Beyerdynamic's history stretches back further than almost any name in audio: founded in Berlin in 1924 by engineer Eugen Beyer, who began by building loudspeakers for the cinema halls of the silent-film era. By the end of the 1930s, that early expertise led to the DT 48 — the world's first dynamic headphone, a product so well engineered it remained in production, largely unchanged, until 2012.

In 1948, Beyerdynamic established a new home in Heilbronn, Germany, where it remains headquartered and still hand-builds the majority of its headphones and microphones today. The decades that followed produced a string of genuine audio landmarks: the M 19 studio microphone in 1937, the hugely influential M 160 ribbon microphone in 1957 (later inducted into the NAMM TECnology Hall of Fame), and, eventually, the acclaimed DT series of studio headphones — the DT 770, 880, and 990 — that remain staples in recording studios worldwide.