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And so, on Wednesday, November 3, Chuck stepped through the doors of the Neumann Marketing, Sales and Service headquarters in Berlin, Germany. After introductions were made, Chuck was taken on a tour throughout the entire facility and given the opportunity to actually see the process of mic development and prototyping. Neumann's sophisticated circuit design and development, capsule development and testing, and circuit prototyping were demonstrated on state of the art computer driven tools. The machine shop was also visited, where work was being done on a "secret" mic which was released at the AES Show (see page 10 for news of that product).
The service department was visited, where Neumann mics dating all the way back to the 1940s can be fully serviced. "New old stocks" of parts were seen here, including capsules, tubes, body shells and individual parts. The full anechoic chamber was demonstrated in terms of mic testing. During the visit to the headquarters, a lot of extremely rare and valuable older Neumann mics were glimpsed.
On Thursday, the Neumann people took Chuck on an ICE high-speed train ride through the German countryside (and past the city-sized Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg) from Berlin to Hannover to visit the actual production facilities for Neumann microphones in a small town called Wedemark. There, in a separate wing of the Sennheiser factory, the Neumann mics are manufactured. In stark contrast to the highly automated Sennheiser Evolution mic production, the Neumann mics were seen to be hand crafted by a small team of specialists. CNC machines for capsule backplate manufacturing, a quasi-clean room for diaphragm sputtering and tensioning and a mini-anechoic testing station were all visited.
Friday was spent taking a tour of the fascinating city of Berlin, a place that simply exudes a sense of history. Chuck's visit there was only a few days before the 10th anniversary of the coming down of the Berlin Wall, and signs of the upcoming celebration were evident throughout the city.
Chuck, a man who has just about seen it all, was impressed. "When you talk about building a product the old fashioned way, by hand, with a sense of pride in the final product, nobody does it any better than Neumann." The highlight of the tour for Chuck? "That's simple," he answers. "For a microphone lover like me, it was seeing their display of vintage mics, some of which are truly one-of-a-kind."
Thankfully for us, photos were taken during the tour. Picture 1 (at top) shows the company's anechoic chamber. Picture 2 is a display of vintage Neumann mics at the Berlin headquarters. Pictures 3 - 5 are photos of Neumann mics being manufactured and assembled in the production facility in Wedemark.