Axel Grell still hasn’t made it. In the Wikipedia entry for Burgdorf it is missing under “Sons and daughters of the city”. He was born there in 1962 and has lived most of his life in this province of Lower Saxony near Hanover. Maybe the city fathers don’t care about headphones. The story is told that quite a few Japanese visitors greeted Axel Grell personally at trade fairs in Tokyo without a name tag indicating his identity.
At the High End in Munich, the most important trade fair for audio products, people keep raising their hands in greeting and accompanying the movement with the words “Hi Axel!”. People know each other, visitors recognize him, even if the brands Heavys and Grell Audio are above his stand and not the name Sennheiser, which many would expect.
Among other things, he developed the legendary HD 800 for the company from Wedemark, which quite a few audiophiles around the world own. It was 2009 when high-end headphones were still a thing of the past. “With these headphones, I opened up a market for headphones over 1000 euros,” says Grell. Audiophiles also know the HE-1. But hardly anyone owns it – because hardly anyone can afford it. At 50,000 euros, it is the most expensive headphone in the world.
Enjoy arguing and lecturing
These two milestones in Axel Grell’s life roughly mark his rise and fall at Sennheiser, where he started right after studying electrical engineering and worked for 27 years. It is difficult to judge in retrospect whether that time has shaped his character to this day or whether he fit in there from the start with his calm, unexcited, professorial manner. But he always comes across as a serious, concentrated engineer whose willingness to be funny in principle is kept in check by his love of arguing and lecturing. Grell is mostly concerned with things like frequency response, membrane, distortion factor or DSP. He often knows better than others without being a know-it-all. His self-confidence has grown so much that he describes himself, almost without irony, as the best headphone developer in the world.
After Axel Grell not only enriched the audiophile portfolio at Sennheiser with the HD 800, he assumed sole responsibility for this area in 2014. A year later, during Sennheiser’s seventieth anniversary celebrations in London, the company unveiled the HE-1. Making it was “a mistake,” says Grell seven years later. Sennheiser should have better “put the money for the development into marketing”.
His toughest accusation
It was already rumbling at the time. Apparently, Grell didn’t agree with the management’s idea of importing expensive blocks of marble from Italy, on which the tubes of the amplifier sit for showmanship and pop out as if by magic when you turn it on. The headphones themselves were finished in 2013, says Grell.
Until 2018, he welcomed visitors to the High End at the Sennheiser stand. A year later he was met in the aisles of Hall 1, where he spoke of his resignation and visited the fair as a consultant. His reasons for leaving his long-term employer are of a personal and structural nature. The fact that his wife Katrin Härtel was fired as a designer a few months before he left is probably one of them. The fact that Sennheiser was looking for a buyer for the consumer sector almost two years after its termination and found one a few months later in the Swiss company Sonova was the result of a threatening development that had already started in Grell’s time. He said he was “sad” when he heard about the sale and is just a little sorry. His criticism of the company is too strong when you talk to him about his former employer. His hardest accusation: even if there was “evidence” of a project’s potential success, nobody took the risk and “didn’t want to take responsibility”. That was particularly disappointing for him.