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.
How a Portland sound engineer's spare-bedroom experiment - taking a pair of earphones apart to build a custom set for his wife - became the in-ear monitor brand touring artists and studio producers trust in more than 90 countries.
For six decades, Bose has sold a deceptively simple promise: make the machinery disappear and let the listener feel the result. Its next act stretches that research habit from headphones and car cabins to luxury hi-fi and the software inside other brands' devices.