Wikipedia on the Beatles’ electronic “wizard”:
Mardas was ultimately given the job of designing the Beatles’ new recording studio in the basement at Apple headquarters in Savile Row, after boasting of his plans to create the world’s first 72-track tape machine. He gave the Beatles regular reports of his progress, but when they required their new studio in January 1969, during the Get Back project that became Let It Be, they discovered not a state-of-the-art facility, but a poorly planned, unusable, cramped set of rooms, with no 72-track tape deck, no soundproofing, no talkback (intercom) system, and not even a patch bay to run the wiring between the control room and the studio. The only new piece of sound equipment present was a crude mixing console Mardas had built, that was consigned to the scrapheap after one session.
One of Mardas’s more outrageous plans was to replace the acoustic baffles (sound insulators, used to prevent leakage) around Ringo Starr’s drums with an invisible sonic force field. That didn’t happen. George Harrison’s suspicions of Mardas’s competence were raised when he saw him wandering around in a white coat, with a clipboard, muttering as he placed tiny loudspeakers around the studio — one for each track. When “Magic Alex” failed to deliver, the Beatles had to wait until George Martin came to the rescue, working around the studio’s technical problems, and borrowing a pair of four-track recorders from EMI, to continue the project. Long time Beatle engineer Geoff Emerick was given the task of building and setting up a new studio with new equipment.
Mardas was fired from Apple by Allen Klein in 1969, and every British patent he applied for on Apple’s behalf was turned down on the grounds that he had invented nothing new, but had only built modified versions of products already under patent. It was later revealed that Mardas’s main electronic experience had been as a TV repairman. In The Beatles Anthology, Harrison considered the possibility that “Alex just read the latest version of Science Weekly, and used its ideas.”
