A family business in Milan.

Faital’s name is a contraction: Fabbrica Italiana Altoparlanti, Italian Loudspeaker Factory. The company says it was founded in Milan in 1958 as “a small family-run business”; its corporate website names the founder as Raffaele Minafra. By the late 1960s, it says, it supplied 40 per cent of Italian demand and was first in loudspeakers for radio and television.

Cars changed the business. Faital says it entered the automotive market in the 1970s, opened a plant at Chieve, near Crema, in 1974, and became an official supplier to car makers in the 1980s; it does not name them. In the early 1990s it set up Sofaital S.A. in France, with a plant at Argenteuil, north-west of Paris, and a facility at Vacarisses in Spain; in 2004 it opened a Hungarian plant at Salgótarján, in the north of the country, for automotive work, run by a company whose name, MHG Kft., abbreviates the Hungarian for Hungarian Loudspeaker Factory. It calls itself “the leading European manufacturer of loudspeakers for the automotive industry,” a claim we give as its own.

Its head office is at San Donato Milanese, just south-east of Milan; Chieve lies in the province of Cremona. Faital’s corporate site names Raffaele Minafra as founder; the FaitalPRO site names no one.

A pro line and a Japanese owner.

FaitalPRO, its professional-audio brand, came in 2006, according to the corporate site; the brand’s own site says only “the new millennium.” It markets itself as “Professional Loudspeakers Made in Italy,” and the corporate site says Chieve is “the production facility where both automotive and professional loudspeakers are manufactured,” while the Hungarian plant makes automotive products only. A US company, Faital USA, at Pompton Plains in New Jersey, handles logistics. The parent company, Faital S.p.A., has share capital of €4,152,000.

Faital is now part of a Japanese group. The Japanese electronics and car-audio group Alps Alpine held 19.9 per cent and, on 27 June 2019, bought another 60.1 per cent, taking its stake to 80 per cent, according to its 2020 integrated report; it paid €26.6 million in cash, for a total acquisition cost of €34.8 million including the €8.1 million fair value of its existing stake, and recorded goodwill of ¥1,143 million. Its 2021 report describes the June 2019 deal as the formation of a “capital and business alliance with Faital S.p.A.” The FaitalPRO website now carries the Alps Alpine group’s logo. The report treats 30 June 2019 as the deemed date of acquisition. Faital’s corporate site and the FaitalPRO site are separate, at faital.com and faitalpro.com. Faital dates the partnership to 2018, a year before the reported purchase, and calls itself “now an integral part of the ALPS ALPINE Group.”

Its website footer now describes Faital S.p.A. as having a sole shareholder, which suggests full ownership, but we found no document dating the purchase of the last 20 per cent, so we do not state it.

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.

Faital shows a third route into that trade: a car-speaker supplier that added a professional line under its own name.

PRO in capitals.

The FaitalPRO wordmark sets “PRO” in capitals after the company name, and the phrase “Professional Loudspeakers Made in Italy” appears in both its page title and its logo text, and its website uses the condensed Oswald typeface. We found no published brand guidelines or documented colours.

We found no separate revenue or staff figures for Faital or FaitalPRO; Alps Alpine’s reports treat it as a subsidiary. Nor did we find details of the family’s ownership before the Japanese investment, beyond the company’s own description of a family-run business.

By age, Faital sits in the middle of the Italian driver brands in this guide: B&C Speakers dates itself to the mid-1940s and Ciare to 1947 or 1951, while Eighteen Sound began in 1997 and Lavoce in 2008. Faital’s route into professional audio was also different: it came from car audio, where loudspeakers are sold to car makers as parts for factory-fitted systems, and added FaitalPRO only in 2006.

For a design guide, FaitalPRO shows how a sub-brand can carry an old company into a new market while the parent changes hands. Compare B&C Speakers, a listed Italian driver maker, and Lavoce, an Italian-designed driver brand made in China. For this guide we use black and a red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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