I am referring to stereo receivers. Lloyds and Soundesign were reliable, just sounded poor. In 1970 to 1980 everyone wanted Pioneer, Onkyo, Marantz, McIntosh, Sansui, Yamaha, Sony and Kenwood.
Love Yamaha equipment…. but always thought it was odd that they also made boat motors, music instruments, motorcycles, etc and so on…
"KEF" is an acronym for Kent Engineering & Foundry, just like "SME" is for Scale Model Engineering. "NAD" is New Acoustic Dimensions; fans of which should cheer them with "GO NADS."
Yes they made almost anything it seemed… I owned an integrated amp, speakers, audio interface and even had a Yamaha recurve bow at some point lol They’ve reduced the diversity of their products though.
I had a pair of those as a kid, too. They operated on channel 9--which, at least by the time the CB craze rolled round a few years later, was supposed to be reserved for emergency communications. Oops. Looking back at long-gone names, Superscope always struck me as dubious, giving the impression the company was a purveyor of test equipment, not audio. Going way back, although descriptive of what the company was selling at the time, The Gramophone and Typewriter, Ltd. just doesn't have much of a resounding ring to it.
I never cared for anything with " research" or even worse " enterprises" in the brand. Just sounds laughably arrogant to me. I call my AR speakers exactly that and I once had a very good Vector Research cassette deck. I don't remember ever calling it though.
Vinyl Flat and Groovy Pouch, while they might be great products, the name turns me off for some reason.
For me it's when someone uses their online screen name to form a hifi company, the most glaring (and now a huge company) that comes to mind is Mr Speakers. I always think of Mr Plow when I hear it. For individual product names, I think it's a bit pretentious of DCS to name their components after composers. Would Bartok, a man of fairly modest means, appreciate his name on an $8000 box that converts zeros and ones to analog.
It's a common German surname which they use to their advantage. I own several Schiit items and I am very satisfied. How about the old Goldstar? Would you buy an audio device with the same brand name as a crappy coffee maker? Well, at least they morphed into LG...
Or the import company behind the brand, "Circus World Display". The worst are over in car audio land. Earthquake. Kicker. Audio Thunder. Punch. Or the cheapo and cheap sounding: anything with "vox" "tek" "phase" in the name.
I think of Forbidden Planet Whammerdyne An amp I'd love to eventually own, but makes the think of Joe Don Baker in The Natural. Even the lightning bolts remind me of Wonderboy.
+1. True masterpieces of Krell technology. Our little crew of audio techs used to refer to generic cheap crap Asian gear as "krell" before the high end company started up in the 1980s.
Irving M. Fried called them “Rectumlinear.” That was in a typewritten letter (remember those?) he sent me replying to my inquiry about his IMF speakers.
Bakoon is (was) a company based in both California and South Korea. I don’t know if the word has a meaning in Korean. Great amps, but the name always irritated me: ‚warming up the koon‘ sounds sounds more than a tad weird to my ears... Their new brand name Enleum is actually a mix of Enlightenment (in English) and Eum for sound (in Korean). Makes a lot more sense to me and I think it is a major improvement.
