ralf, in this case the Telefunken name wasn't licensed. Rather, an enterprising individual discovered that the trademark status of the Telefunken name and the diamond symbol, etc., had lapsed in North America. He applied for those trademarks himself, got them, and licensed their use to Toni Fishman, who isn't legally permitted to use those trademarks anywhere outside North America.
"Telefunken USA" is a clone manufacturer. They sometimes try to portray their products as "re-issues" but to my mind that is a pretense. When Neumann made a limited number of U 67s available for sale in 1993, which they had assembled from their remaining parts stock plus their ongoing capsule production over 20 years after they had discontinued that model, that was a re-issue. But when none of the key original parts (capsules, tubes, transformers, circuit boards, housings ...) are available and a third party comes along and puts together a microphone from reverse-engineered imitations of those parts, that's a clone.
The fact that the Telefunken emblem on the outside is also a clone doesn't make the microphone behind that badge any more authentic.
You are right that Telefunken never manufactured professional microphones. At the end of World War II, Telefunken had international contacts which Neumann, Schoeps, AKG, Beyer and Sennheiser did not. Those companies (all of which but Neumann were just starting up in those years) made distribution agreements with Telefunken because at the time, they couldn't handle this themselves. That situation continued into the mid/late 1950s, when the manufacturers gradually set up their own distribution arrangements.
Telefunken's approach was always to require the manufacturers to put the Telefunken brand name put on the products they sold. Thus there were "Telefunken" U 47s, "Telefunken" M 221s, and so on--at the same time as Neumann and Schoeps were selling those same microphones domestically. See the catalog page below, which shows Sennheiser, Schoeps and Neumann microphones all with Telefunken emblems on them. Telefunken continued to sell a limited number of these companies' studio microphones well into the 1970s, as parts of their equipment packages for broadcasting studios.
The Telefunken Ela M 250 and M 251 were exceptions in that they were manufactured by AKG solely for Telefunken, and were never in AKG's own catalog.
--best regards
Topic: telefunken usa (Read 2999 times)