Microtech Gefell is a brand whose history is inseparable from the history of the condenser microphone itself. The company was founded by Georg Neumann — the same man whose name graces one of the most iconic microphone brands in the world. In 1943, fleeing the Allied bombing of Berlin, Neumann relocated with around twenty employees to the small Thuringian town of Gefell, where he set up production in an abandoned textile mill. The first microphone built there was the CMV 4a — fitted with the legendary M7 capsule that would later define the sound of the U47 and M49.
After the war, Neumann returned to Berlin to found the company the world knows as Neumann GmbH. But his technical director, Erich Kühnast, and most of the original staff stayed in Gefell. When the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, the two branches of the same family were cut off from each other for thirty years. Behind the Iron Curtain, the Gefell factory developed along its own path — and often ahead of its time: hybrid FET amplifiers, high-pressure ceramic capsules, precision measurement microphones. When the Wall fell and Neumann's Berlin engineers finally came to inspect the Gefell equipment, they were surprised to find technology that surpassed some of what was available in the West.
Today Microtech Gefell remains an independent, privately owned company — in the hands of the Kühnast and Drechsler families, now in their third generation. Every capsule is still made by hand, exactly as Neumann taught the elder Kühnast in the 1940s: hand-drilling each hole in the backplate, applying the PVC membrane, gluing it together — one microphone at a time. This isn't nostalgia. It's the only method that produces that sound.
