Neumann History 1928 - 1998 English

Georg Neumann GmbH, • Ollenhauerstr. 98 • D-13403 Berlin • Tel.: +49-30 / 41 77 24-0 • Fax: +49-30 / 41 77 24-50 E-Mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] • Website: www.neumann.com Neumann History 1928 - 1998

Georg Neumann – Neumann had never been one to settle for compromises. In An Inventor and His Life’s Work and of itself, the was indeed a sensation. Con- Company founder Georg Neumann was born sumed by the idea of mass pro- on 13 October 1898, in Chorin, some 80 km ducing a microphone using the Northeast of Berlin. He received his vocation- capacitative transducer princi- al training at the firm of Mix & Genest in ple, he soon parted company Berlin. Later he worked in a research labora- with Reisz to found his own tory at AEG’s Oberspree Cable Works where firm in Berlin, together with the focus was on building amplifiers. Eugen Erich Rickmann, on 23 No- Reisz was director of this laboratory. A short vember 1928. while later, he founded his own firm and took on Georg Neumann as an employee. Since until then the only place in which it was possible to manufacture a condenser micro- In those days, the commonly phone was in the laboratory, his plans for in- used for sound recordings were carbon micro- dustrial production seemed rather fantastic. phones. These resembled a shoe polish tin, partially filled with carbon grains, with open- ings on one side to admit the sound. These The Neumann Bottle openings were backed by fine gauze to pre- vent the carbon grains from falling out. By modern standards, the quality of these micro- The CMV 3 was the first ever mass produced phones was dreadful. The transducer princi- condenser microphone, far superior to the ple used in these microphones was also jok- Reisz microphone, and it gained recognition ingly referred to as a “controlled loose con- under the nickname of the ‘Neumann Bottle’. nection”. It wasn’t exactly small, measuring approx. 9 cm in diameter and approx. 40 cm in height. Its weight of nearly 3 kg made reporting a very Georg Neumann examined this microphone, strenuous job. scattered powdered carbon on a marble slab, inserted two electrodes, introduced a direct , a subsidiary of AEG and Siemens, current, and spoke into this configuration. took on the marketing rights to Neumann’s A corresponding response microphone. which, by Georg Neumann’s account, was very “thin”, em- Between 1928 and the end of World War II anated from the attached the Bottle’s design remained virtually un- loudspeaker. changed, during which time it became firmly established as the standard for studio use and Next Neumann stretched a was used extensively in the 1936 Olympic rubber membrane over the Games in Berlin. At this time there existed al- contraption, spoke into it ready a selection of exchangeable capsule again, and suddenly the low heads with different polar patterns. frequencies were there. A new microphone was born, the Reisz marble block micro- phone.

It was into this microphone that the first German radio station, a Berlin station broad- casting on the 400 m band, sounded its “first yawp” from Vox House on Potsdamer Platz in 1923.

With a linear frequency response between 50 Hz and 1 kHz this microphone had an ex- cess of 10 dB up to 4 kHz, which decreased to approximately 15 dB at 10 kHz. Not quite what we would call a studio microphone these days.

2 3 Neumann History 1928 - 1998

More than Just Microphones ... pressure which could be controlled optically with great accuracy within the 20 Hz to 600 Hz range via the movement of a piston By 1928 Neumann had spread his attention which displaces a given volume of air. The to other aspects of studio engineering, such amplitude of the piston was observed through as record making. It was his inte