For several decades Neumann was also a leading manufacturer of cutting lathes for phonograph disks, and even ventured into the field of mixing desks.

Georg Neumann relocated his company to the much smaller town of Gefell in Thuringia and resumed production at the beginning of the following year.

At the close of the war, Thuringia fell under Soviet control and the company eventually became an East German "Publicly Owned Operation" (i.e. a state-run enterprise).

In the United States, for example, the sound of the best-known crooners of the 1940s (e.g. Bing Crosby and later Elvis Presley) had utilized the ultra-smooth, rolled-off tone of RCA ribbon microphones; on the other hand, pop recordings in the 1950s (e.g. Frank Sinatra and later The Beatles) were sharper, clearer, and more present as the result of using condenser microphones with elevated upper-mid-range response such as the U 47.

Other important microphones introduced by Neumann during the immediate postwar period included the M 49 and M 50, both based on designs researched and engineered at the NWDR in Germany.

The M 50 featured a small, diffuse-field equalized pressure transducer embedded in the surface of a 40 mm hard plastic sphere, which gave it increasing directionality above the mid-range frequencies.

During the period from 1953 to 1956 Neumann introduced a series of small condenser microphones (KM 53, 54 and 56) especially for use in television broadcast studios.

At the end of the 1950s, the Telefunken VF 14 vacuum tube on which the circuitry of the U 47 and U 48 had been based, was discontinued, so Neumann came under pressure to develop a successor.

(This could be considered ironic, since the U 47 and U 48 have a cult following today specifically for use in close-up vocals, with some engineers seeming to fancy that they are re-creating a "vintage" sound—whereas in fact, they are creating a sound quality that was specifically abhorred by many of the "golden ears" of the era—notable exceptions being Beatles producer George Martin and engineers Norman Smith and Geoff Emerick.)

In 1964 Neumann developed a small cardioid capsule with considerably improved off-axis linearity; it was used in the KM 64 and U 64 microphones.