Gary Flanigan wrote:

I'm wondering how big the R&D/design staff is with the microphone
companies. [ ... ] On the Schoeps site it mentions one Dr. [Küsters],
later succeeded by [Jörg] Wuttke, as being responsible for the design
of the microphones. [ ... ] Are there unnamed teams working around
these folks, or is the enterprise often so small that one designer does
it all? If so, who were/are these unsung heroes?

Schoeps is the one that I can tell you something about. It's a small
company in which most of the employees tend to be there essentially for
their entire working lives. Technical development is led by one person
(Mr. Wuttke) but collegial consensus is involved to a great extent, and
almost everyone has multiple responsibilities and knows something about
everything that's going on in the company.

The gentleman in charge of building capsules at Schoeps is a Mr. Kleber,
by the way, since you asked for names. Maybe we can make up a series of
picture trading cards for the people whose work we appreciate? Instead
of their batting averages, we can list signal-to-noise ratios.

--What may not be obvious is the extent to which the top people in these
companies work directly with the customers. For decades in Europe,
including the crucial period of post-war economic recovery in which the
present forms of the three companies you mentioned were established,
the national broadcasting organizations and the old-line record companies
were their biggest customers and had significant influence on product
development. This influence was multiplied by rules which, for example,
required the ORF (Austrian broadcasting network) to use Austrian-made
products wherever possible, etc.; so it's not always a case of "we invent,
you decide."

David Satz wrote:

The gentleman in charge of building capsules at Schoeps is a Mr. Kleber,
by the way, since you asked for names. Maybe we can make up a series of
picture trading cards for the people whose work we appreciate? Instead
of their batting averages, we can list signal-to-noise ratios.
..snip...

For trading cards I'd cast a vote for Jim West: father of (...anyone?)


Later...

Ron Capik
--

"Ron Capik" wrote in message
...

For trading cards I'd cast a vote for Jim West: father of (...anyone?)

Nathan West?

dtk

"dt king" wrote in message
hlink.net...

For trading cards I'd cast a vote for Jim West: father of (...anyone?)

Nathan West?

Adam West?

--
Dave Martin
Java Jive Studio
Nashville, TN
www.javajivestudio.com

For trading cards I'd cast a vote for Jim West: father of (...anyone?)

Nathan West?

Adam West?

Artemus Gordon?

OK, so it's the foil electret microphone, but I'l freely admit I had to
"google" that one.

NeilH

Mae West?

For trading cards I'd cast a vote for Jim West:
father of (...anyone?)

Alexander M. Poniatoff trading cards anyone???

--
Steven Sena
XS Sound
www.xssound.com


"Ron Capik" wrote in message
...


David Satz wrote:

The gentleman in charge of building capsules at Schoeps is a Mr. Kleber,
by the way, since you asked for names. Maybe we can make up a series of
picture trading cards for the people whose work we appreciate? Instead
of their batting averages, we can list signal-to-noise ratios.
..snip...

For trading cards I'd cast a vote for Jim West: father of (...anyone?)


Later...

Ron Capik
--

Ron Capik wrote:

For trading cards I'd cast a vote for Jim West: father of (...anyone?)


The Wild, wild, west?

"Steven Sena" wrote in message
...
Alexander M. Poniatoff trading cards anyone???


I'm think a good card would be the inventor of the Smith Chart -- whoever
he was.

dtk

Who Designs the Mics?

Group: rec.audio.pro Date: Sat, Aug 9, 2003, 11:23pm (EDT+4) From:
(Steven=A0Sena)

Alexander M. Poniatoff trading cards anyone???

an EXcellent idea.

Eric

On Sat, 9 Aug 2003 17:07:29 -0500, "Dave Martin"
wrote:

"dt king" wrote in message
thlink.net...

For trading cards I'd cast a vote for Jim West: father of (...anyone?)

Nathan West?

Adam West?

Honey West?

I don't know, but I think he's buried in Grant's tomb.

I'm think a good card would be the inventor
of the Smith Chart -- whoever he was.

William Sommerwerck wrote:

I don't know, but I think he's buried in Grant's tomb.

I'm think a good card would be the inventor
of the Smith Chart -- whoever he was.

Hmmm... how does one apply the Smith Chart to audio?
Anyway:
Phillip H. Smith (yet another Bell Labs guy) invented the chart.
He retired the year I joined the lab so I never got to meet him.
There's a nice bio at:
http://www.ee.kmitnb.ac.th/wireless/resources/smith.pdf

Ron Capik
www.alberthall.org/images/LRon1.jpg
--

"Ron Capik" wrote in message
...
William Sommerwerck wrote:

I don't know, but I think he's buried in Grant's tomb.

I'm think a good card would be the inventor
of the Smith Chart -- whoever he was.

Hmmm... how does one apply the Smith Chart to audio?
Anyway:
Phillip H. Smith (yet another Bell Labs guy) invented the chart.
He retired the year I joined the lab so I never got to meet him.
There's a nice bio at:
http://www.ee.kmitnb.ac.th/wireless/resources/smith.pdf

Oh, yeah, that's the guy. Managed to patent the number 1.65.

dtk

Gary Flanigan wrote:

I'm wondering how big the R&D/design staff is with the microphone
companies. [ ... ] On the Schoeps site it mentions one Dr. Kuesters,
later succeeded by Joerg Wuttke, as being responsible for the design
of the microphones. [ ... ] Are there unnamed teams working around
these folks, or is the enterprise often so small that one designer does
it all? If so, who were/are these unsung heroes?

It's not too big, and with the reduction in real R&D at the pro-audio
mic companies caused by the drastic reduction in average price, it's
probably going to stay small. You can get a clue about the real players
by looking at the patent history. There are a few clear family trees
of microphone design that I know of. Sticking with condenser mics, all
of the early work was done by Wente et al, at Bell Labs and Western
Electric. Altec absorbed some of this and passed some of what it figured
out to AKG. The German government broadcasting organizations, mostly
Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) developed the dual-diaphragm cardioid mic.
von Braunmuhl and Weber worked for NDR. Georg Neumann was an electrochemist
they consulted with about getting thin metallization on plastic; he was
involved in inventing NiCd batteries at the time but set up an electro-
acoustic lab to manufacture mics for NDR and the German radio propaganda
machine in the 1930's. Magnetic tape gets a lot of credit for these
broadcasts sounding so real, but the NDR-designed Neumann-manufactured
mics deserve much of this credit too. Georg Neumann is listed as the
inventor of the cross-slot capsule (which became the KM84) but I wonder
whether it was really his work. In the 1950's there was a lot of
cross-pollination in Eastern Europe, with Neumann instrumentation and
studio mic technology appearing in the USSR, by virtue of the Neumann
Gefell plant being just inside the East German border. At least one
of the Beijing 797 engineers, a woman I met at 797 around 1985, studied
this technology for several years in Moscow.

Designing the mic capsule is hard enough. Only recently have there been
good models of the internal physics, and mic companies tend to be very
protective of what they know -- or even that they know what's going on.
But at least as difficult is designing the manufacturing process. Early
designs that were made on an individual basis (like the original AKG CK12
capsule, which is the work of Bernhard Weingartner, more recently founder
of Neutrik) are simply not economical for most companies today. Making
capsules that are consistent, and don't require a lot of adjustment, is
really important. The jellybean electret capsule market is an example of
getting the production techniques nearly perfect -- but you can't make
good sounding directional mics that way, the tolerances are much tighter
than can be accomplished with that technique once you demand good low
frequency response *and* extension to 20 kHz.

Each of the mic companies has a small handful of people who know
enough about the basic physics to keep the production running. They know from
observation and history, for instance, that an unwanted slope in the frequency
response in a certain range is probably due to a certain part being too big.
Within that handful are typically one or two who really understand the physics. I consider myself very fortunate to have met most of the modern experts,
and there aren't many. You can find a lot of them in the two good microphone
books now in print, _AIP Handbook of Condenser Microphones_ and _Microphone
Engineering Handbook_.

David Satz' comments about Schoeps fit with my experiences visiting
with Mr Wuttke there. All of the high-end mic labs are small, and no
one knows *everything*. In some cases, there's quite an internal
rivalry (job security?) where an individual has developed a personal
trick for solving some production problem and considers it his own.
Likewise David's comments about the relations between the mic labs
and the key broadcast and recording customers are correct. I must say
that it is infinitely preferable for a mic manufacturer, no matter
how small, to deal with customers who know what they want and know
when they have gotten it. We have very few customers in the US like
that, but for instance in dealing with one of the big German classical
record companies, there was no question about what they wanted -- we
were able to produce it when no one else would, and they were happy.
It's not nearly as close a relationship as it was 60 years ago when the
broadcasters provided a set of drawings to build from, but there is
definitely a historical precedent like that.
--
Josephson Engineering / Santa Cruz CA /