TEAC Corporation


TEAC Corporation is an electronics company based in Japan. TEAC was created by the merger of the Tokyo Television Acoustic Company, founded in 1953, and the Tokyo Electro-Acoustic Company, founded in 1956.

Overview

TEAC has four divisions:
TEAC is known for its audio equipment, and was a primary manufacturer of high-end audio equipment in the 1970s and 1980s. During that time, TEAC produced reel-to-reels, cassette decks, CD players, turntables and amplifiers.
TEAC produced an audio cassette with tape hubs that resembled reel-to-reel tape reels in appearance. Many manufacturers at the time used these TEAC cassettes in advertisements of their tape decks because the TEAC cassettes looked more professional than standard audio cassettes, and because reel-to-reel tape recordings were known to be of higher quality than cassette recordings.

History

The company that eventually became the TEAC corporation was founded in August 1953. Originally named the Tokyo Television Acoustic Company, it employed Katsuma Tani, a former aviation and aeronautics engineer, who established a reputation as a highly qualified creator of audio equipment.
In 1956, his brother, Tomoma Tani, brought home a hand-made, 3-motor, 3-head stereo tape recorder. This sparked Katsuma's interest in reel-to-reel tape recorders. Confident they could engineer a better tape recorder, the Tani brothers founded the Tokyo Electro-Acoustic Company on 24 December 1956.
The Tokyo Television Acoustic Company and the Tokyo Electro-Acoustic Company were merged to create the TEAC corporation, taking the initials of the latter company as its name. The main focus of the new company was to design and manufacture tape recorders.
In 2013, Gibson bought a majority stake in the company, giving it 54.42% of the company. After Gibson's bankruptcy in 2018, TEAC announced that they would continue to operate on their own.

Computer tape memory systems

In May 1961 TEAC entered into a licensing agreement with IBM to create magnetic tape memory systems.