About the Company
Audio Kino — Hungarian Audio Brand (1950s)
Brand: Audio Kino
Manufacturer: Audio Kino és Hangtechnikai Vállalat (Audio Kino and Sound Technology Company)
Country: Hungary
Years in Business: Approximately 1950 – 1959
Product Focus: Consumer audio equipment (turntables, radios, microphones, speakers, and a small number of tape recorder products)
Unlike many mainstream reel-to-reel brands, Audio Kino was not primarily a dedicated reel-to-reel tape deck manufacturer (i.e., it did not produce a full line of open-reel tape recorders on its own). Instead, it was a mid-20th-century Hungarian audio maker that experimented with tape recorders and adapters within a broader product range.
Company Background
Founded: About 1950 by Nagy Andor, Vörös Rezső, and Pulvári Károly in Budapest, Hungary.
Industry: Consumer audio and sound technology.
Products: Turntables, radios, microphones, speakers, and a small number of tape recorder products.
End of Era: Around 1959, the company ceased operations or was subsumed into state structures typical of Central and Eastern Europe in that period.
Audio Kino’s primary relevance today lies in its early participation in magnetic audio — but its presence in the reel-to-reel market was very modest relative to other mid-century brands.
Reel-to-Reel Tape Product(s)
Audio Kino AM-155 Tape Recorder Adapter
Role: Not a full reel-to-reel tape deck, but an adapter unit designed to allow tape recording/playback using a turntable’s motor as the drive system.
Category: Tape recorder adapter, not a standalone reel deck.
Electronics: Vacuum-tube circuitry.
Tape Format: Full-track mono (½ track) on 7″ reels.
Speed: 7½ ips (19 cm/s).
General Specs: Mono record/playback with a permalloy head; wide frequency-response limitations and modest sound-quality ratings typical of early consumer tube machines.
Era: Circa 1954–1956.
This kind of turntable-driven adapter was sold by a handful of companies in the early 1950s before purpose-built reel-to-reel machines became more common. The design allowed users to repurpose the spindle speed of a record player to run tape transport, but such adapters were mechanically and acoustically inferior to dedicated tape decks.
Production Context and Market Position
Limited Tape Deck Production
Audio Kino did not develop a broad reel-to-reel tape deck lineup like brands such as Akai, Philips, Telefunken, or TEAC.
The AM-155 is essentially an adapter for early magnetic tape experiments rather than a self-contained high-fidelity tape recorder.
No other dedicated open-reel tape recorder models are reliably documented under the Audio Kino name in consumer or collector registries.
Hungarian and Eastern European Market
During the 1950s, Hungary and much of Eastern Europe were emerging into consumer electronics production with small domestic firms producing radios, turntables, and basic audio gear.
Magnetic tape technology was still new and relatively expensive, so adapters and hybrid units were among the earliest approaches before fully integrated tape decks became common.
Nationalisation
Audio Kino appears to have been nationalized or reorganized by the Hungarian state toward the end of its period of activity, a fate shared by many private firms in Eastern Europe in that era.
Legacy
Audio Kino’s reel-to-reel footprint is very limited — essentially a single adapter product rather than a dedicated reel-to-reel brand line.
Its historical significance is primarily regional: as part of Hungary’s early post-war consumer audio industry rather than a major global tape recorder maker.
The AM-155 adapter remains interesting to collectors mainly for its unusual design and as a curiosity from the early tape era.