Dino Giannini’s company.

Ciare’s name is an acronym, and its own website expands it two ways. Its timeline says that in 1951 “Costruzioni Italiane Altoparlanti Radio Elettronica” was “born from the will of Dino Giannini”; the introduction on the same site reads it as “Costruzioni Italiane Apparecchiature Radio Elettriche.” Both mean, roughly, Italian makers of radio loudspeakers or equipment.

The date is also unsettled. B&C Speakers, which now owns the brand, said in a 2017 filing that Ciare was founded in 1947; the website gives 1951 and speaks of “over seventy years.” We give both. The site does not say in which town the company began, and gives no further biography of Dino Giannini; its timeline is the main source for Ciare’s early history, and it names no other founders or partners.

Ciare worked across several markets — professional audio, car audio, high-output “SPL” systems, named after the sound-pressure-level measure used in car-audio loudness contests, and home speakers. Its timeline lists the Planet tweeter of 1996, the CW171 “Compak” of 1997 and the neodymium CSW4000 and CSW8000 subwoofers of 2004 and 2010.

Electronic Melody, Eighteen Sound and B&C.

Ciare has passed through several hands. From 1980 it sold a catalogue under the trade name Electronic Melody, and in 1990 it introduced a concentric coaxial driver it calls the Twin Driver, which it says it patented — the earliest product its timeline names after the 1980 catalogue; a coaxial driver mounts a high-frequency unit in the centre of a larger cone so that both radiate along one axis. In 2012 Ciare and Electronic Melody merged.

In 2015, the website says, “Eighteen Sound acquires Ciare.” B&C’s filing is more precise: Eighteen Sound bought the registered CIARE trademark in 2015 and registered “CIARE 2.0” in 2016. A company called Sound & Vision srl was set up in Senigallia, on the Adriatic coast north of Ancona, on 16 November 2015, and began operating in 2016. We describe the 2015 deal as a trademark purchase, as the filing does.

Ciare reached B&C indirectly. When B&C bought Eighteen Sound from Landi Renzo in December 2017, Sound & Vision came with it; no separate price for Ciare was published. B&C paid €6.79 million for Eighteen Sound as a whole, whose 2016 turnover of about €12.6 million covered both its 18 Sound and Ciare brands. Sound & Vision’s registered office was on Strada Fortenuovo in Senigallia. Today the website’s footer reads “Sound & Vision, a division of the B&C Speakers Group – Eighteen Sound srl,” in Reggio Emilia, and B&C’s 2025 annual report says Ciare products are made and distributed through Eighteen Sound.

Drivers and other badges.

Many loudspeaker brands buy their drivers from specialist makers. A compression driver, as English Wikipedia puts it, is “a small specialized diaphragm loudspeaker which generates the sound in a horn loudspeaker,” and horn-loaded drivers can be around ten times as efficient as ordinary cone speakers. B&C Speakers of Florence, founded in the mid-1940s, says it supplies “OEM components to many of the top professional audio brands.”

B&C’s annual report shows how that trade works. In 2025 the group had revenue of €99.1 million, only 6 per cent of it in Italy, and it warned that “most of the Group’s revenues come from orders placed by OEM customers” — other brands that build its drivers into their own loudspeakers. Its largest customer alone accounted for 21 per cent of group sales; the report does not name it. The group makes its products in Florence, in Reggio Emilia, in Kentucky and in Dongguan, China.

Ownership in this corner of the industry varies widely. B&C Speakers has been listed in Milan since 2007 and owns Eighteen Sound, which it bought from the gas-systems group Landi Renzo in 2017 as a “non-core” business; Faital, the maker of FaitalPRO, has been controlled by Japan’s Alps Alpine since 2019; Lavoce belongs to Elettromedia of the Marche; Outline says it has no institutional shareholders at all; and Markbass listed its shares in 2025, with its founder keeping a majority.

Not every Italian audio name works behind other badges. Some of the companies below sell drivers to other manufacturers; others sell finished amplifiers and loudspeaker systems under their own names. Each guide records who owns the brand today and what the company says about where its products are made.

Ciare shows the trade from the other side: an old independent name that now sits inside a listed driver group.

An acronym with two meanings.

Ciare says plainly where its products are made: “we engineer and manufacture all our loudspeakers and drivers in Italy.” That is consistent with B&C’s statement that Ciare products are made through Eighteen Sound in Reggio Emilia, and we give it as the company’s claim.

Its website uses the Open Sans typeface, a dark graphite and a bright blue, with the logo in white, and carries the tagline “Where Passion Meets Precision: Italian Audio Mastery.” We found no published brand guidelines. The site was built by the agency Dinamo Digitale, and its footer gives Eighteen Sound’s address on Via A. Botticelli in Reggio Emilia.

Ciare’s new owner is large by the standards of this trade. B&C Speakers, founded in Florence in the mid-1940s and listed in Milan since 2007, had revenue of €99.1 million in 2025 and lists Ciare among its brands with B&C, Eighteen Sound and Eminence. Eighteen Sound, which bought the Ciare trademark, had itself begun in 1997 as a unit of AEB, a Reggio Emilia maker of electronics for gas-powered cars, and passed to the Landi Renzo group in 2010. B&C’s accounts treat the whole group as a single business, acoustic transducers, so Ciare’s own sales and staff are not reported separately, and we found no other figures for them.

For a design guide, Ciare shows how an acronym brand can survive several changes of owner by keeping its name. Compare Eighteen Sound, which bought it, and B&C Speakers, which now owns both. For this guide we use graphite and a blue with a sans, close to the website but an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ciare’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.