ABSTRACT
Born in San Francisco and growing up in Larkspur in Marin County, Mullin graduated from Santa Clara University in what is today Silicon Valley, with a major in electrical engineering. He was a member of the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II, and during the postwar occupation in Germany he visited a studio near Frankfurt that was occupied by the Allies and was shown a small storehouse of magnetic quarter-inch tape and machines. He had already suspected that the Germans had some kind of superior recording device from his monitoring experiences when he was stationed in England, and the device he discovered that was most important was the high-fidelity version of the German AEG Magnetophon K-4 audio tape recorder,a machine with extremely low distortion and a frequency response, almost matching the human hearing range. Getting official permission to send home samples of what he felt was important, he shipped 50 reels of tape, head assemblies, and two of the tape transports back to America (in pieces in multiple mailbags), and later worked to improve the technology. In October 1946, at a meeting of studio executives, Mullin used his modified Magnetophone recorders to demonstrate how the new recording technology worked. Soon Bing Crosby, who hated the pressure of live broadcasting, started using the then revolutionary technology to pretape his radio show for ABC. The show included laugh tracks, which Mullin also invented. Previous to Mullin, prerecorded programs (usually done on 16-inch transcription discs) presented terrible sound quality. His new technology, which not only allowed for production during convenient time periods, but also allowed for scissors-andtape editing that removed bloopers, revolutionized the industry and set a precedent in broadcast production that remains the norm to this day. Mullin’s prototype machines proved the feasibility of the new tape technology to Ampex Corp., a small northern California company that then decided to become the first American manufacturer of the Mullin-enhanced German technology. The result was the Model 200A, and later the Model 300, tape recorders, which went on to revolutionize the entertainment and information industries. Mullin went on to work for Minicom, a division of 3M, and helped to formulate many recording industry standards, including the NAB equalization curve that is still in use for analog recording. He remained Minicom’s chief engineer until his retirement in 1975. At that time, he began a second career of voluntary teaching, writing, and lecturing, in addition to helping to work out recording technology for the blind and dyslexic. He created over 2,000 hours of books on tape that now reside at the university library at Princeton and that are still nationally distributed to the readingimpaired. He also created one of the finest collections of historic entertainment technology available, including radios, recorders, microphones, tapes, and discs. The Mullin Museum is now a part of the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, near 3M in St. Paul. For his work in recording technology, the Audio Engineering Society presented him with numerous awards, including the organization’s Silver Medal, in 1994.
