Georg Neumann established his first factory in Berlin in 1927 to repair electrical appliances. However, it was damaged by an incendiary bomb in 1943 and so he set up a new repair factory in a disused textile mill in a small town called Gefell close to the old border between East and West Germany, near Dresden.
The first microphone made in this factory was the CMV4a 'bottle', which used Neumann's M7 condenser capsule (later used in the U47 and M49 microphones, as well as in several of Microtech Gefell's current models).
After the war, Neumann eventually returned to Berlin and started the Neumann microphone company we all know and love today. His former technical director, Mr Kuehnast, and most of the original staff remained in Gefell also making microphones, and the two facilities remained in close contact.
However, when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, all communications between East and West stopped, and as a result of communist ethos, the names of the former company owners were obliterated in 1972, and the name became VEB Mikrofontechnik Gefell.
The company continued developing various advanced technologies through the '70s and '80s, including solid-state microphone amplifiers and government-funded development of high-powered industrial lasers. In fact, the company still uses a laser engraving machine to mark the model and serial numbers on the cases of its microphones.
When the East German government finally collapsed in 1989 and the Berlin Wall came down, the Berlin Neumann company offered to co-operate with Microtech Gefell once again. As part of the co-operation deal, the Neumann factory in Berlin tested the various Gefell microphones and the Neumann engineers were surprised to discover microphone technology more advanced than some of that available in the West! For example, Microtech Gefell were using hybrid FET amplifiers in the 1970s, a decade before the same technology was adopted in the West.
The M900 and M910 microphones use a capsule made of a ceramic material moulded under high pressure and plated with chromium — technology developed in Moscow, perfected by Microtech Gefell, and unlike anything currently found in Western microphone designs.
Eventually Georg Neumann's heirs reclaimed a share of the old company as former owners, and when Sennheiser acquired the Berlin Neumann company in 1991, all links between the two companies were severed once again.
Microtech Gefell is now privately owned by the Neumann family heirs and has continued to develop high-quality microphones for studio, broadcast, PA and measurement applications.
Currently under the technical supervision of Kuehnast's son, Microtech Gefell still produces the M7 capsule in exactly the same way Georg Neumann taught the elder Kuehnast 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!
John Weeks has a new Microtech Gefell M930.... and he sounds great on it. He presents his tests of his various set-ups. He says,
I was under the impression that the U71 is the Gefell "voiceover" mic. John's M930 sure sounds good. Let me know if you use or have used other Microtech Gefell's for VO.
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