Tutorials Audio

Georg Neumann: The Studio Microphone as a Product

By Infinite Creation · Profile

At a Glance

Georg Neumann (1898-1976) founded his Berlin company in 1928 and produced the CMV 3, the first commercially manufactured condenser microphone, known as the "Neumann bottle" for its shape. The company went on to the U 47, the U 67 and the U 87, microphones that defined recorded sound for decades and are still in professional use.

Lived: 1898-1976, Germany
Anchor year: 1928, the CMV 3
Strand: overlooked, the name is on the box, not in the histories

Career

The problem as it stood

Wente had shown a condenser microphone could have flat response, but a laboratory instrument is not a product. Broadcasters and recording studios needed microphones that were rugged, consistent between units, serviceable, and available to buy.

What he actually did

Neumann engineered the condenser microphone for manufacture and sale, starting with the CMV 3 in 1928 with interchangeable capsules. He also worked on disc-cutting lathes, another piece of studio infrastructure his company came to dominate.

How it worked

The capsule design, diaphragm tension, backplate geometry, and the arrangement of the polarising voltage: determines the polar pattern and the frequency response. Making those consistent from unit to unit is the manufacturing problem, and solving it is what lets a studio in one city sound comparable to a studio in another.

What it made possible

A professional recording and broadcast infrastructure with predictable, comparable equipment. The later U 47 became so associated with particular vocal sounds that it shaped how records of the period were made, and the multi-pattern capsule gave engineers a control they had not had.

What happened to him

The company survived the war and the division of Berlin and continued to define the studio microphone market. Neumann died in 1976. The name remains a professional standard.

Where the credit landed

Neumann is unusual in this corpus: the name survived because it is on the product. Almost nobody who uses a Neumann microphone knows anything about Georg Neumann, but the attribution is at least intact, which is more than Wente, whose principle he manufactured, can be said to have.

Known For

Making a laboratory instrument manufacturable and consistent is its own achievement.
Interchangeable capsules gave engineers control over polar pattern.
The lineage from the 1928 CMV 3 to the U 87 is unbroken.

Knowledge Base

What You'll Learn

Standardised equipment is what lets studios in different countries produce comparable work.

Why polar pattern is a design decision

A microphone's directional pattern comes from how sound reaches both sides of the diaphragm. Seal the back and it responds to absolute pressure, giving an omnidirectional pattern. Open it and it responds to pressure difference, giving a figure-of-eight. Combining the two in proportion yields cardioid and its variants. Switchable-pattern microphones let an engineer choose how much room to record along with the source: the most consequential single control in a recording session.

Where This Fits

Neumann's condenser microphone made the capture link a product, the first link set out in A History of Broadcast Technology.

FAQ

Q: What was the first commercial condenser microphone?
A: The Neumann CMV 3 of 1928, known as the "bottle" for its shape, with interchangeable capsules. It began the studio condenser lineage that runs through the U 47, U 67 and U 87.

Q: Why are Neumann microphones still used?
A: Consistency and a well-understood sound. Once a body of recorded work is made with particular microphones, those characteristics become a reference that engineers continue to want.

Vocabulary

Condenser microphone. A microphone whose diaphragm forms one plate of a capacitor, with sound changing the spacing and therefore the capacitance. Offers greater sensitivity and detail than earlier designs, at the cost of needing power.

Capsule. The part of a microphone containing the diaphragm and backplate, where sound becomes an electrical signal. Its size and construction determine the microphone's character more than anything downstream.

Polar pattern. A description of how sensitive a microphone is to sound from each direction. Determines how much of the room is captured alongside the intended source.

Diaphragm. The thin membrane that moves in response to sound pressure. Its mass and tension set how quickly it responds, which shapes both frequency response and transient detail.

Sources

No document is cited here. Checked 20 August 2026.

The record would be a German patent covering the CMV 3 of 1928 or the capsule inside it. Searches returned company histories and specifications but no patent number, and without a number the German record cannot be pulled. Worth noting what is documented elsewhere: the condenser microphone principle was patented by E. C. Wente at Western Electric in 1916, and that patent is cited on his page. Neumann's contribution was manufacture at scale, which the patent record captures poorly.