International. The AKG brand celebrated 75 years of accompanying the music scene, delivering professional headphones and microphones, among other devices, which today are work tools for emerging artists and podcasters.
This brand, mostly recognized for its microphones, has been on the stage of historical figures such as Frank Sinatra, David Bowie, Kanye West and The Beatles. Even its technology is in orbit aboard the MIR space station.
To achieve these goals, AKG has gone a long way of development, which began in a basement in Austria, a space where a couple of inventors built, by hand, film equipment.
History
AKG was founded in 1947 by physicist Rudolph Görike and engineer Ernst Pless, old friends who met again after World War II in war-torn Vienna, at the time the brand was known as "Photophon". By that time the cinema was the most popular entertainment, but most of the city's cinemas had been looted or destroyed, and it was almost impossible to replace damaged projection systems.
Görike and Pless, together with a core team of five employees, set out to supply cinemas in Vienna with film projectors and speakers, modifying projectors purchased from a closed factory and building horn speakers with cardboard diaphragms. They delivered the products on bicycles or wheelbarrows, as payment they received butter, meat and cigarettes in kind.
At first, the company sold a huge range of products, such as light meters, car speakers, intercoms, phone capsules and cushion headphones, which were fashionable at the time. After a couple of years, he turned his attention to microphones; They introduced the DYN series, their first dynamic microphones for voices and instruments, as well as the C1, which was their first tube condenser microphone. In 1949, AKG introduced its first headphone model, the K120 DYN.
In the 1950s, AKG pioneered the development of moving coil transducer technology and mass-charged diaphragms, both of which expanded the frequency range and eliminated the stridency inherent in previous microphone designs. The D12 was the world's first single-diaphragm cardioid dynamic microphone; It set a new sound standard for voice transmission and was quickly adopted by radio stations, recording studios and film productions around the world.
In 1953, AKG introduced the legendary C12, the world's first large-diaphragm, remote-controlled, multi-pattern condenser microphone; its base, the CK12 capsule, was the first to show a constant frequency response and sensitivity for all polar patterns.
The C12 was commissioned by RAVAG, the Austrian national radio network "They were looking for a microphone as thin as a pen", the then designer Konrad Wolf, commented that "nobody was able to do it, but in any case, we came up with a cylindrical and thin shape for the C12". This device resulted in the stereo microphone, along with the version for Siemens and Telefunken, including the Telefunken Ela M 250 and M 251.
By the mid-1960s, AKG was well established in the music industry, and in 1970, it introduced the BX20, the world's first portable studio reverb. The unit had coil piers with long time delays that mimicked the reverberation characteristics of large concert halls. Vintage BX20s are still highly sought after today.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the company continued to pioneer headphone technologies and introduced the K340, the world's first dynamic/electrostatic hybrid headphones; the K1000 open headphones for binaural listening; and the Libero wireless headphones, which used infrared light to transmit audio signals.
After Harman acquired AKG in 1994, the company focused more on its core products, microphones and headphones. In 2010, AKG received a Technical Grammy Award for its "contributions to the art and science of recording and musical performance through innovation and excellence in product design."
Philip Feinman, AKG's global product line manager, says that going forward, the company intends to continue to offer tools that take advantage of the latest technologies and platforms. "Whether it's using some of the newest immersive audio technologies or creating unique ways to capture sources, AKG is committed to making innovative, high-quality products that help inspire artists and make life sound better."
Over the past two decades, with the explosion of digital recording technologies, AKG has evolved to meet the needs of modern content creators, producing a range of wireless microphone systems, Bluetooth headsets and USB microphones. Nowadays many nascent artists and podcasters have become fans.
