Written on April 22, 2008 – 7:41 am | by Bogdan Alex |

What’s the difference between a 70-year old mike and a brand new 2008 model? Honestly, I’m not that sure there might be any big difference… OK, there should be major improvements done to the actual basic parts, but then again everything has rapidly evolved since the end of WW2. I wasn’t asking about material differences, but spiritual ones. C’mon, what’s spirit got to do with mikes? It has an awful lot when it happens to be a Neumann Microphones model, I tell you.

What you see here is the Neumann U47 mike that the Beatles recorded on almost exclusively from 1962 to 1970, as did Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and… Hitler. What, that dirty bastard could sing? Not exactly, but close. The U47 (sounds like a German U boat, lol) was used during the Berlin Olympics in 1936 as German Chancellor Adolf Hitler opened ceremonies with the aid of such device. Soon after, the Third Reich used this one to address and reach the hearts of his fellow countrymen. That’s how the mike gained the nickname Hitlerflasche, or the Hitler Bottle.

Neumann made The U47 specially for Hitler’s public appearances and after WW2, the maker took the old carbon-grain broadcast microphone, which used bits of carbon sandwiched between two plates, and turned it into a mass-produced "condenser" microphone, which has one fixed plate and another that forms a diaphragm moved by sound waves.

I bet there aren’t many of these left and that the one used by Hitler could get more expensive than a small tactical squadron arsenal.