An insight story
Perhaps I should mention that I'm really quite devoted to the Muses. Not that I think, this is a special sign of quality, but on the other hand, my presence here in a high-tech company does not necessarily speak for itself. I knew of d&b audiotechnik as a manufacturer of high quality products, so when I came to Korb for the first time in the middle of the eighties, I was expecting to find a lot of industriously busy gentlemen in white coats, running around with calculators in their hands and important-looking wrinkles on their foreheads. Instead, I found myself in slightly hectic, but definitely casual surroundings where work seemed to be rather a second priority.
All of us (that's me with the tie), at the beginning of the 90s ...
Perhaps this is what fascinated me about this company from the very start. Although I was quite impressed by the meticulous precision with which the black boxes were made, I did not have the impression that the product was the sole concern of all activities. Every conversation, every technical description revealed clearly that the main task here was to make music sound good. And I dearly felt that this company had developed from a close-knit group.
... fifteen years later, about two thirds of our workforce.
d&b's beginnings go right back to the inevitable garage. And to two hobby musicians who had experienced that the sound that leaves the system through the power towers is not always the same as that which goes in. And so they decided to introduce new impulses in audio technology, with the firm conviction that even larger and louder loudspeakers was simply not the right way to meet the electroacoustic challenges. Their utopian spirit was fed on practical experience. Jürgen Daubert, for example, had been juggling with transistors since his youth, developing amplifiers with increasing efficiency and output, and finally, as a sideline during his student days, had developed a new kind of amplifier electronics. Rolf Belz on the other hand, "the ear", had trained his ears inexorably through all kinds of music and sound experiments. His claim to fame were two suitably calibrated measuring instruments, his ears.
A trio was formed when Werner "Vier" Bayer joined their endeavours. He had already earned himself a reputation as audio mixer magician and knew that his work simply lacked good sounding systems.
Just to prove we are a Swabian company: Pretzels with butter are a regional speciality (Andy Mietling of R&D) ...
This all happened at the beginning of the eighties. Punk had just arrived in Germany, simple pop songs came into fashion again, and in Korb, a tranquil Swabian village, the first prototypes emerged of what were soon to become legendary, controller driven sound reinforcement systems. By then, the team had had enough of optimising a good loudspeaker here, revolutionizing a frequency crossover there and fiddling around with a new audio mixer somewhere else. Instead, all ideas, experiences and developed components were combined together and packed in a closed unit as a unified whole: the d&b system.
The courage it took to conceive integrated systems was soon rewarded with success: the products from Korb were welcomed with open ears. This of course meant leaving the quaint and cosy garage: urgently needed production area, storage capacity and a larger team made it necessary to move into a former carpenter's workshop.
... and a tightly organized community (Iris Mann, Marc Philipp).
