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Which country produces the greatest speakers?

carewser

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I think you'd have to be a fool not to concede that America is the clear winner here as they should be given their population, but what about on a per capita basis? I think Britain easily takes the title using that criteria, from companies like Tannoy, Quad, Monitor Audio, Celestion, KEF, Castle, Mission, ProAc, B&W, Rogers, Mordaunt-Short and Wharfedale, limeys have made a massive contribution to the loudspeaker industry, totally out of proportion to their population. There's also Denmark with a population of less than 6 million people yet they've come out with Dali, Jamo Dynaudio and Bang and Olufsen (although B&O make other audio components as well). The only other countries I think of when I think of quality loudspeakers are Germany, Canada and France. Oddly, I don't know of a single loudspeaker company from Japan
 
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carewser

carewser

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Nope, I added the Danes after I edited my post
 

dfuller

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limeys have made a massive contribution to the loudspeaker industry totally out of proportion to their population.
A lot of that is down to the BBC funding a ton of research into speakers over the latter half of the 20th century.
 

Chrispy

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TAD comes from Japan. Country of origin of the final product is somewhat meaningless, tho. Where do the components come from?
 

bo_knows

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I think you'd have to be a fool not to concede that America is the clear winner here as they should be given their population, but what about on a per capita basis? I think Britain easily takes the title using that criteria, from companies like Tannoy, Quad, Monitor Audio, Celestion, KEF, Castle, Mission, ProAc, B&W, Rogers, Mordaunt-Short and Wharfedale, limeys have made a massive contribution to the loudspeaker industry, totally out of proportion to their population. There's also Denmark with a population of less than 6 million people yet they've come out with Dali, Jamo Dynaudio and Bang and Olufsen (although B&O make other audio components as well). The only other countries I think of when I think of quality loudspeakers are Germany, Canada and France. Oddly, I don't know of a single loudspeaker company from Japan
Yamaha to start with.
 

Kal Rubinson

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A lot of that is down to the BBC funding a ton of research into speakers over the latter half of the 20th century.
Similarly, the Canadian industry benefitted greatly from support of the Canadian NRC.
JVC, Sony, Yamaha, some brands that do speakers from Japan.
...............and many more!
 
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carewser

carewser

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What’s the point of this discussion?

It was a question. I kind of figured people would weigh in with their answers/ideas

JVC, Sony, Yamaha, some brands that do speakers from Japan.

I thought of Yamaha and all the others except those companies make all kinds of things other than just speakers
 
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Berwhale

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+1 for UK, simply because i'm from there (although my monitors are Italian :))

*edit* although the Italian monitors are now paired with a US sub (PreSonus) and I have Rega, Celestion, Mission and REL in the living room.
 
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carewser

carewser

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I thought of Italy but couldn't think of one company there that makes speakers which is ironic when one considers the rich history of music from that country, so who makes your monitors?
 
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Kal Rubinson

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you might want to pick that mic back up again because your list only shows which countries produce speakers not who (per capita) makes the best
Not the best. This thread is about who makes the greatest! That's even harder to define.
 

sweetchaos

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you might want to pick that mic back up again because your list only shows which countries produce speakers not who (per capita) makes the best
We only have spinorama data for 105 speaker companies (source), but I've collected 985 companies (source) around the world.
Which means we only have spinorama data for 10% of the companies around the world...clearly we need more data to make any meaningful analysis of such a question.
 
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carewser

carewser

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Putting some semblance of science to this.
Genelec have the best preference scores based on measurments.
So Sweden ftw

Except one company does not make an entire nation's speaker industry stand out not to mention the fact that Genelec primarily make studio monitors

We only have spinorama data for 105 speaker companies (source), but I've collected 985 companies (source) around the world.
Which means we only have spinorama data for 10% of the companies around the world...clearly we need more data to make any meaningful analysis of such a question.

What does a ride at a carnival have to do with speakers?
 
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