Sennheiser MKH 416 Shotgun Mic Turns 50

Wedemark, Germany (March 19, 2025)—This year marks the 50^th anniversary of a microphone that proved to be a cornerstone for Sennheiser: the MKH 416 P48 shotgun mic. Long a go-to for broadcasters, filmmakers, voice-over artists, and content creators, it has become a familiar sight for all sorts of productions where an on-camera microphone just isn’t quite appropriate.

The development of the MKH 416 P48 fell into the lap of engineer Manfred Hibbing, who came to Sennheiser with a background in electroacoustics and RF technology. As it happened, development of the new microphone was his first assignment when he joined the company. The new mic would take inspiration from a predecessor—the MKH 415 T—but the MKH 416 would be a phantom-powered (hence P48) shotgun microphone, making it Sennheiser’s first phantom-powered product. At the time, the broadcast industry preferred AB power for a microphone due to its resistance to ripple voltages, but with studios opting for phantom power, Sennheiser wanted a part of that market as well.

In a 2023 interview, Hibbing noted that optimizing the interaction between the electroacoustic transducer and the electronic circuit was his favorite part of creating the 416. The overall design has remained relatively the same over the ensuing decades, as he pointed out, stating, “The design of the MKH 416 was only revised in two instances: one was to make it suitable for SMD mounting, and the other to update it for a more advanced transducer technology.”

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Sennheiser posits that part of the mic’s ongoing popularity can be attributed to its resistance to humidity, allowing it to be used outdoors in humid or cold weather, whether in rainforests or the arctic. That resistance comes down to the MKH 416 operating on the RF condenser principle, having nothing to do with wireless, but instead the high-frequency voltage at the capsule and the associated electronics in the microphone.

Another aspect might be the directivity of the microphone capsule, which is combined with an interference tube in front of it. The tube has regularly arranged slots, which are covered with fabric that has a certain acoustic impedance, and prevents reflections and standing waves inside the tube. If sound arrives directly from the front, the interference tube has no effect, but when sound enters the tube from the sides, it passes through different holes. This results in different path lengths to the transducer and thus different time delays. Depending on the angle of sound incidence, the sound components more or less cancel each other out. This effect increases at higher frequencies: Here, the microphone essentially picks up the sound coming from the front. This is particularly important for speech intelligibility as the decisive speech formants are recorded with less lateral interference at high frequencies than with standard microphones.

Marking the 50^th anniversary, Sennheiser has placed the mic on sale with a 15% anniversary discount at participating Sennheiser dealers.