The audio brand known as Sennheiser has been around since 1945 and created its first microphone on a small farm in Germany around 80 years ago. Since then, the company has become known for its high-quality audio products. In particular, many of their headphones over the years have received consistent praise from the audiophile community.
Given that Sennheiser was founded in Germany all those years ago, one would expect its name to have some sort of meaning in its native German language. But Sennheiser does not actually translate, or even mean anything, into modern German.
If you type the brand name into a German dictionary, you will get no results. Indeed, Sennheiser has no meaning other than simply the last name of the company’s founder, Fritz Sennheiser. In fact, Sennheiser wasn’t always the name of the company. Originally founded as Laboratorium Wennebostel (Labor W), the company would later change its name to Sennheiser in 1958.
Maybe it’s a question of linguistics
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A surname like Sennheiser hasn’t always been as common as you might think. All surnames arose as human populations expanded. A town might only have a few Johnathans, but in a big city this would start to become a problem. So the creation of the last name was a way to help differentiate people. And many early family names simply adopted the jobs people did.
For its part, the German language took on surnames around the 1100s. And like the English, they generally took on professional surnames. The word Senne often refers to a place where dairy products are manufactured or to a mountain dairy farm. A man who works in a Senne would then be called a Senn. This suggests that the Sennheiser name may have its roots in working on a dairy farm.
This is interesting considering that Sennheiser got its start on a farm, which is still part of Sennheiser’s headquarters. If you ever find yourself in Germany, you can request a tour of this farm to experience a piece of audiophile history. You might even get the chance to see the incredibly rare Sennheiser HE-90 Orpheus headphones while you’re there.
