Neil - what's the story re Yamamura Churchill Limited please?
First things first - the following is not to be confused with (a) Yamamura Systems S.R.L. nor (b) Yamamura Systems (US) Inc.
So, this is what I have discovered online:
British company founded in 1994 by Robert William Charles Spencer Churchill and was based in Netherhampton, Salisbury in Wiltshire, please note that the gentleman in question is better known as simply Robert Spencer Churchill and that some write his last two names a hyphen between them. The company manufactured the designs by Japanese musician Bé Yamamura but Mr Churchill met Yamamura-san by chance in Italy where he had designed a line of cables for A.R.T., the first products from the company were the ART Millenium cables re-branded as YC Millenium but a line of horn loudspeakers soon followed, and then a line of electronics that included amps, CD players, power conditioners, turntables and loudspeakers, all notably minimalistic designs that often used custom made components such as Bakelite resistors.
The company generated a lot of interest in its home country since it both produced equipment that was unusually exotic in comparison to their British counterparts but also quite expensive, for instance the Yamamura Churchill Dionisio 32 horn loudspeakers was made out of solid copper, and stands at 2.3 metres tall and 1.4 m wide, you know how some loudspeaker manufacturers sometimes boast about their products being able to "fill a room", well a pair of Dionisio 32's did just that, in the literal sense, and to give you an idea of the prices, the little brother of the 32 was the Yamamura Churchill Dionisio 27 which had a retail price of 25 thousand UK pounds, excluding VAT. All the amplifiers the company made were unearthed, clad in copper skin and their later models were solid state current source devices, the designer maintained that at the impedance range the Yamamura Churchill horn loudspeakers worked at the current source topology offered better sound and efficiency. Other oddball products included a natural oil that you used to treat the surfaces of CD discs with, sounds odd but the people who bought the Q-151 oil in general raved about it.
Things went quiet in 1999 and the company appears dormant by 2001, went bankrupt in 2003 and was disolved by 2004. We have minimal information on the Yamamura - Churchill Requiem Turntable archived but note also that the cables the company sold were actually made by A.R.T. and are still supplied by that company, for more info on them see A. R. T. Millenium Cables. French company MadoTec bought the remains of the stock of the company when it was closed down and they still have a few products available when this was written in 2013, including amplifiers , cables and switches plus sundry accessories, although stocks were running low. Go to the MadoTec homepage and download a price list from by clicking on the Euro symbol at the bottom, the page is in French, the price list is in English.
Resources: -- Background info on the designs of Bé Yamamura in an article by Positive Feedback Online -- An old review of the Q-151 oil treatment -- An article on the products of Yamamura Churchill by British Newspaper "The Guardian".
