Georg Neumann GMBH - a microphones saga

 

A Brief History of Neumann 

1928 – Foundation

A Brief History of Neumann - Part 1

The histories of Neumann and Microtech Gefell are intrinsically linked, making it impossible to discuss one without mentioning the other. For this reason, I will present the evolution of both companies in parallel. Their fates were deeply influenced by the geopolitical situation in Germany during the post-war period. One might wonder how things would have unfolded if the town of Gefell had been just a few kilometers further south, outside the DDR bloc. Today, both companies should be equally regarded as references of quality in the audio industry.

This text would not have been possible without the work of Anselm Rößler, author of the book Neumann - The Microphone Company (a highly recommended read). Here, we summarize the information presented by him, complemented by data from various sources.

Introduction

Among the pantheon of legendary professional audio brands, Neumann undoubtedly wears the crown. Everyone, from seasoned engineers to studio assistants and musicians, has some level of familiarity with the name.

Georg Neumann (1898–1976), one of the most influential pioneers in early microphone manufacturing, was born on October 13, 1898, in Chorin, Germany. Chorin lies 80 km northeast of Berlin, near the Oder-Havel Canal. Its most notable landmark is the Chorin Monastery, founded in 1273, which today stands as one of the most beautiful examples of brick Gothic architecture.

According to Rößler, Georg’s father, Albert Neumann, worked as a railway crossing guard, while his mother, Auguste, was a homemaker. Georg was the youngest of four siblings, with a significant age gap between him and his older brothers. Until the age of 14, he attended school in Chorin, spending his free time tinkering and experimenting. However, there’s no evidence that his exceptional talent was recognized or nurtured during his early years.

Personality

Georg Neumann was not a talkative man but an astute observer of his surroundings. He trusted his employees and refrained from micromanaging, allowing his team the freedom to explore new methods and research directions. His suggestions were insightful, and his interventions were always well-considered. He led the company with a subtle, almost invisible hand.

Ernst Weiß, a Neumann employee, once described his leadership style:

“He was very democratic. He would come up with ideas and offer advice on solving a particular problem. He’d say, ‘Why not try it this way?’ or ‘What about using a different material?’ In the end, his ideas usually prevailed.”

Neumann also valued his employees’ well-being. He organized multi-day trips for the entire company to destinations like Hamburg or the Baltic Sea. These trips included evening entertainment and raffles. One employee recounted attending at least ten such outings.

During the 1950s and 1960s, morale within the company was high. The business was thriving, and employees were highly motivated, often staying loyal to the company throughout their careers. When someone reached ten years of service, celebrations often included humorous remarks like, “Your probation period is finally over!”

While Neumann entrusted financial management to his staff, he preferred to focus on the technical side of the business. Even in his later years, he remained curious and eager to learn. His son Ralph once remarked, “I doubt he experienced a single moment of boredom in his life.” Neumann admired figures like Edison and Bell, both for their lives and their inventions. He was an avid reader and often spent hours pondering technical challenges.

His daughter, Ingrid Canetti, recalled his home laboratory:

“It was filled with all sorts of things, and he often worked there until 4 a.m., for example, on his stereo cutting lathe.”

Was he proud of his accomplishments? “No,” Ingrid said. “He was too modest for that.” Ralph Neumann believed his father found satisfaction in his achievements but saw money primarily as a form of affirmation rather than a means for personal indulgence.

Family Life

Georg Neumann and his family enjoyed spending time in Wannsee, Berlin, where he loved water sports and piloted a motorboat for the local water-ski club. It was in Wannsee in 1929 that he met his future wife, Elly. They married the following year, and their daughter Ingrid was born in 1931, followed by their son Ralph in 1934. Since the 1950s, both children have lived near Paris.

Elly played a significant role in Georg’s life, acting as his connection to the outside world. While he was reserved and modest, she was lively and extroverted, organizing the family’s social life. Ralph recalled:

“I think my mother was the only person he spoke to extensively.”

Georg was a caring and attentive father. Ingrid reminisced about their long walks, during which he would explain the workings of an ant colony or help with school assignments. “He’d copy my homework and take it to another room, checking in periodically to see how I was doing. If I got stuck, he would guide me without doing the work for me,” she said.

Ralph added:

“As long as we were happy, he was happy. If I had told him I wanted to be a shoemaker, he wouldn’t have batted an eye. What mattered to him was our happiness.”

Mix & Genest

Although Georg Neumann did not pursue formal education leading to a university degree, at the age of 15, he began vocational training with the firm Mix & Genest in Berlin. His father, Albert, paid the princely sum of 300 marks for this apprenticeship.

Mix & Genest was primarily a manufacturer of telephones. By the 1950s, it had become part of SEL (Standard Electric Lorenz) and is now owned by Alcatel. Reflecting on his apprenticeship, Neumann wrote:

 "During the first two years, we received practical training in filing and turning; afterward, we could choose a department. I opted for the laboratory where they were working on wireless telegraphy and amplifier valves."

Neumann was a diligent and enthusiastic student. Alongside his apprenticeship, he attended evening classes at the Abendschule Gauss to expand his knowledge of physics and electrical engineering. He deeply appreciated any information he could access, as resources to deepen his understanding were scarce at the time. Occasionally, Mix & Genest provided him with textbooks and a journal on wireless telegraphy, which he eagerly consumed.

For the young Neumann, this apprenticeship opened the door to a new world of technology that he could explore and investigate. It was during this period that he met his future business partner, Erich Rickmann, as well as two individuals who would later become his employees, Erich Kühnast and Hans Heyda. However, the foundation of his company was still far off. In 1917, World War I was wreaking havoc across Europe.

AEG

Subsequently, Neumann joined the research department at AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft AG), focusing on the design and production of audio amplifiers. According to Rößler, Neumann later recalled that his health was fragile at the time, but he was still deemed fit for community service. After completing his apprenticeship in August 1917, he was assigned to the skilled workers’ battalion in Luckenwalde. Appalled by the unsanitary conditions he encountered there, he responded to a job posting for a position at AEG’s cable factory in Oberspree.

At that time, the amplifier factory was primarily producing Lieben valves. Meanwhile, the research and development department was working on a range of technical innovations, including ground resistance listening devices used to intercept enemy telephone conversations.

For Neumann, this marked the beginning of a deeper immersion into the world of technology, laying the groundwork for his future innovations in audio engineering.

The company, originally named Georg Neumann & Co., was founded on November 23, 1928 (in Berlin, at Brandenburgstraße 43, currently called Lobeckstraße) by Georg Neumann and Erich Rickmann, accompanied, as the chronicle notes, by three mechanics: Erwin Semmler, who had previously worked in Rickmann’s radio shop, and two former employees of Mix & Genest, Fritz Jörn and a certain Mr. Knorr. Their long personal friendship and, in particular, the experience they had gained as engineers in the industry formed a solid foundation for the success of this new venture.

Their desire to find solutions and overcome technological obstacles with fundamentally new approaches essentially laid the groundwork for modern microphone design, while also contributing significantly to other areas of the professional audio, broadcast, and recording markets. From the revolutionary Reisz microphone to cutting-edge electroacoustic measuring instruments and pioneering disc-cutting technology, their quietly tenacious appetite for innovation pushed the boundaries of what was technologically achievable and gave rise to some of the most iconic recording equipment ever made.

Work began in a 75 m² room with a workforce of three mechanics. At that time, the first electrically driven disc-cutting machine—used primarily for recording sound onto vinyl—was produced.

According to Rößler, in the early days things were difficult, as Fritz Jörn would later recall:

“I was shocked when I first saw how primitive the workshop was. Our equipment consisted of nothing more than a small lathe, a small direct-drive drill, and a homemade block for sharpening steel. I asked Mr. Rickmann if he could guarantee me long-term employment. He replied that he couldn’t give any guarantees, but hoped it would be for the long term.”

Rickmann was not disappointed in his hopes, because even with those primitive tools, as the company chronicle recorded in 1938:

“They were able to produce the first electrically driven gramophone disc-cutting machines. However, because the contact microphones then used for sound recording were not of sufficiently high quality, they first had to develop a better type of microphone. The result was the successful development and integration into the system of a condenser microphone that remains in production to this day.”

Georg Neumann showed this new microphone to Deutscher Rundfunk, with whom he still had good contacts from his time working with Reisz. When they understandably expressed interest, he made a few capsules and mounted them in a small black metal box. This microphone, which at the time still had no name, turned out to be his great breakthrough. As Jörn recalls:

“The first microphones looked very different; the amplifier was housed on a rectangular chassis. We couldn’t really measure these things back then, but it sounded different and brought out the treble better. Later measurements at Deutscher Rundfunk, however, revealed that the shape was unsuitable, as reflections from its large surface area caused distortion in the sound field. So we built this big ‘bottle’ shape with an egg perched on top, and the capsule mounted in front of it.”

Because the contact microphones used at the time for sound recording no longer met the needs of the day, better microphones first had to be created. The first model of the condenser microphone was developed and successfully put into practice. Simultaneously, a new design for an electromagnetic cutting head and a pickup for wax discs was introduced.

The idea behind this new company was to manufacture microphones following the capacitive transducer concept (invented in 1916 by E.C. Wente, an engineer at Western Electric). Neumann believed that developing better microphones would complement his efforts related to the development of vinyl-cutting machines. He was a highly skilled mechanic and managed to make important advances in creating microphones for practical use, capable of withstanding daily wear and tear. Until then, available condenser microphones—such as delicate measurement microphones—were too fragile. Unlike the metallic-diaphragm capsules, Neumann developed capsules using new plastic materials such as PVC and gold cathodic sputtering. As a result, the frequency response was far better than anything he had been able to achieve with the carbon Reisz microphones.

A Brief History of Neumann - Part 2

Eugen Reisz

Landing a job at AEG proved to be a stroke of luck that decisively influenced the course of his life, for it was there that he met Eugen Reisz (Hungarian physicist, 1879–1957), the department’s technical director. Reisz encouraged and supported him, and it was under Reisz’s supervision that he would invent the “Reisz Microphone” a few years later. Reisz was one of the leading research engineers of the time; he had studied with Robert von Lieben during the period when von Lieben was conducting research on amplification using his cathode-ray relay, and the two had also worked together in von Lieben’s laboratory in Vienna. Eugen Reisz should not be confused with Philipp Reis who, in 1860, conceived the principle of the microphone.

For Neumann—who was fascinated by new technology and loved to experiment—this job was ideal. Each day, he gained a little more experience and was free to conduct all sorts of scientific experiments. But then the war ended, and the laboratory was closed.

Film and Sound

As co-owner of several of von Lieben’s patents, Eugen Reisz, Neumann’s department head and the laboratory’s technical director, was relatively well off—indeed, it was said that he had even received the royalties that had accumulated in the United States during the war. Being an inventor and pioneer, he was naturally drawn to the emerging film industry and to the problem of putting sound onto film. Equally naturally, when embarking on this new challenge, he was eager to keep his best researcher, Georg Neumann, by his side.

Film sound technology was the subject of intensive research in the period just after World War I, as movies rose in popularity. It was in 1917 that Universum Film AG (UFA)—for which Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau would later direct—was founded. It was an exciting—indeed tumultuous—time for other reasons, too: with the November Revolution, the abdication of the Kaiser, the Spartacist uprising, and the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Berlin.

Eugen Reisz bought a large house in Berlin’s Zehlendorf suburb, where he set up a laboratory. He and Neumann began researching their own system for film sound. “Reisz had ideas,” Neumann remembered, “that could never have worked, because he wanted to overlay the soundtrack as a kind of relief, like on a gramophone record, directly onto the film.”

The film was exposed through a shutter controlled by a thin plastic diaphragm, with the sound being recorded mechanically via a large funnel-shaped horn. When the film was developed, the exposed areas were thicker and more rigid than the unexposed areas; Reisz’s plan was to read the resulting contours. As Neumann would later explain: “We managed to produce the relief, which we had to scan mechanically, since electric pickups had not yet been invented. It worked, more or less, so we built a camera and made some recordings. The quality wasn’t particularly good—by modern standards, we would say it was dreadful—but this was largely because the soundtrack was recorded mechanically using a horn, so we decided to try using microphones instead.” The performance of those microphones was also well below that of other links in the recording chain, and it was the desire to remedy this weakness that is generally cited as Neumann’s motivation to embark on microphone research.

The Reisz Microphone

In the early 1920s, sound recordings were still being made with carbon microphones of the type used in telephones at the time: these resembled shoe-polish cans filled with carbon granules. On one side of the can, there were small openings through which sound could enter, backed by a fine mesh to prevent the granules from falling out. By today’s standards, the quality of these microphones was terrible, and even at the time, their transduction principle was disparagingly referred to as “controlled bad contact.”

While researching film sound, Neumann realized that this technology was inadequate for his needs. Recalling his first major discovery, he wrote:

“Reisz was out of the country, and while he was away, I tried a few experiments: I sprinkled some powdered carbon onto a marble slab, inserted some electrodes, and spoke into it. You could hear something, but the low frequencies were missing. Then I stretched a rubber diaphragm over it, and suddenly the low frequencies were back. That was the start of the Reisz Microphone, and when Reisz returned from his trip, we decided to forget about film and concentrate on manufacturing microphones.

We used marble because tin’s self-resonance is very pronounced. We wanted no resonance other than that of the rubber diaphragm, which was so heavily damped that the frequency response, as far as we could judge by ear, was very good.”

Neumann’s ears were not deceiving him. The microphone with the marble block came very close to linearity between 50 Hz and 1 kHz; in the region between 1 kHz and 4 kHz, there was a 10 dB increase in response, falling by about 15 dB at 10 kHz. At the time, this was sensational performance.

Beginning in 1923, the microphone was skillfully marketed by Reisz, becoming known as the “Reisz Microphone.” Over the following years, it became established as the broadcast industry standard, replacing the old carbon-granule capsules found in telephones and the “catodophone.” In 1923, Germany’s first radio station, in Berlin, used the now-famous Reisz microphone with its marble block, which had largely been developed by Georg Neumann. As Neumann recalled:

“A catodophone was being used in broadcasting, but it didn’t sound good. So we installed some microphones in the Vox House (the Berlin headquarters of Germany’s first radio station, located at Potsdamer Platz) and made some comparisons. Ours was by far the best in the building, and that’s how we got our first orders.”

In the early 1920s, the market was ready for radio and film sound. In 1920, the world’s first regular radio program was broadcast in the U.S. by KDKA. In the autumn of 1922, the BBC was founded in London, and around the same time, the first talkie, Der Brandstifter (“The Arsonist”), was screened in Berlin. However, the Triergon or Lichttonverfahren (“sound-on-film”) system developed by the German inventors Vogt, Engl, and Massolle did not come into its own until the second half of the decade, as the film industry preferred to continue making silent films, with dialogue delivered between takes in the form of subtitles. Then, on October 29, 1923, at 8 p.m., broadcasting from a studio in the Vox House, Berlin, Germany’s first radio station, Radiostunde AG, went on the air with a program of popular entertainment. A beginning had been made.

Now Reisz bought another house, in which he set up a workshop alongside the laboratory, employing several mechanics to build microphones that sold for 600 marks each. It was a considerable sum, but not unreasonable, as Neumann himself explained:

“We might make 20 microphones a month. In the beginning, business was slow because there simply weren’t that many radio stations. Even so, we got enough orders to make it worthwhile. People didn’t consider the price excessive because the product was our own invention.”

The Reisz Microphone was universally acclaimed in the press for its “very high quality” and found widespread use in the (then-infant) broadcasting industry, in film-recording applications, and for public-address systems.

In parallel with the development of the Reisz Microphone, Georg Neumann found time to conduct research and experiments in a variety of other fields, including capacitive loudspeakers, various types of amplifier, special valve circuits, and even condenser microphones—whose effectiveness, however, was hampered by the thickness of the diaphragm at that time.

Stay in England

Around 1925, Neumann met Kurt Breusing of the company Lignose AG, which was working on film sound and the synchronization of discs with film.

“Breusing showed up one day and started asking me all sorts of questions about microphones. He and I got to talking, and he told me he was working on a film-sound system. Later, when I returned his visit, I could see for myself: his system for sound was actually very good, and he wanted to try it in a large cinema.”

Through Breusing, Neumann became acquainted with Eugen Beyer, the founder of Beyerdynamic, who had studied with Breusing at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin and was also devoting most of his time to research in the field of film sound.

The three audio pioneers became close friends and were constantly exchanging ideas; the Beyer and Neumann families even vacationed together. Unfortunately, Breusing fell seriously ill in the early 1930s and withdrew from the scene. Recurring themes in their discussions on sound equipment included gramophone discs and the cutting machines used to produce them, since it was Breusing’s idea to use synchronized discs to provide film sound. However, the technology of recording machines and disc cutters was not yet fully developed at the time, and once again Georg Neumann’s ingenuity was called upon.

Though still employed by Reisz, Neumann had bought a lathe, which his friend and future partner Erich Rickmann—who now owned a flourishing radio shop—was looking after for him. He, Rickmann, and Rickmann’s mechanic, Erwin Semmler, worked together there on a cutting machine for gramophone discs. Meanwhile, Breusing visited interested parties in England and returned with a commission to build a complete system for gramophone record production. Neumann described his dilemma:

“They wanted me to develop the recording system, but I was still employed by Reisz. So I decided to ask for leave.”

Reisz opposed Neumann’s trip to England, fearing licensing complications with Marconi—the English company to which he had sold the Reisz Microphone patent. Perhaps he also feared losing his best and most creative employee—after all, it was Neumann who had invented the microphone that had brought Reisz so much money and renown.

“When I insisted on going,” Neumann recalled, “we had the inevitable quarrel, and I ended up suing Reisz for the microphone royalties, settling for 20,000 marks, which, at the time, was a lot of money.”

Nevertheless, Reisz was not the only one who had recognized Neumann’s talent; Lignose, the company that had commissioned Breusing, offered him a consultancy.

“They were trying to recruit me. I got 1,000 marks a month, in return for which I was supposed to show up twice a week and look intelligent,” Neumann recalled with a smile.

In England, Neumann met a certain Mr. Carlton, a former Edison employee who was working for Metropol, the commissioning company. Carlton asked Neumann to create a disc-cutting machine, so Neumann designed both the cutting machine and the amplifier. The recording machine was based on a design Neumann liked to call the “tombstone motor.” The turntable was driven mechanically by the weight of a large stone, and the RPM was controlled by a governor—another design Neumann considered unsatisfactory, inspiring yet another round of reflection and experimentation.

Initially, they really did use Reisz Microphones for recording, which they

“hid in a cooking pot so nobody could see that they were Reisz microphones,”

as Neumann would later recall. Then he had an idea:

“I had already worked with thin diaphragms and made some attempts at building a capacitive microphone when I was with Reisz. Now we wanted to spray a thin collodion membrane with gold to build a capsule. I went back to Germany and, in a single week, made some microphone capsules and amplifiers, which I then took back to England. It all happened very quickly. We didn’t even test or measure anything. It sounded good, so we left it at that…”

Neumann set up the plant in England and got it running, earning, in addition to his expenses, the princely sum of 50,000 marks. Dismissed by Reisz in the meantime, he now had 70,000 marks of start-up capital at his disposal; so he approached his friend Erich Rickmann and told him he wanted to become independent. Thus, on November 23, 1928, in Berlin’s Brandenburgerstraße, the two of them founded Georg Neumann & Co.

That same year, the German inventor Fritz Pfleumer obtained a patent for the first magnetic tape recorder, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill premiered The Threepenny Opera, and Sir Owen W. Richardson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for his work on the thermionic phenomenon and especially for the discovery of the law bearing his name.” It was Richardson’s work that paved the way for the discovery of cathode tubes.

The content of this chapter is based on and partially references or uses technical data from the following authors and sources: Anselm Rößler, Behind the Brand | Neumann | Sound Bites, R. David Read, Neumann Museum, Dan Alexander, Mix Magazine, Hugh Robjohns, Matthew Mcglynn, and David Satz.

THE FIRST MICROPHONE

After spending his early years experimenting with new ideas to improve the problematic carbon-based microphones (culminating in the innovative Marconi–Reisz transmission microphone), Neumann’s first real success came in the form of the CMV3 (Telefunken Ela MZ 027/1). Nicknamed “The Bottle,” the CMV3 was a radical departure from traditional microphone designs of that era: a large condenser microphone with a cylindrical chamber that offered a range of interchangeable capsules featuring different polar patterns. The first capsule was the omnidirectional 50U, which had a rather bright response, with ±12 dB at 10 kHz. Two years later, a new version with a more linear frequency response was introduced. Its superior sound quality and versatility meant that it quickly established itself as the industry standard for studio and broadcast use, being officially approved by the German public broadcaster “Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft” (RRG). This official seal of approval after rigorous testing was a crucial moment for the success of the first microphone. Introduced in 1928, it would remain virtually unchanged until the end of World War II. Although the CMV3 is an iconic design, it was large and heavy and would soon be surpassed.

THE NEUMANN CMV-3

According to Rößler, the CMV3 was the first condenser microphone capable of being manufactured in large quantities; until then, the only functioning capsules had been made in a laboratory. In terms of sound quality, it was far superior to the Reisz microphone, and with the nickname “The Neumann Bottle,” it was destined for worldwide recognition. Countless news reports and radio broadcasts were recorded with it, including the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Neville Chamberlain’s famous “Peace for our time” speech upon returning from Munich on September 30, 1938, and Berlin Mayor Ernst Reuter’s dramatic appeal at the start of the Berlin Blockade in September 1948:

“People of the world, look upon this city!”

Before long, the CMV-3 became the standard in the German broadcasting industry, and Telefunken distributed the microphone worldwide, proudly stamping it with its own logo. As a result of this distribution deal, many people referred to their old Neumann microphones as “Telefunkens” for years, as though Telefunken were the manufacturer. Frank Sinatra, for example, famously nicknamed his U 47 “Telly.” In fact, it was a shrewd arrangement, as Neumann himself explained:

“We granted Telefunken the right to distribute our microphones in exchange for them waiving any claims based on the patent they held on the vacuum tubes we were using, for which we would otherwise have had to pay a license fee.”

CMV-3 TECHNOLOGY

The letters “CMV” stood for Condensator-Mikrofon-Verstärker, which translates as “condenser microphone amplifier.” The amplifier in question, featuring the aforementioned Telefunken RE084 tube, had a bayonet socket on top, onto which various interchangeable capsules could be attached. From the “3,” we can infer the existence of two predecessor models or laboratory prototypes, but these seem to have been lost to history.

The capsule’s diaphragm consisted of a sheet of collodion with a thin layer of gold. Collodion is a highly viscous, fast-drying solution of nitrocellulose (“gun cotton”) in a mixture of alcohol and ether, used in both surgery and photography.

“Mr. Rickmann made the diaphragms at home; he took an extremely high-quality sheet of gold that had been rolled completely smooth and flat, poured a collodion solution over it, and waited for it to solidify,” recalled Fritz Jörn. “Later, we used PVC dissolved in amyl acetate. PVC had been invented in 1913. The diaphragm solution was poured onto a 15 × 15 cm glass plate. At first, we used gold foil, but then discovered that the gold could be sputtered, so after that, we placed a circular mold on top of the glass plate, sputtered the gold onto it, and then poured the foil solution over the top. Sometimes it worked well. Sometimes not so well. Sputtering the gold was quite difficult.”

Until the end of World War II, for large batches, the coating was applied by a company in Leipzig. The backplate was a perforated disc with blind holes—quite similar to those used today. The first series-produced microphone capsules were designated MI-2. They had been developed in 1927, before the company was founded.

Later, there were two versions: until 1930, they were made with silk gauze and subsequently with wire mesh covers. In 1932, Neumann built the first capsules for a pressure-gradient microphone, the legendary M7, which would later be used—with both diaphragms connected—in the famous U 47 and M 49 microphones. How did Georg Neumann arrive at the elaborate hole pattern that gave the M7 its cardioid characteristic? In the opinion of Stephan Peus, Neumann’s Head of Development:

“I don’t believe anyone specifically said, ‘If we combine blind and open holes exactly this way, we’ll get a cardioid characteristic.’ It’s more likely that they experimented with a great number of different patterns and observed the results. Many things for which a theoretical explanation is later found were, in fact, discovered by trial and error. But in any case, an empirical approach is something important, and there’s a lot to be said for it.”

In terms of sound quality, the CMV-3 was far ahead of anything else that had been produced before. As stated in the operating instructions for a 1939 model:

“The condenser microphone is without doubt the most commonly used type of microphone for high-quality recordings. Its merits, such as the complete absence of noise, the absence of a response threshold, an almost undetectable level of distortion, and a very linear frequency response, make it far superior to any other type of microphone.”

It is not surprising, then, that the CMV-3 quickly took the world by storm. Today, it is not only a prized collector’s item but also a cherished working tool in many studios’ inventories.

The content of this chapter is based on and partially references or uses technical data from the following authors and sources: Anselm Rößler, Behind the Brand | Neumann | Sound Bites, R. David Read, Neumann Museum, Dan Alexander, Mix Magazine, Hugh Robjohns, Matthew Mcglynn, and David Satz.

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