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About SchoepsCompany history
The company known as “Schalltechnik Dr.-Ing. Schoeps” was founded in June, 1948; the precise date is not recorded. In the period following the war, business practices weren’t regulated as closely as they are today. During those years, people were concerned mainly with procuring and securing the means of survival; thus the first official entry in the business register of the chamber of commerce of Karlsruhe occurs only in 1956. It is not shown yet as an incorporated entity; that occurred only later, in 1978. The place of the company’s founding was Durlach, the oldest neighborhood of the ciry of Karlsruhe, where the company still has its home. The founder was Dr.-Ing. Karl Schoeps (b. 1906), and his first co-worker was Dr.-Ing. Wilhelm Küsters (b. 1910). Both had completed their studies in Information Technology at the Technical College of Karlsruhe.
The name, which is somewhat unusual for a manufacturer (“Schalltechnik” = audio technology), stems from the original intention to be concerned with all aspects of sound recording and public address systems in general. At the time the company was founded, the German population had a great need for entertainment, which could not yet, of course, be met with video recorders or home theater systems. The cinema was foremost; films with sound thus experienced their first great period of growth, and at the Schoeps company, plans were being made for cinema sound installations. Beyond that, the company was concerned (in private apartments at first, and later in a rented building) with constructing small quantities of tape recorders. But already in its first year, the company also built the first Schoeps condenser microphone, the CMV 50/2 (containing two of the well-known RV 12 P 2000 vacuum tubes). The capsule and the microphone body (whose size, unimaginable in today’s conditions, was ca. 13″ tall and 3″ in diameter), were still connected together in a fixed manner.
During its first twenty years, the Schoeps company had practically no distribution network of its own. Despite this, the circle of its clients grew steadily larger. Due to Dr. Schoeps’ friendship with a commercial representative in France who had excellent contacts among French radio broadcasters, a considerable market position (which still endures today) could already be achieved there in the 1950s. Far more than half of Schoeps’ production at that time was exported to France.