I was Engineering Manager for Casablanca Fan so I think I can shed some light on this subject. Casablanca used to be an independent company, it was bought out by Hunter Fan so they are in actuality the same company. However, Casablanca is considered the higher end fan and used to only be sold in lighting showrooms, and not in big box stores. Based on what I've heard it appears that Hunter has reduced the quality of the Casablanca line so my knowledge may be somewhat out of date. However, the Casablanca line used special wound motors that were much quieter (and expensive) than the standard motors and great efforts was put into making sure the noise of the wind coming off the fan blades was louder than the motor at any speed. Also, I noticed one of the writers here said all the fans came from the same few places in China. To the most extent this is correct, however, it was not true of the Casablanca Fans. One of the distinguishing factors the older line of Casablanca fans had was they used die cast bodies, which are far more expensive to manufacture, but allowed much more sculpted designs. Another factor that went into Casablanca Fans was the fan blades were carefully matched so all the blades were exactly the same weight. This goes a long way to making the fans much more dynamically stable. Most of the competitors only check that the blades visually appear the same.