Yehor Sharkovskyi

Native Instruments is a German company that develops, manufactures, and supplies music software and hardware for music production, sound design, performance, and DJing. The company's corporate headquarters and main development facilities are located in Berlin, with additional offices in Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Paris, and Shenzhen.

RME was founded in 1996 by Ralf Männel and Matthias Carstens. Carstens got his start in the audio world by training as an electrical engineer, playing drums, working in various music stores, and becoming proficient at electronic repair. As Carstens was working with audio equipment, Männel presented a project in ELRAD, a German magazine for electronics and technical applied computing. Männel’s concept was a Interface, Level Meter, Error Analyzer, measuring and long term test system. Carstens thought the project had promise, contacted Männel and the two decided to work together, thus creating RME. Currently RME consists of a German team of developers with a robust vision of creating innovative, user friendly, and high-quality digital audio solutions.

One of the personalities who made a significant contribution to the development of modern sound equipment is Eugen Beyer. It was this man who created the company, which became on a par with Sennheiser, Telefunken, Elac and Manger, as a living embodiment of high German quality in audio.

During its existence, Beyerdynamic specialists have implemented many innovations, including: the first full-fledged sound for movie theaters, the first serial dynamic stereo headphones, the first specialized studio microphone, and the first wireless concert microphone.

Today, this relatively small company is known worldwide as one of the manufacturers of high-quality studio audio equipment, as well as HI-FI and HI-END class headphones. The company owes its appearance and development to the founder, who was a talented engineer and generator of advanced ideas.

Eugen Beyer was born in 1903 in Stockholm. In the same year, the family moved to St. Petersburg (Russian Empire), where the future founder of the world-famous brand lived and grew. Relatively little is known about Bayer’s parents. Most biographers do not provide any reliable data on the early childhood and youth of the future engineer, except that he came from a German family. It is known that Eugen graduated from one of the St. Petersburg gymnasiums. The revolutionary events in the Russian Empire in 1918 forced the Beyer family to return to Stockholm. Presumably, in 1921, after completing his studies at Stockholm University as an engineer, Eugen left Sweden. The young engineer travels to his ancestral homeland, to Berlin, to find opportunities for the development of his talents there.

Beyer biographers agree that he became interested in electrical engineering and acoustic experiments in his teens, however, there is no documentary evidence of this, only scanty family memories. It is reliably known that Beyer considered his activity as an engineer and experimenter, as a way to contribute to the field of knowledge, innovative for that time, as well as an opportunity to earn money. According to family evidence, during his high school years Eugen had a great interest in mathematics and physics, while he was not very successful in the humanities. It is also known that Eugen's interests were shared by his brother Sergei Beyer, who would later take part in beyerdynamic projects.

In 1924, in Berlin, Eugen Beyer created the "Elektrotechnische Fabrik Eugen Beyer", later renamed Beyerdinamic. In the early years of his existence, his company was a small but prosperous workshop for the production of dynamic speakers.

Already in 1926, the Bayer speakers became a sought-after product, in connection with the emergence of the idea of ​​sound in the cinema. It is interesting that Eugen anticipated the development of sound cinema, although most film market connoisseurs predicted the long summers of mute classics. The first screening of the sound film took place as early as 1900, but the imperfection of technology and the lack of a full-fledged technological and theoretical base, as well as interest in the nascent film industry, seriously pushed the introduction of innovation.

It so happened that Eugen Beyer became the first engineer who decided to create one of the missing links for sound cinema in Germany. This link was the cinema speakers. The risk was great enough, since the materials and elements for creating such systems at that time cost a lot of money, and Beyer's business was just beginning. Meanwhile, in 2 years, Eugen was able to convince the leading film distribution companies in Germany that silent cinema has no future, and the cost of speaker systems will pay off many times.

Beyer was right, and everyone who agreed to invest in his systems really paid back, since after 5 years, silent cinema was in a state of dying agony. For a short 6 years from 1924 to 1930, the company developed rapidly. A small electronic workshop turned into a thriving industrial enterprise. Eugen managed to convince almost all German film distributors of the advantages of sound cinema, and by 1931 there were no cinemas in Germany without speaker systems.

The vast majority of movie theater sound systems were created by the Bayer factory. Large competitors of the company, such as Telefunken, were able to counter electrostatic panels with a new product of the company, which, although they had a number of advantages over electrodynamic speakers, were extremely expensive and not very reliable (they often burned and worked for no more than 4 years).

By the beginning of the 30s there was a significant leap in studio recording technology. In 1933, EMI developed the world's first stereo recording technology, which became the basis for the subsequent creation of commercial stereo recordings. The EMI innovation was seen in the world, but did not find commercial embodiment in either the 30s or 40s. Most of the records were released in mono. However, the requirements for the quality of the recordings have seriously increased, mainly for the cinema, consumer claims for the recordings have also grown.

As a true innovator, in 1935, Eugen initiated the development of studio headphones and a studio dynamic microphone. It should be noted that at that time there were no standards for headphones of one type or another, and the headphones themselves in the studio were more likely a rarity than an obligatory attribute. Sound was evaluated using speakers. Eugen Beyer decided once again to change the idea of ​​sound and in fact created the very concept of studio headphones as an alternative to studio monitors. Studio microphones have already been produced, but their capabilities were not sufficient for the growing demands of the market.

Two years of painstaking work on the device, a significant part of which was conducted by Beyer himself, led to resounding success. In 1937, Eugen's company began mass production of dynamic head phones - its first DT 48 headphones, which not only became the standard for their time, but were produced by the company until 2012 with only minor modifications. Probably, these were the first specialized studio headphones in the world, first in mono, and later in stereo. History does not know examples of another model of headphones that has existed on the market for so long.

In 1939, the Beyerdynamic M 19 dynamic microphone appeared, also specifically designed for studio use. In those years, Joseph Goebbels’s department really needed high-quality sound equipment, especially radio and nascent television. After evaluating the samples of microphones manufactured in Germany for the Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft (German national broadcasting company), it was M19 that was chosen. Many experts note that among the serial samples of the 30s-50s, the M19 was one of the best in the world.

In addition to the German radio announcers, symphony concerts of orchestras conducted by Furtwängler were broadcast in these microphones; they were spoken by the NSDAP bosses from Hitler to Rosenberg. After the fall of the Third Reich, practically nothing has changed for Beyer's company. M19 was highly in demand until the mid-50s in West Germany, the USA, Holland, and Great Britain.

During the years of war and post-war devastation, Beyer initiated the development of a number of products unique to his time. The most interesting thing is that Eugen seems to be looking into the future and knows in advance what the market will need after 5, 10 or 15 years. Meanwhile, at this time in Germany, competitors imperceptibly begin to develop, impressed by Beyer's success. One of these competitors is Fritz Senheiser, who created his “Labor W” in the ashes of old laboratories.

Probably realizing that Beyerdynamic’s monopoly will not last forever, Eugen seeks to give maximum effort to promising developments. So in 1953, the revolutionary DT 49 “stick” mono headphones appeared, which actually opened up opportunities for creating disco bars (several places for test listening to records in a music store).

But the main research of the 50s is the “transistophone” - the world's first wireless concert microphone. A distinctive feature of this device was the use of transistors, which made the microphone transmitter very compact by the standards of the time. Research to create a full-fledged semiconductor circuitry was started back in 1953, the microphone was mass-produced in 1962.

Eugen Beyer himself did not live up to the serial release of the new product. He died suddenly in 1959. Before the true triumph of his brainchild, the founder did not live only a few years. Over the next decade, his company's products were in demand by stars such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and microphones were used at top-level press conferences.

As an engineer and innovator to the bone, Eugen did not pay much attention to marketing, which had fatal consequences. Beyerdynamic, which had ideal starting positions after the war and the most promising developments, lost the impressive shares of the national and world markets to competing compatriots from Sennheiser (in microphones) and overseas colleagues from KOSS (in headphones). The descendants of Eugen, which to this day owns a significant part of the assets of the company, corrected errors with marketing. Today Beyerdynamic is one of the most famous manufacturers of headphones and microphones on the planet.

In the 1920s in Berlin Eugen Beyer believed that the cinema presented a new opportunity in communication media. The first products he produced were loudspeakers for film palaces in 1924. At the end of the 1930s Beyer developed the first pair of dynamic headphones. World War II temporarily froze production; however, in 1948, Beyerdynamic sought new beginnings in Heilbronn. The "Stielhörer" DT 49 became a popular item of "Plattenbars" (record-bars) in the 1950s.

Beyerdynamic developed the highly directional ribbon microphone Beyerdynamic M 160 model in 1957, along with the figure-8 pattern M 130. These microphones contained dual ribbon aluminum elements suspended between neodymium magnets. The M 160 went on to become a classic recording studio microphone, still in production after more than six decades. The "transistophone", the company's first wireless microphone, went into production in 1962. The Beatles' 1966 German tour used the E-1000 microphone. Elton John, ABBA, and Stevie Wonder all sang into sound transformers produced by Beyerdynamic. In 1985, Beyerdynamic acquired its then-North American distributor, Burns Audiotronics, which became its North American subsidiary. Today Beyerdynamic, Inc. have their own office headquartered in Farmingdale, New York.

At the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul all media reporting sites were equipped with headsets from Beyerdynamic. In 1999, the new Bundestag in Berlin was fitted with Beyerdynamic's digital microphones. The reporters from the Football World Cup in Germany used the DT 297 headset. Most recently, the TG1000 digital wireless system has been introduced.

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RME was founded in 1996 by Ralf Männel and Matthias Carstens. Carstens got his start in the audio world by training as an electrical engineer, playing drums, working in various music stores, and becoming proficient at electronic repair. As Carstens was working with audio equipment, Männel presented a project in ELRAD, a German magazine for electronics and technical applied computing. Männel’s concept was a Interface, Level Meter, Error Analyzer, measuring and long term test system. Carstens thought the project had promise, contacted Männel and the two decided to work together, thus creating RME. Currently RME consists of a German team of developers with a robust vision of creating innovative, user friendly, and high-quality digital audio solutions.