Christian Poulsen of DPA Microphones has a plan to take over the world with good audio
On December, 17, 2013, renowned microphone manufacturer DPA announced that the Riverside Company would become majority shareholders in the company. It was a startling move to many observers of the fiercely independent Danish company, but this manufacturer has been making sweeping changes under its relatively new CEO Christian Poulsen, and his latest move only bolstered his mission to make sure DPA becomes one of the top three microphone companies in the world — by any standard.
Vision
Based in Allerød, Denmark (about 30 minutes outside of Copenhagen), DPA occupies two different buildings, a legacy of when it was two different companies. Morten Stove and Ole Brosted Sorensen founded Danish Professional Audio in 1992 after many years at Brüel & Kjær, a respected Danish audio measurement company. In 1994, DPA partnered with hearing-aid manufacturer company Muphone to develop the DPA 4060, an omnidirectional microphone, and DPA’s core competencies were established: innovative, high-quality miniature microphones. Today, 80 percent of DPA’s business is in miniature mics. While the company has branched out with the full-sized d:facto mic (more on that in a bit), its innovations and quality keep it firmly in line with DPA’s core focus on microphones.
“It’s temping to ask why don’t we do wireless, why don’t we do mixing consoles, why don’t we do audio software, why don’t we do a million things,” says Christian Poulsen, the CEO of DPA. Poulsen is talking to me in the basement of Dragsholm Castle while a blizzard rages outside, shaking the thick walls of the castle.
In his thick-rimmed glasses, black turtleneck and close-cropped hair, Poulsen comes across like a Danish Steve Jobs, and his intensity about his vision for DPA matches the storm outside. “We are a one-of-a-kind microphone company and I have a strong vision of maintaining that position rather than trying to be like everybody else. If we try that, we’ll be nothing.”
That vision includes increasing market penetration and sales of DPA’s current microphone lineup. Yet equally important is the development of additional high-end mics (echoing Steve Jobs philosophy that new products drive sales) and finding efficiencies and new methods for microphone manufacturing in its home country, because DPA is committed to staying in Denmark. This stems as much out of pride in the high skills of its workforce as reluctance to let the precision manufacturing secrets they have uncovered out into copy-centric manufacturing culture overseas. DPA also enjoys taking advantage of the closeness of their R&D department and their manufacturing facilities.
“I can’t get R&D too far away from production when we are doing new products that are at the edge of what is possible,” says Poulsen. “It’s not just a matter of inventing stuff — we need to be able to produce it, too.” Keeping R&D so close to manufacturing means their engineers can rely on the expertise of the workers to manufacture prototypes, they can listen to the workers to find better ways of making them and they can also monitor and standardize practices so that no matter how many are being produced, they all sound great.
Back at headquarters, DPA head of R&D Ole Moesmann echoes Poulsen’s beliefs. “I need to know what challenges there are in the daily production, so I can fix them so I don’t put them into a new product,” Moesmann says.
This real-world aspect of R&D even extends into the lab where the engineers develop the next products. A wind generator is available to blast air at microphone prototypes, a special mouth simulator can reproduce pop sounds for creating mics that defeat plosives and a drop test machine simulates the inevitable reality of real-world conditions. Regarding the latter, product manager Mikkel Nymand laughs, saying, “it’s part of our QA process to intentionally abuse the mics. We have a hard plate and we have a mic stand, and we push the microphone and the stand to the ground a number of times then measure the audio. Then do it again, then do it again, and again, and see how many drops it takes to change the sound.” The sound that comes out of a DPA may be pristine and delicate, but the mics aren’t. They are made to deliver great audio under tough conditions, a benefit that is particularly clear when you put them onstage and on the road, offering durability and tonal quality that hold up even under the most adverse sonic conditions.
In what would seem like a cruel trick to anyone outside the audio industry, a voice-over artist has agreed to demo four different DPA mics for me — while being blasted with close to 100 dB of pink noise. She sits in front of a table in a recording booth. A DPA 4018C supercardioid table mic sits in front of her; a 4060 omni-directional lavalier and 4080 cardioid lavalier are clipped to the front of her blouse; and twin d:fine mics (one cardioid, one omnidirectional) wrap around her ear and rest near her cheek. She reads, and the mics all sound great — and then pink noise starts. And while the table and lav mics capture the pink noise, the d:fines reject almost all of the pink noise and her voice comes through cleanly.
Challenges
Being able to produce microphones with such level of a accuracy and quality is a process filled with challenges of a completely different scale. Mic quality and self-noise is dependent on the size of the diaphragm (obviously small in miniature headworn mics), the distance between the backplate and the diaphragm and the charge at the backplate. Making the first two variables larger would negate the “miniature” aspect of DPA’s microphones, which means DPA has invested a lot of time and effort into controlling the voltage in its capsules through a process of pre-polarizing the backplate. (The process looks a lot like heating Saran Wrap over metal lunch bins — but in a clean room.) The polarization decays before leveling off at a stable amount. This process can take a while, but DPA has perfected a method to quicken the stabilization process, a method they guard about as closely as the recipe to Coca-Cola. Only three people in the whole company know it. “We are world champions at this,” says Poulsen. “Nobody can do this better. This is why all our miniature microphones with comparable sizes to the competition have much lower noise than others.”
Venturing into the Handheld Arena
DPA’s creative thinking doesn’t stop at miniature models. Last year, DPA introduced the d:facto II handheld vocal mic. Ostensibly a super-cardioid design, it’s a little harder to quantify than just that.
First off, the d:facto II isn’t just available as merely a wired handheld. DPA manufactures capsule adapters that let users attach the mic head to any major manufacturer’s wireless handset. And this goes beyond merely changing the threading on the adapter — the adapter range has a DC servo circuit to ensure perfect power supply offset to the manufacturer’s transmitter body to ensure the cleanest possible signal. “We optimize the amplifier circuit in the mic head for each of the different handles, because there are big differences in power in each,” says Poulsen. “We want to optimize the dynamics from the capsule by offering the best possible electrical conditions in the adapter. We are at the edge of what is possible for the dynamic range and the sound quality we need.”
And secondly, while the company refers to the d:facto II as a supercardioid, it’s a little more complicated than that. DPA decided that, while rejection of rear sound is good, other improvements can really be had by shrinking the size of the cardioid pattern, taking away sound coming in from the sides and reducing the off-axis sound. And the pickup pattern at the head of the mic was widened, letting more of the audio you want in, and rejecting more audio around the mic.
“Basically the d:facto II is a not a cardioid and it’s not a supercardioid,” says Poulsen. “But then everyone who tests it finds out that this is a fantastic microphone, better sounding than anyone else, especially if there’s room noise.”
Future Growth
Even before the company received investment from the Riverside Company in December of last year, DPA was restructuring its management and sales team to continue to increase sales and market share. As DPA has independent distributors throughout the world (except in the U.S., where they own DPA Microphones Inc.) they needed to find a way to encourage distributors as well as attract new customers. To help in this, Niels Jørgen Øhrgaard was hired as executive vice president, sales, and Bo Brinck as global sales support manager. Brinck will help support the dealers, making himself available for shoot-outs and other activities, offering advice from his years of experience in all branches of sound production.
Both are working to create initiatives to attract new users in and reward current users. They’ll soon launch a DPA Sound Expert training program to certify users as DPA microphone experts. Also new is a launch of the DPA Master’s Club of dedicated users, which offers them rewards and special programs for being champions of DPA mics. “DPA has so many extremely passionate, enthusiastic sound engineers using DPA microphones, we would like to offer them something in exchange for that work,” says Øhrgaard. They’ve already started this program with a bang, bringing key users to Denmark for tours and training. “We need to have more people getting to Denmark to understand the DNA of DPA, and I’m thrilled about this Master’s Club, which can enlarge the circle of people we can communicate with in the industry.”
Part of that communicating is convincing the industry that it’s worth paying extra for a mic. “Our microphones are more expensive than other microphones, but you get a lot for the extra money,” says Poulsen. “If you ask a photographer what is more important, the megapixels a camera can shoot or the lens, they will all say they can’t live without their good lens. Good mics are the audio lens. There’s so much you can benefit from a good mic.”
Getting more sound pros to listen to the mics and make up their own minds is Brinck’s job, and he recognizes that he has an uphill climb in a world saturated with the competition. But he’s confident the quality of DPA mics speak for themselves. “If I can get five minutes of their time and get them listening to that mic, I don’t have to do anything else,” Brinck says, remaining undaunted even in the face of theatre sound designers and show crews, a risk-averse bunch. “It’s really, really hard to get the sound engineer to try something different because his job is on the line, and if it doesn’t sound good enough on the main actor, he’s out of there. But I can show him a mic, he can double mike the snare drum — he can double-mike anything in the orchestra pit without anyone noticing. And he can do a recording and play it in his own time, the day after or late at night. And if I can get him to try the microphone in an orchestra pit, I might have a way onto the stage as well, later on. Because why wouldn’t he do it differently on stage if it sounds better in the orchestra pit?”
To approach the rock ‘n’ roll market, DPA decided to just go big — as in Metallica FOH engineer “Big Mick” Hughes. A Danish sound engineer suggested Big Mick try DPA mics on Metallica’s latest tour, and he originally turned them down, saying that DPA was too delicate for rock ‘n’ roll, that they were only good for classical music. The engineer kept pushing, and eventually Big Mick tried them out — which turned into him buying and using DPA across all three legs of Metallica’s worldwide tour.
“It doesn’t get much more rock ‘n’ roll than that,” says Brinck. “If they can use it, maybe you can use it as well. Any time you want to do the test I will be there, I will bring two suitcases with my microphones and we will do a shoot-out. Are you in for that game?”
That confidence about their microphones exists throughout DPA, and it all starts from Poulsen, who never wavers from his vision. “Over the last two years we have had so many exciting new products and breakthroughs,” says Poulsen. “And we are going to continue making even better microphones.”
More information at www.dpamicrophones.com.
