Sennheiser founder passes away

Prof. Dr. Fritz Sennheiser’s company, which started a university laboratory located in Wedemark near Hanover, now generates a total sales revenue of over €385 million (in 2008).

‘As an eleven-year-old boy, I witnessed the introduction of the radio. I built my own receiver out of the simplest of components: a slide coil, a tungsten tip, a crystal and a 20-metre-long radio frequency antenna,’ Fritz Sennheiser once said.

The depression in Germany meant that career prospects were poor, and so instead he decided in favour of his “second love”, and began to study electrical engineering with the focus on telecommunications at the Technical University in Berlin.

Amongst his achievements was helping develop a reverberation unit that was used at the opening ceremony of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The unit was said to replicate the sounds of a large church.

The MD 2 and the MD 3, also known as the “invisible microphone”, since its transducer was located beneath a very slim neck were amongst his most influential products.

At the end of the 1950s, the young company’s sales had already reached 9.9 million marks.