Founded by

Georg Neumann Georg Neumann GmbH (Neumann), founded in 1928 and based in Berlin, Germany, is a prominent manufacturer of professional recording microphones. Their best-known products are condenser microphones for broadcast, live and music production purposes ...

, Microtech Gefell was originally known as Georg Neumann & Company Gefell.

Gefell Gefell is a town in the Saale-Orla-Kreis district, in Thuringia, Germany. Overview 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 durin ...

is the name of the town to which Georg Neumann fled from

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

in 1943. An

incendiary bomb Incendiary weapons, incendiary devices, incendiary munitions, or incendiary bombs are weapons designed to start fires or destroy sensitive equipment using fire (and sometimes used as anti-personnel weaponry), that use materials such as napalm, th ...

had destroyed most of his original factory earlier that year. He brought his family, his technical director Erich Kühnast, his legal adviser Mr. Drechsler and around 20 employees with him, and soon set up shop in an abandoned textile factory. Production continued in Gefell of the microphone models made since the 1930s in Berlin, including the M7 capsule developed by Walter Weber and Hans Joachim von Braunmuhl of the

Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft The Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (RRG; ''Reich Broadcasting Corporation'') was a national network of German regional public radio and television broadcasting companies active from 1925 until 1945. RRG's broadcasts were receivable in all parts o ...

. By 1948, Neumann had moved back to his home in Berlin, which was finally relinquished by the military, and started up a new company called Georg Neumann GmbH. When the

Berlin Wall The Berlin Wall (german: Berliner Mauer, ) was a guarded concrete barrier that encircled West Berlin from 1961 to 1989, separating it from East Berlin and East Germany (GDR). Construction of the Berlin Wall was commenced by the government ...

was erected in 1961, Neumann's Berlin and Gefell workshops were separated. In 1972, pressured by the GDR, the company changed its name to VEB Mikrofontechnik Gefell. As a January 2004 ''Sound on Sound'' article stated: "Currently under the technical supervision of Kühnast's son, Microtech Gefell still produces the M7 capsule in exactly the same way Georg Neumann taught the elder Kühnast in the 1940s — hand drilling each hole in the backplate, making the PVC membrane, and gluing it all together by hand just as Neumann specified!"Robjohns, Hugh; "Microtech Gefell M930"; ''Sound on Sound'' January 2004; http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan04/articles/microtechgefell.htm?print=yes Throughout the

GDR East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the state ...

period, the Gefell factory grew and supplied measurement and studio microphones to much of the

east bloc The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc and the Soviet Bloc, was the group of socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America under the influence of the Soviet Union that existed du ...

. The original operation grew to about 160 employees by the late 1980s, and the East German government funded construction of a new building which now houses research and production for measurement and studio microphones. The company is owned by Georg Neumann KG, the descendant of the original firm that was nationalised by the GDR in 1972 and which is now owned by the Kühnast and Drechsler families. Today the Microtech Gefell factory produces a range of studio and measurement microphones that are sold through distributors worldwide. Three generations of the Kühnast family and two of the Drechsler family are involved in management of the enterprise.

Sources

*"Microtech Gefell 75 Year History"; https://web.archive.org/web/20040502160450/http://www.microtechgefell.de/eng/history/HistoriePDF/E_History%20Microtech%20Gefell%20_pdf.pdf *Cucoo, Jeremy; "Microtech-Gefell M296"; Recording.org

*"The History of Microtech Gefell"; Mercenary Audio; https://web.archive.org/web/20070914105604/http://www.mercenary.com/hiofmige.html *Robjohns, Hugh; "Microtech Gefell M930"; ''Sound on Sound'' January 2004; http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan04/articles/microtechgefell.htm?print=yes

References

{{reflist Companies based in Thuringia German brands Audio equipment manufacturers of Germany Microphone manufacturers

Sources

See also

References