The Telefunken name that we associate with rare and valuable microphones and preamplifiers dates back to well before World War 1. Telefunken were set up in Berlin as a collaboration between Siemens & Halske and the General Electricity Company and by 1939 the parent company had a staff of over 23,000 workers. In 1941 AEG bought Siemens & Halske, and in 1967 Telefunken were merged with AEG and the company renamed AEG-Telefunken. AEG were bought by Daimler in 1985, and the Telefunken name dropped from the name, though Daimler-Chrysler still use it as a brand within Europe.

Connecticut-based Telefunken USA were incorporated in 2001, after acquiring the rights to the Telefunken name, though founder Toni Fishman had been working on his ideas for a couple of years before that. He apparently started out by looking at the possibility of providing replacement parts for some very rare and valuable vintage mics, including some Telefunken models, but ended up wondering if his company could just build the whole thing from scratch to replicate the original — and clearly he could!

Initially, it was the Telefunken Ela M251 model that took Toni's attention. The original was developed during the 1950s in collaboration with Vienna-based AKG, as a competitor to the Neumann U47, and it used the famous AKG CK12 capsule. This capsule, the 6072 tube and the model T14...