Georg Neumann
Encyclopedia
Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung
Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung is a type of legal entityvery common in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and other Central European countries...
(Neumann), founded in 1928 and based in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, is a prominent manufacturer of professional recording microphone
Microphone
A microphone is an acoustic-to-electric transducer or sensor that converts sound into an electrical signal. In 1877, Emile Berliner invented the first microphone used as a telephone voice transmitter...
s. Their best-known products are condenser microphones for broadcast, live and music production purposes. For several decades Neumann was also a leading manufacturer of cutting lathes for phonograph disks, and even ventured into the field of mixing desks for a while.
Early years
The company's original product was the CMV 3, the world's first commercially available condenser microphone. It was a rather large (40 cm tall, 9 cm diameter) microphone with several interchangeable capsule heads which gave it different directional patterns. Because of its shape and size, this microphone was often known as the "Neumann bottle". It is often seen in historical photographs of public events in Germany through the period of World War IIWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
.
Neumann's factory in Berlin was damaged by Allied firebombing in November, 1943. Georg Neumann relocated his company to the much smaller town of Gefell
Gefell
Gefell is a town in the Saale-Orla-Kreis district, in Thuringia, Germany. It is situated 16 km south of Schleiz, and 14 km northwest of Hof. It is where the Berlin professional audio company Georg Neumann GmbH relocated during World War II. During the time of the GDR, Gefell was in East...
and resumed production at the beginning of the following year. At the close of the war, this province fell under Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
control and the company eventually became a "people's corporation" (i.e. a state-run enterprise). After the reunification of Germany, the company in Gefell, which had continued to use the Neumann name, became known as Microtech Gefell
Microtech Gefell
Founded by Georg Neumann, Microtech Gefell was originally known as Georg Neumann & Company Gefell, and is considered by many in the audio recording industry to be the true bearer of the well-known Neumann name....
.
Meanwhile, Georg Neumann re-established his company as "Georg Neumann GmbH" in one of the Allied sectors of Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
and in 1949 began producing a new model of switchable pattern microphone, the U 47
U 47
The U 47 was a large-diaphragm condenser microphone manufactured by Georg Neumann GmbH during the years 1949-1965.The U 47 used the M 7 capsule originally developed for the CMV 3 microphone...
, based on the M 7 capsule of the earlier CMV 3 series. This microphone was one of the first condenser microphones to gain widespread acceptance in the recording industry worldwide.
In the United States, for example, the "sound" of the best-known crooner
Crooner
Crooner is an American epithet given to male singers of pop standards, mostly from the Great American Songbook, either backed by a full orchestra, a big band or by a piano. Originally it was an ironic term denoting an emphatically sentimental, often emotional singing style made possible by the use...
s of the 1940s (e.g. Bing Crosby
Bing Crosby
Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby was an American singer and actor. Crosby's trademark bass-baritone voice made him one of the best-selling recording artists of the 20th century, with over half a billion records in circulation....
and later Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King"....
) had utilized the ultra-smooth, rolled-off
Roll-off
Roll-off is a term commonly used to describe the steepness of a transmission function with frequency, particularly in electrical network analysis, and most especially in connection with filter circuits in the transition between a passband and a stopband...
tone of RCA ribbon microphones; pop
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...
recordings in the 1950s (e.g. Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra was an American singer and actor.Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the...
and later The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
) on the other hand were sharper, clearer, much more "present" and more "hi-fi"-sounding as the result of using condenser microphones with elevated upper-mid-range response. The U 47, which was distributed worldwide under the Telefunken
Telefunken
Telefunken is a German radio and television apparatus company, founded in Berlin in 1903, as a joint venture of Siemens & Halske and the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft...
brand name, was also used for some early classical orchestral recordings in stereo.
Postwar period
Other important microphones introduced by Neumann during the immediate postwar period included the M 49 and M 50, both based on designs researched and engineered at the NWDR in Germany. The M 49 used the M 7 capsule in a configuration whose directional pattern was remotely controlled, the first microphone to offer such a feature. The M 50 featured a small, diffuse-field equalized pressure transducer embedded in the surface of a 40 mm hard plastic sphere, which gave it increasing directionality above the mid-range frequencies. The company also produced equipment for electroacoustic measurement, including calibrated measurement microphones and chart recorders.During the period from 1953 to 1956 Neumann introduced a series of small condenser microphones (KM 53, 54 and 56) especially for use in television broadcast studios. In 1957 they introduced the SM 2 microphone, which was essentially a pair of KM 56 microphones in a single body, arranged so that their directional patterns could be controlled remotely. The SM 2 was the world's first stereo
STEREO
STEREO is a solar observation mission. Two nearly identical spacecraft were launched into orbits that cause them to respectively pull farther ahead of and fall gradually behind the Earth...
microphone.
The end of the fifties
At the end of the 1950s, the Telefunken VF 14 vacuum tubeVacuum tube
In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube , or thermionic valve , reduced to simply "tube" or "valve" in everyday parlance, is a device that relies on the flow of electric current through a vacuum...
on which the circuitry of the U 47 and U 48 had been based, was discontinued, so Neumann came under pressure to develop a successor. They decided to offer all three of those two models' directional patterns in a single microphone. In the meantime, the rock 'n' roll era had begun and some engineers were recording loud vocals with singers singing directly into microphones at very close range; when the U 47 or U 48 were used in this way, the result was considered by many engineers at the time to sound unacceptably harsh. (This could be considered ironic, since the U 47 and U 48 have a cult following today specifically for use in close-up vocals, with some engineers seeming to fancy that they are re-creating a "vintage" sound—whereas in fact, they are creating a sound quality that was specifically abhorred by many of the "golden ears" of the era—notable exceptions being Beatles producer George Martin and engineers Norman Smith and Geoff Emerick.) The result was the U 67, a microphone with less emphasis in its upper midrange response, giving it less of a "forward" tone color.
The sixties
In 1964 Neumann developed a small cardioidCardioid
A cardioid is a plane curve traced by a point on the perimeter of a circle that is rolling around a fixed circle of the same radius. It is therefore a type of limaçon and can also be defined as an epicycloid having a single cusp...
capsule with considerably improved off-axis linearity; it was used in the KM 64 and U 64 microphones.
In 1965 Neumann began to introduce solid-state microphones. The first model was the KTM small cardioid, later followed by the "fet 70" series—transistorized versions of small omnidirectional, cardioid and speech cardioid microphones as well as a "U 77" transistorized version of the U 67. This series used the 12-volt A-B powering system (parallel powering, T-power or "Tonaderspeisung") as found in Nagra tape recorders, and was therefore incompatible with existing studio power supplies. However, standard two-conductor shielded cables (as were commonly used for dynamic microphones) could now be used for connecting condenser microphones as well, obviating the need for special multi-conductor cables.
Phantom power
Phantom power, in the context of professional audio equipment, is a method for transmitting DC electric power through microphone cables to operate microphones that contain active electronic circuitry....
method that had been used for years in certain telephone systems, so that a compatible method of powering would allow tube microphones, solid-state microphones and dynamic microphones all to be connected to the same power supplies. Eventually the "fet 80" series grew to include over a dozen models, some of which are still in production as of 2007—the U 87, U 89, KMR 81, KMR 82 and USM 69. The best-known models from this series were the KM 84 small diaphragm cardioid and the U 87 three-pattern, large diaphragm successor to the U 67.
The eighties and beyond
In 1983 Neumann began to introduce microphones with balanced outputs but no output transformerTransformer
A transformer is a device that transfers electrical energy from one circuit to another through inductively coupled conductors—the transformer's coils. A varying current in the first or primary winding creates a varying magnetic flux in the transformer's core and thus a varying magnetic field...
, starting with the model TLM 170. Eventually this "fet 100" or "transformerless" series was expanded to include the KM 100 modular series of small microphones (with seven different "active capsules" for various directional patterns), the cardioid TLM 193 (using the capsule of the U 89 and TLM 170), the small-diaphragm
Diaphragm (acoustics)
In the field of acoustics, a diaphragm is a transducer intended to faithfully inter-convert mechanical motion and sound. It is commonly constructed of a thin membrane or sheet of various materials. The varying air pressure of the sound waves imparts vibrations onto the diaphragm which can then be...
KM 180 series, the large-diaphragm cardioid TLM 103, the variable-pattern TLM 127 and the TLM 49 cardioid vocal microphone.
Beginning in 1995 the company introduced a series of vacuum tube
Vacuum tube
In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube , or thermionic valve , reduced to simply "tube" or "valve" in everyday parlance, is a device that relies on the flow of electric current through a vacuum...
microphones with transformerless output circuitry: the multi-pattern M 149 Tube, the cardioid M 147 Tube, and the omnidirectional M 150 Tube (based on the classic M 50 design, with the pressure transducer mounted in the surface of a sphere inside the capsule head).
In 2003 Neumann introduced their first microphone with built-in analog-to-digital conversion, the Solution-D D-01. In 2006, the D-01 was followed with a modular, small-diaphragm series of digital microphones, KM D, based on the KM 100/180 series.
In 2005, Neumann began production of its first dynamic microphone, the BCM 705, for the broadcast industry.
Neumann was acquired by Sennheiser
Sennheiser
Sennheiser electronic GmbH & Co. KG is a private German audio company specializing in the design and production of a wide range of both consumer and high fidelity products, including microphones, headphones, telephony accessories, and avionics headsets for consumer, professional, and business...
electronic GmbH in 1991. Production of Neumann microphones was moved into a newly built level 100 cleanroom factory in Wedemark
Wedemark
Wedemark is a municipality in the district of Hanover, in Lower Saxony, Germany. Wedemark is a historical landscape description for the area and is situated approx. 20 km north of Hanover...
, near Hannover. The company maintains its official headquarters in Berlin.