A Berlin firm that moved east in 1943.

Microtech Gefell’s history starts in Berlin. In 1928 Georg Neumann and Erich Rickmann founded the limited partnership Georg Neumann & Co. to make condenser microphones, the company’s own history says; its first series-made model was the CMV 3, the “Neumann bottle.” German Wikipedia adds that Neumann had earlier helped develop the Reisz carbon microphone used by Berlin radio from 1923. The firm set up agencies in England, France, America and India from 1933, and the company says a Neumann condenser microphone with the M 7 capsule — a capsule it still makes — had its first live test at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

In 1943 bombing badly damaged the Berlin works and the company moved its seat to Gefell, a small town in Thuringia, setting up in a former textile factory, according to the company and German Wikipedia. Neumann’s works manager Erich Kühnast went too, with most of the staff. After the war Gefell fell into the Soviet zone. In 1947, the company says, Georg Neumann founded a second company in Berlin, Georg Neumann GmbH — the firm that makes Neumann microphones today — while the original partnership stayed in Gefell under Kühnast, making the CMV 4 and CMV 5/B. English Wikipedia says only that Neumann had restarted in Berlin by 1948.

That order matters. Microtech Gefell is often described as an offshoot of Neumann, but by its own account, and German Wikipedia’s, it belongs to the older of the two firms, the 1928 original, and the Berlin company was the second foundation. English Wikipedia also gives 1928 as the founding year of the Berlin company, so both trace themselves to the same start.

Behind the Wall.

By decision of the GDR authorities the Gefell business took on state participation in 1956, the company says; German Wikipedia gives 1958. In the 1950s it made the CMV 563 valve preamplifier and the UM 57 valve condenser microphone, and from the 1960s to the 1980s it developed studio microphones with East German broadcasters, including the two-channel ZUM 64 and the SMS 70 system, along with wireless stage microphones and measurement microphones, a line it had begun in the 1930s and expanded from 1950. The Berlin Wall cut contact with the Berlin company in 1961.

In 1972 the partnership was expropriated and renamed VEB Mikrofontechnik Gefell, under the RFT trade mark shared by East German electronics makers. German Wikipedia says Kühnast had designed a Neumann logo in 1949 — the name on a stylised microphone bottle — and that the GDR authorities banned its use in 1972. Sound On Sound, in a 2004 review, wrote that Gefell used hybrid FET amplifiers in the 1970s and, for its M900 and M910, a chromium-plated ceramic capsule based on technology the magazine said was developed in Moscow and perfected in Gefell. English Wikipedia says the plant had about 160 employees by the late 1980s and that the state funded a new building.

After 1989 the Treuhandanstalt managed the plant with a view to returning it to private hands, and the expropriated partnership applied for its return. In 1993 the partnership, now called Georg Neumann KG, got its former plant back and has run it since as Microtech Gefell GmbH, the company says. Sound On Sound reported that the Berlin Neumann company worked with Gefell after the Wall fell, and that the links were cut again when Sennheiser bought the Berlin firm in 1991.

Germany’s microphone makers.

Behind the best-known microphone names stands a group of smaller specialists, each built around one kind of microphone: the condenser, with a charged diaphragm; the ribbon, a thin strip of foil in a magnetic field; and the dynamic, a moving coil.

Three condenser makers here are German. Schoeps was founded in Karlsruhe in 1948 and says it makes its whole range in Durlach, the city’s old town, and remains family-owned. Microtech Gefell, in Gefell in Thuringia, traces itself to the firm Georg Neumann founded in Berlin in 1928, which moved to Gefell in 1943; its legal notice names Georg Neumann KG as sole shareholder. Brauner, a valve-microphone maker, closed its production site at Rees on the Lower Rhine in 2021 and said in July 2026 that production would restart.

DPA Microphones, founded in Denmark in 1992 by two former Brüel & Kjær employees, has its head office at Kokkedal and its factory at Asnæs; in February 2026 the British group Audiotonix announced an agreement to buy it.

The ribbon specialists are Royer Labs of Burbank, California, founded in 1998, which says every Royer is hand-made in the USA, and Coles Electroacoustics of Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, which says it has made the BBC-designed 4038 in Britain for more than 50 years.

Electro-Voice, best known for dynamic microphones and loudspeakers, began in South Bend, Indiana, and since 2025 has belonged to Keenfinity Group, the former Bosch business owned by the investment firm Triton.

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.

Hand-made in Gefell, owned by Georg Neumann KG.

Today Microtech Gefell GmbH’s sole shareholder is Georg Neumann KG, according to its legal notice, and its managing director since 2010 has been Matthias Domke, the company says. It pictures Jochem and Elisabeth Kühnast as partners of the KG; English Wikipedia says the KG is owned by the Kühnast and Drechsler families, while Sound On Sound in 2004 described the company as owned by Neumann’s heirs, so the accounts differ. It sells under the MICROTECH GEFELL trade mark and, German Wikipedia notes, uses the line “founded 1928 by Georg Neumann.”

On manufacturing, the company says every product is made by hand, tested and measured by specialists, with development, design, production and service under one roof in Gefell, and production kept in-house as far as possible, from diaphragms and capsules to circuits, housings and mechanical parts. Sound On Sound reported in 2004 that the M 7 capsule was still made the way Neumann had taught the elder Kühnast, each hole in the backplate drilled by hand and the PVC diaphragm made and glued by hand. The range covers measurement microphones and calibration as well as studio models: the compact M930, which Sound On Sound found a match for Neumann’s TLM103; valve models such as the UM 92.1S and reissues of the UM 57 and CMV 563; and the KEM 975 line-array microphone, developed with Munich’s Institut für Rundfunktechnik. German Wikipedia says the KEM 970 is used in the German Bundestag. In 2013, for its 85th anniversary, the company opened a Georg Neumann museum at the works.

For a design guide, Microtech Gefell shows a brand that leans on lineage — a founder’s line and a hand-made capsule — more than on a mark. Compare Neumann, the Berlin company that began as Georg Neumann’s second foundation, and Sennheiser, which has owned it since 1991. For this guide we use graphite, satin nickel and bronze with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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