accessories and hi-fi furniture, including Goldring, QED, Soundstyle and Sound Organisation. Most of the brands were incorporated into the Veda company but QED and Goldring continued as independent legal entities, some brands such as the accessories trademark Milty appear to have originated at Veda. In 1997 Veda founded a custom installation company called Integrated Media Installations that was based in Aldershot. The company was sold to Armour Group in 2003 for 12.5 million UKP which used it to form the basis of a new subdivision of the Armour Automotive group called Armour Home Audio division which has grown somewhat since then with further acquisitions. Unlike Armour, Veda tried hard to mask from the consumer that the same company was manufacturing all that stuff and had separate homepages and advertising campaigns for each of their brands which did not mention Veda in any way with the exception of the Soundstyle product range.

Vereinigung volkseigener Betriebe/HV RFT
An East German quango founded in 1946, its name would roughly translate as "the union of the peoples own companies". Its purpose was to encourage and coordinate the formation of co-operative ventures in the East Germany radio, consumer electronics and communication industries and oversee their running, and to convert the companies that were in private hands into such self-owned co-op's. The co-operative ventures got the formal name VEB, short for “Volkseigener Betrieb” which stands for "the peoples own company" or "owner operated concern". The VVB registered the trademark RFT that same year, but that is a shortening of "Radio und Fernmeldetechnik" or "Broadcast and communications technology", and the idea was that all East German companies operating in that sector would manufacturer products using that brand.

In practice that never fully happened, some companies continued to trade using their old brands well into the 1950's, the brand was not initially considered appropriate for export use so brown goods that were exported to the west seldom sported that name and companies that did use the brand but ventured into the manufacture of electronics not strictly in the radio or communications sectors such as computer manufacturer Robotron, had a tendency to prefer to use their own brands if at all possible, many used both, sometimes using RFT on consumer equipment and their own name or bands on professional gear, a tendency that increased in the 70's and 80'. Nonetheless the bulk of brown goods manufactured in the DDR from the 50's and up until the merger with West Germany were sold locally using the RFT brand, the names of the individual manufacturer are however almost always to be found on the device somewhere.

The VVB changed its name to HV RFT in 1952 since by then there were numerous VVB's each operating it its field of industry, but in popular usage was either referred to as RFT or continued to be called VVB. By that time it functioned as much as state run manufacturing and sales organisation, coordination the orders of the Central Planning Committee, stipulating to each company what they could and should manufacture and distributing the final goods. Note that this method of centralised distribution was mostly only used for consumer products, professional products were often distributed and branded by the individual companies and high end products such as Blüthner Pianos were always exported by the original company even after nationalisation.

In fact it is important to remember that in the case of East Germany the word “nationalisation” is not really the correct word to use, at the least not in the USSR sense, VVB could after 1972 force companies to convert into VEB’s but prior to that they could not directly do so, thus quite a large number of companies remained privately owned and even after VVB got the powers they did not use it except in cases where they concluded that doing this was in the national interest so quite a number of specialised smaller concerns remained privately owned. Furthermore while VVB and the state had a considerable say in the run of the companies it the long term, they could order them to operate in specific market sectors and meet specific targets, but they had no say in the day to day running of the VEB’s. Those were controlled by individual managers on one hand and workers committees on the other, but those had an almost identical function in the VEB as board of directors have in the capitalistic world the only real difference being that the worker committees had a tendency to have their fingers in the day to day running of the company more than a board of directors usually does, and the owner of the company was considered to be the worker and they therefore voted for members of the board while in a capitalistic economy the owners of the company are the providers of the capital and they get voting rights.

It should also be noted that unlike some other Eastern European countries that prior to a change in the law believed to have happened in the late 60’s, the owners of private companies that were taken over were required to be fully compensated, even prior to the founding of VVB or as early as 1945 the East German government was compensating owners, even in cases when they actually had them in jail as suspected war criminals, the bulk of these then moved to the West Germany and that actually created quite a bit of resentment in the western part of the country. After the war companies were only in a few cases allowed to manufacture industrial goods in the western part due to a plan of de-industrialation of Germany demanded by the USA congress, in most cases the only getting operating permissions were concerns making products needed by the occupying forces or companies owned by the concerns or individuals from one of occupying countries. A number of companies got permissions for acting as repair shops and these did in some cases resort to manufacturing clandestinely, moreover not only did the occupying forces not pay any reparations for confiscated properties even if they had been in fully private ownership and had no relation to the war effort or the Nazi party, but as a political move they allowed industrialists from East Germany to get operating licenses to encourage them to move from the communist East. This meant an influx of East German industrialists into West Germany that were getting operating licenses as early as 1947 and had capital provided by the East German government, buying properties and setting up shops next to concerns that were expressively forbidden to operate, some of them having to wait until 1953 for a license and had no access to capital.

Some of the East German consumer goods electronics manufacturers were in 1980 merged into a new company run by HV RFT/VVB called “RFT - Kombinat Rundfunk- und Fernsehtechnik” which was the first actual company to use the RFT name.

Notable VEB’s: VEB Blüthner Pianos, now Julius Blüthner Pianofortefabrik GmbH — VEB Elektroakustik Leipzig — VEB Funkwerk Dresden — VEB Funkwerk Zittau (now Ziphona) — VEB Mikrofontechnik Gefell/Neumann East Germany (now Microtech Gefell) — VEB Musikelectronic(now Musikelectronic Geithain).

Vergence Technology, Inc
Founded in 1997 by Chris Byrne and Ken Kantor who had founded the Now Hear This (NHT) company some 10 years earlier, the company was in fact originally introduced to the world as NHT Pro which was not popular with the then owners of NHT, namely Recoton but the parties reached an agreement in 1998 whereby the then renamed Vergence licensed the NHT Pro name from Recoton with the understanding that only loudspeakers intended for the professional markets would be sold under that name. Announced in 2000 that their products would be sold in the future under their own name.

Veritas Horn Systems Ltd
Company based in Holt, in Norfolk, UK. Originally founded in 1999 and made mid/high end acoustically suspended, ported and horn loaded loudspeakers and digital power amps. The amplifiers were actually designed and made for them by Alner Hamblin and they featured an unchanged Tripath evaluation board but with a fairly hefty power supply. As the name suggests the company supposedly manufactured horn loaded speakers and advertised a line-up of nine different models including 3 Lowther based horn loaded ones and 4 floor standing models, but the only models we have been able to find on the second hand market have been 2 bookshelf/stand mount models and one horn loaded one, it does look like Veritas either never shipped the rest or if they did, in very limited numbers even though they showed prototypes of the all 3 in 1999.

The company had stopped trading by 2003, possibly even 2002 and was dissolved in 2004. Spares & service : Regarding the amplifiers Alner Hamblin (link above) will service any Veritas amplifier product but since they are really based on the original Tripath evaluation board any technician with knowledge of the older Tripath boards should be able to work on the units. As for the loudspeakers, they use fairly common parts and are fairly conventional designs even though the H3 model horn loaded model is slightly different to your average home speaker, but that means that any competent speaker repairer will be able to service them.

Next Page : Defunct Audio Companies – Vi to V9 -- Previous Page : Defunct Audio Companies – Va to Veb