Dr. Sennheiser (the Microphone Dude) dies

Boom poles were at half mast across the nation on May 18, 2010 in honor of the passing of Dr. Fritz Sennheiser (1912 – 2010).  Audio guys worldwide paused for 30 seconds of “room tone” — which is a little stunt they regularly pull just to annoy Producers and Camera Teams everywhere.  Sennheiser’s innovations included such things as the Shotgun Mic, interference free wireless headsets and ultra-reliable UHF wireless mic systems.

Internet speculation has it that he was also responsible for developing a “Cone of Silence” as seen in the film Get Smart with Steve Carrell…but that is less widely known since that is a rumor that I have only just started.  Give it a few months to gain some traction, though.  Our sources, who wish to remain anonymous, tell us that the “Cone of Silence” could be on sale at Best Buy in time for Christmas 2010.  You heard it here first, folks!

Anyway, Mix Magazine for Audio Nerds (pretty sure that’s the full, official title) had a nice article about some actual, verifiable Sennheiser facts.

(EXCERPT) Just a few days after his 98th birthday, Dr. Fritz Sennheiser, the founder of Sennheiser Electronics passed away. His years of innovation, combined with a warm sense of caring and creating a close-knit family atmosphere at work live on in the company he started 65 years ago.

In the Karlshorst district of Berlin on May 9, 1912, a child named Fritz Sennheiser was born who would forever change the course and direction of the consumer and professional audio industries. It’s ironic that at the time, neither industry existed at all, but fate would change all that. Fritz’s father wanted him to study landscape architecture, but an event a half a world away on October 25, 1929, would intercede, as the Black Friday stock market crash affect the economics of the entire planet.

Dr. Fritz Sennheiser in 1935

With that, the 17-year-old Fritz Sennheiser entered the electrical engineering/telecommunications program at Berlin’s Technical University and focused his studies on speech and music. “I built my own radio receiver in 1924 from a slide coil and a crystal,” he once recalled.

In June 1945, post-war Germany was in shambles, and Sennheiser founded his “Laboratorium Wennebostel” with a staff of just seven employees. German scientists were then prohibited from doing research in radio technology, so Sennheiser used his savings to create a business making millivoltmeters for Siemens.

“Then we had a stroke of luck,” Sennheiser recalled. “Siemens asked if we could make microphones for them.” After building mics for Siemens, the team began designing its own mic and in 1947 debuted the MD 2, a dynamic mic that found favor with radio stations. The company grew and expanded into other products, such as amps, intercoms, transformers, headphone capsules and the 1953 MD 21 mic, which is still in production. Based on a lab model developed in 1949, the company’s 1956 MD 82 was the first shotgun mic. A move into wireless mic production followed a year later.

Take a look at the Full Article over at MixOnline.com

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