Sennheiser Turns 60

Last June, Sennheiser, a multinational manufacturer of microphones, headphones, and wireless technology products, celebrated its 60th anniversary. The company was founded as Wennebostel Laboratories (Labor W) in 1945 by Dr. Fritz Sennheiser and seven other employees of the Institute for Radio Frequency Engineering and Electroacoustics at Hanover Technical University. At the time, as Dr. Sennheiser explained when I visited the company's Wennebostel facility 10 years ago, German radio engineers were prohibited by the occupying Allied forces from constructing communications equipment, so he and his crew needed to find something else they could do. In addition, supply shortages severely restricted the scope of what they might manufacture. Sennheiser determined that they could build test instruments such as millivolt meters from the parts they were able to recover from the Institute and the Allies. Seimens' Hanover branch bought the first samples and the startup company began to supply that firm with more and more complex products.

Seimens eventually asked Labor W to manufacturer a microphone, which the company did. In 1947, Labor W produced the classic M2 microphone, following that success with a series of groundbreaking designs that included the MD 21 (1953), which is still manufactured today; the first shotgun microphone, the MD 82 (1956); and, in 1957, its first RF wireless microphone, a product in which the firm still leads the field.

In 1958, the company changed its name to Sennheiser. Ten years later, it introduced the product that probably characterized Sennheiser most prominently in the non-professional market: the HD-414, the world's first "open" headphones, whose bright yellow foam earpads made them instantly recognizable. Also in 1968, the company introduced the MK 12, a clip-on condenser microphone that revolutionized wireless microphony. A series of innovations followed in the fields of infrared transmission, microphone technology, digital communications, and headphone design.

The Sennheiser Group has become one of the world's leading manufacturers of microphones, headphones, and wireless transmission systems, with total sales of about $262 million in 2004, an international workforce of more than 1600 employees, and sales subsidiaries in France, the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, China, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and the USA. That's a lifetime and a world away from its humble beginnings 60 years ago.

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