Talk:Georg Neumann

The negative opinion concerning Neumann's present-day microphones is the kind of thing ("POV") which we generally strive to avoid on Wikipedia, no? -- DSatz 23:51, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you.--Lenilucho 04:35, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I got brave and rewrote the whole thing. Now it needs to be "mercilessly edited" by others. -- DSatz 16:44, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

It's been almost twenty years, I've studied more on this topic, and now see that I made a major historical error which I'm about to correct: I had written (without attribution, which is a problem in and of itself) that Neumann's CMV 3 had been "the world's first commercially available condenser microphone."

On the simplest level of error, "CMV 3" was not the name of that microphone; it was the name only of its amplifier part (the "V" stands for "Verstärker", the German word for amplifier). The microphone was introduced ca. 1932 by Telefunken under the model designation "Ela M 14" but I have never seen a specific Neumann product name for it as a whole. The CMV 3 could be combined with, I believe, either of two different capsule types to make a complete condenser microphone.

The deeper error is that Western Electric had already introduced condenser microphones commercially in the mid-1920s, and licensed their patents to RCA and Westinghouse and possibly other manufacturers. Condenser microphones were definitely being manufactured and sold (as well as leased) commercially several years before Neumann began making them. These microphones formed part of the equipment used for "talking pictures" and electrical phonograph recording, and were also used in radio broadcasting and early public address systems.

Finally, even Neumann himself was making and selling condenser microphones a few years before the 1932 date that's generally given for the CMV 3 + whatever capsule (CM 5 perhaps). He started his company around 1928 but had been making capsules, at least, for a client in England in the year before that. Still that's >10 years after Wente's 1917 patent at Western Electric, and at least five years since microphones based on that patent were introduced commercially.

So with this apology I'm about to delete this false claim, which I have unfortunately seen repeated in the meantime on various other Web sites; that's on my conscience. DSatz (talk) 00:37, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

My Edit as of yesterday was strictly correct and verifiable, why was this removed? U67 less forward in upper mid-range than U47? Quote one engineer who has ever said that. U47 not liked in it|s time for close up vocals? Have you asked a Geoff Emerick or Bruce Swedien about that? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 80.202.217.159 (talk • contribs) 15:36, 9 September 2006.

Hi, I may be mistaken in reverting your edit as I am not exactly an expert on this subject, but looking at the frequency response graphs for these microphones (at [1] and [2]) it seems to me that the U47 and U48 do emphasize the frequencies between 2-4 kHz (the frequencies the ear is most sensitive to) while the U67's frequency response is rather flat in this area. --KFP 16:27, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

KFP, you were not mistaken at all. -- To the anonymous person who posted the previous comment, the two engineers you mention came along decades after the U 47 was introduced. In Geoff Emerick's rather wonderful book it is quite evident that he and the Beatles were looking for all possible ways to (basically) push equipment past its normal bounds so as to produce sounds that their designers had never intended. Published materials from both Neumann and Gotham Audio (Neumann's very active U.S. representative) at the time of the U 67's introduction also refer to Neumann's tailoring the U 67's response specifically to allow for very close pickup of vocals without harshness; it is clear that this application had not been especially anticipated in the design of the U 47, which the U 67 was mainly designed to replace. DSatz 03:21, 26 August 2007 (UTC)