John Thomas Mullin was an American pioneer in the field of magnetic tape sound recording and made significant contributions to many other related fields.
16 Facts About Jack Mullin
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Jack Mullin saw the potential of the new technology and developed it immediately after the war.
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Jack Mullin served in the US Army Signal Corps during World War II.
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Jack Mullin was posted to Paris in the final months of the war, where his unit was assigned to find out everything they could about German radio and electronics.
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Jack Mullin was sent to inspect a site near Frankfurt, where the Germans had reputedly been experimenting with using directed high-energy radio beams as means of disabling the ignition systems of flying aircraft.
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On his way back home to San Francisco, Jack Mullin made a chance stopover at a nearby German radio station at Bad Nauheim, which was already in American hands.
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Jack Mullin had them shipped home and over the next two years he worked on the machines constantly, modifying them and improving their performance.
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Jack Mullin gave two public demonstrations of his machines in Hollywood in 1947, in which he first presented live music performed behind a curtain, followed by a concealed playback of the performance.
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Jack Mullin's recorder caused a sensation among American audio professionals and many listeners could not tell the difference between the recorded and live performances.
10.
Mackenzie arranged for Jack Mullin to meet Crosby, and in June 1947 Crosby was given a demonstration of Jack Mullin's magnetic tape recorders.
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Jack Mullin disliked the regimentation of live broadcasts, and much preferred the relaxed atmosphere of the recording studio.
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Crosby realised that Jack Mullin's tape recording technology would enable him to pre-record his radio show with a sound quality that equalled live broadcasts, that these tapes could be edited precisely, and replayed many times with no appreciable loss of quality.
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Jack Mullin was asked to tape one show as a test; it was a complete success and Jack Mullin was immediately hired as Crosby's chief engineer to pre-record the rest of the series.
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Jack Mullin has claimed that he even pioneered the use of the laugh track; at the insistence of Crosby's writer Bill Morrow, he inserted a segment of raucous laughter from an earlier show to follow a joke in a later show that had not worked well.
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Jack Mullin kept an impressive collection of early recording hardware, which was donated in 1990 to the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting.
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Jack Mullin died of heart failure at his Camarillo, California home.