microphones
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Audio-Technica Beat the CD by Turning One Tiny Audio Skill Into a 64-Year Business
A cartridge maker should have disappeared when CDs arrived. Instead, Audio-Technica treated the format shift as an engineering prompt - and built a durable business around the overlooked hardware between a sound and the person hearing it.
Shure Built the Microphone Presidents, Popes, and Podcasters All Reach For
A one-room radio-parts shop in 1925 Chicago turned into the microphone every roadie trusts and every meeting room quietly runs on. Here is how Shure spent a century refusing to go public - or to make a fragile mic.
The $20 Earbud Company That Sells in a Blue Box You Cannot Miss
Founded in 2005, JLab turned cheap earbuds and a bright blue box into a top-selling audio brand. Here is how a company that refuses the rockstar price built a business worth $370 million.
The Family That Wired the World's Stages - And Then Sold the Headphones
Fritz Sennheiser started a lab in a farmhouse in 1945. Eighty years later his grandsons run the microphone company that quietly powers your favorite show - and made a hard call about the headphones on your head.
The Speaker Company That Names Its Line Arrays After the Moons of Jupiter
A small crew in Walnut, California ships line arrays, subwoofers and weatherproof PA gear straight to the DJs and churches who use them - and names the product series after planetary moons.
sensiBel
sensiBel is a Norwegian semiconductor company that makes optical MEMS microphones - tiny chip-scale devices that use a laser and photodetector to sense a diaphragm's motion instead of the electrical (capacitive) method used in almost every microphone for the past century. Its flagship SBM100B is billed as the world's first production optical MEMS microphone, delivering studio-grade specs (80 dBA SNR, 146 dB acoustic overload point, 132 dB dynamic range) in a package small enough for earbuds, laptops and microphone arrays. Spun out of Norwegian research institute SINTEF in 2017, sensiBel sells to audio, consumer-electronics and pro-audio manufacturers and counts Sennheiser among its investors.
Joseph Bousaba
Joseph Bousaba is the CEO of InvenSense and General Manager of TDK Corporation's MEMS Sensors Business Group, leading a global powerhouse in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) sensing solutions. With over 18 years of senior leadership in the semiconductor industry - spanning Philips Semiconductors, Qualcomm Atheros, and Qualcomm - he stepped into the top role at InvenSense in October 2024, bringing a track record of building multi-hundred-million-dollar businesses at the intersection of motion, sound, and AI-driven sensing.