Audio specialist Sennheiser is celebrating its 70th year in business by rewinding the clock and explaining how the company first started out. Throughout 2015, Sennheiser’s anniversary year, the online magazine Bluestage will present exciting background stories about the audio specialist’s products and the corporate history every month.
The company was founded on 1 June 1945 as Laboratorium Wennebostel or “Labour W’ for short by electrical engineer Fritz Sennheiser near Hanover in Germany. For decades, the name Sennheiser has been associated with high-quality products, excellent sound and numerous innovations that have set new standards in audio technology.
In 1947, Sennheiser launched its first microphone that was developed in-house. The first “shotgun’ microphone followed in 1956 and a year later the company was already producing 100 different types of products. In early 1958, Labour W was renamed Sennheiser electronic, the inception of a brand that ten years later would spark a worldwide boom by developing and producing the first open headphones.
Cutting-edge developments across different areas of acoustics and new sales locations worldwide, followed with unusual momentum, was soon after Sennheiser”s first change of generations.
In May 1982 when son of Fritz Sennheiser, Jorg Sennheiser, was appointed managing director, he steadily modernised and internationalised the company’s structure.
In July 2013, Daniel Sennheiser and Andreas Sennheiser, the sons of Jorg, took over as the CEOs of Sennheiser electronic GmbH & Co and today, Sennheiser has more than 2700 employees, with around half of them based in Germany.
As a modernism-driven company, Sennheiser continues playing a key role in shaping the future of audio. The foundations for this have already been laid with its new Innovation Campus, built on the company site in Germany. “In the future, we will align our product development even more closely to customers’ true needs, wherever they arise on live stages, at professional studio productions, in offices, or simply while listening to music and relaxing while always striving to achieve acoustic perfection,’ Daniel explains.
With adaptable and increasingly smart products, Sennheiser will keep on developing and delivering future solutions that redefine audio technology.
