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Microtech Gefell

German company Microtech Gefell is on of the most respected microphone manufacturers of all times. Founded by Georg Neumann himself, Microtech Gefell was originally known as Georg Neumann & Company Gefell, and is considered by many in the audio recording industry to be the true bearer of the well-known Neumann name.

Gefell is the name of the town to which Georg Neumann fled from Berlin in 1943. An incendiary bomb had destroyed most of his original factory earlier that year. He brought his family, his technical director Mr. Kuehnast, his legal adviser Mr. Drechsler and around twenty employees with him, and soon set up shop in an abandoned textile factory. Production continued in Gefell of the microphone models made since the 1930s in Berlin, including the M7 capsule developed by Walter Weber and Hans Joachim von Braunmuhl of the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft and subsequently used in the U47 and M49, and the "bottle" microphones used throughout German broadcasting. By 1948, Neumann had moved back to his home in Berlin, which was finally relinquished by the military, and started up a new company called Georg Neumann GmbH. When the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961, Neumann's Berlin and Gefell workshops were separated. However, Neumann and his engineers in Berlin were able to stay in communication with the laboratory in Gefell until 1976, when Georg Neumann died.

Microtech Gefell is still the only company that manufactures the original M7 capsule whose diaphragms are constructed on a PVC backing rather than PET film.  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!

Today Microtech Gefell produces a large array of high quality microphones that bear the great original Neumann heritage that is enriched by modern technology, precise manufacturing and new creativity - to suit perfectly the needs of todays recording studios.

Thanks to very good relations with Gefell company, we had an opportunity to try and compare most of the Gefell microphones in detail (as you can see from the photo below). For a long time we had been testing these wonderful microphones to get an exact idea how they sound and how they compare to each other and also to other microphones. We made a lot of samples on vocals and various instruments. The set of selected samples of various Gefell microphones can be downloaded HERE.






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