A software engineer, a daughter’s songs and a box of hardware.

Ear Trumpet Labs began in Portland, Oregon, in 2011. The year comes from the company’s own press boilerplate — “Founded in Portland, Oregon in 2011” — which it was already using in 2012, and it is repeated independently by Vortex Music Magazine, which wrote in December 2018 that “Ear Trumpet Labs was born in 2011.” The earliest copy of the company’s website in the Internet Archive dates from October 2011, which fits.

The founder is Philip Graham. The company describes him as an “inveterate tinkerer and former software engineer”; Vortex reported that he worked in software during the dot-com years of the late 1990s, grew tired of how little of that work lasted, and called himself “a really terrible guitar player” who preferred building amplifiers to playing. According to the company, he built his first microphone for his daughter, Malachi Graham, when she wanted to record her own songs, assembling the bodies from parts he had in his basement and from hardware scrap stores.

That basement was the first workshop. When Tape Op reviewed the company’s Edwina microphone in its September/October 2012 issue, Larry Crane wrote that Graham was building the mics in his basement in Northeast Portland. Musician friends began borrowing them, the company says, and Graham refined the designs for live sound. On its early website he took the title “bricoleur” — from the French for someone who makes things from whatever is at hand — and the company still lists him as “proprietor / bricoleur.”

Plumbing, bike parts and a Schoeps-style circuit.

The look is the first thing reviewers mention. Reviewing the Edwina for RecordingHacks in March 2012, Don Gunn described a body made from “a 3-inch piece of substantial copper tubing,” plumbing flanges and a bronze end-cap; Larry Crane listed “plumbing fittings, bike parts, and stainless steel bolts.” In Sound On Sound in July 2013, Hugh Robjohns described the Edwina’s 26mm capsule held between two steel flange-plates with stainless-steel bolts and brass cap-nuts, and later reports mention springs, copper rings and, in Vortex’s words, “even reclaimed bicycle gears.” The 2011 website said the company evolved its designs “from common hardware, everyday objects, found things,” packed its mics in recycled toolbox cases and cast its own badges.

Under the styling, the engineering is conventional in the best sense. Robjohns wrote that the Edwina is a large-diaphragm cardioid condenser that needs 48-volt phantom power, with circuitry “derived from a classic transformerless Schoeps design,” an FET front end and a balanced output stage of discrete transistors. He called it “an accomplished sounding microphone with distinctive styling and construction and an attractive price.” It sold for $499 in the United States in 2012 and 2013. The reviews we read do not say where the capsules come from, so we leave that out.

The microphones carry women’s names. In 2013 Sound On Sound listed five — Edna, Josephine, Louise, Chantelle and Edwina — and Vortex reported that Louise is named after Graham’s grandmother. The current range adds Myrtle, Delphina, Nadine, a microphone that mounts on an upright bass’s tailpiece, and Wanda, announced in April 2026 with what the company calls “all-brass midcentury styling.”

The company aims its mics at the stage as much as the studio, and says they are tuned to resist feedback — useful for bluegrass and folk bands that gather around a single microphone. Its quoted users include Rhiannon Giddens, the Milk Carton Kids and the dobro player Jerry Douglas, and in 2018 the roots-music journal No Depression profiled the company under the headline “This Thing’s On: Ear Trumpet Labs Create Mics with Meaning.”

Who builds the microphone.

The United States has microphone makers at every price. At one end are small workshops that build by hand or recreate classic studio designs; at the other are brands selling inexpensive microphones to home studios and podcasters. The seven makers here cover that range, spread across the country.

Two are small workshops in the West and South. Ear Trumpet Labs says it was founded in Portland, Oregon, by Philip Graham, a former software engineer, and that its microphones are handbuilt in Oregon. Wunder Audio says its showroom, the Wunderbar Room, is in Austin, Texas.

Two revive vintage designs in the East. Peluso Microphone Lab says John Peluso founded it in 2002 after decades of repairing vintage microphones, and calls FloydFest, held near Floyd, Virginia, its local festival. Telefunken Elektroakustik, founded in 2001, says it assembles its microphones in South Windsor, Connecticut, under the name of the German radio company Telefunken.

Three are larger brands. CAD Audio grew out of Astatic, the Ohio microphone maker founded in the 1930s, which formed CAD as a division in 1988, according to English Wikipedia; its website now gives an address in Berlin, Connecticut, and names JAM Industries USA in its footer. MXL is a brand of Marshall Electronics, which gives its headquarters as Torrance, California. Samson, with a mailing address in Hicksville, New York, says it began with wireless systems in 1980.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still a small workshop in Portland.

Ear Trumpet Labs has stayed small and, as far as the sources we checked show, independent; we found no record of an outside owner. Its website describes “a small workshop with four craftspeople,” though its crew page lists six people, among them Graham, a production manager and Malachi Graham, who helps run the business; Vortex called her the operations manager in 2018. The company says every microphone is “handbuilt in Oregon,” and the independent accounts agree: Tape Op in 2012 and Vortex in 2018 both placed the work in Northeast Portland, where, Vortex wrote, each mic was “custom-made and hand-wired.”

The company also makes promises that a larger maker might not. It offers a lifetime warranty against defects, says it will repair road damage for the cost of parts and shipping, and says it gives 10 percent of its profits each quarter to causes chosen by its employees. In June 2026 it said its Nadine had been used on Broadway productions including the revival of Ragtime at Lincoln Center, quoting the sound designer Kai Harada; we give that as the company’s account.

For a design guide, Ear Trumpet Labs shows how a found-object look, kept consistent from the first basement prototypes to the newest model, can become an identity in itself. Compare Schoeps, the German maker whose transformerless circuit Robjohns heard echoed in the Edwina, and Royer Labs, another American microphone workshop. For this guide we use copper, brass and a workshop black with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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