Steve Mills

Steve Mills was a music student in Seattle when he landed a job at Crown International in 1979. He began working on the bench on circuit boards, and after earning his electrical engineering degree at Purdue, Steve became a microphone engineer and then manager of the Microphone Engineering Department. The product engineers in the microphone division, Tom Lininger and Bruce Bartlett, asked Steve to assist with the creation of the CM311, known at Crown as the Garth Brooks microphone because it was designed for the country star. The microphone used the Differoid noise canceling technology, which was a leading innovation and the foundation for many microphones to come. Steve left Crown in 2009 and teamed up once again with Bruce Bartlett when Bartlett Microphone Company was formed.