Ray Dolby


Ray Milton Dolby was an American engineer and inventor of the noise reduction system known as Dolby NR. He helped develop the video tape recorder while at Ampex and was the founder of Dolby Laboratories.

Early life

Dolby was born in Portland, Oregon, the son of Esther Eufemia and Earl Milton Dolby, an inventor. He attended Sequoia High School in Redwood City, California. As a teenager in the decade following World War II, he held part-time and summer jobs at Ampex in Redwood City, working with their first audio tape recorder in 1949. While at San Jose State College and later at Stanford University, he worked on early prototypes of video tape recorder technologies for Alexander M. Poniatoff and Charlie Ginsburg. As a non degree-holding "consultant", Dolby played a key role in the effort that led Ampex to unveil their prototype Quadruplex videotape recorder in April 1956 which soon entered production.

Career

In 1957, Dolby received his B.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford. He subsequently won a Marshall Scholarship for a Ph.D in physics from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Research Fellow at Pembroke College.
After Cambridge, Dolby acted as a technical advisor to the United Nations in India until 1965,when he returned to England, where he founded Dolby Laboratories in London with a staff of four. In that same year, 1965, he officially invented the Dolby noise-reduction system, a form of audio signal processing for analog tape recorders. His first U.S. patent was not filed until 1969, four years later. The system was first used by Decca Records in the UK.
The Dolby B consumer noise-reduction system works by compressing and increasing the volume of low-level high-frequency sounds during recording and correspondingly reversing the process during playback. This high-frequency round turn reduces the audible level of tape hiss. The professional Type A system operates on four different frequency bands, and the final SR system on ten.
After his pioneering work with noise reduction Dolby sought to improve film sound. As the As Dolby Laboratories' corporate history explains:
The first film with Dolby sound was A Clockwork Orange, which used Dolby noise reduction on all pre-mixes and masters, but a conventional optical sound track on release prints. Callan was the first film with a Dolby-encoded optical soundtrack. The first true LCRS soundtrack was encoded on the movie A Star Is Born in 1976. In fewer than ten years, 6,000 cinemas worldwide were equipped to use Dolby Stereo sound.
Dolby then developed a digital surround sound compression scheme for the cinema. Dolby Stereo Digital was first featured on the 1992 film Batman Returns. Dolby Digital is now found in the HDTV standard of the United States, DVD players, and many satellite-TV and cable-TV receivers.
Dolby was a Fellow and past president of the Audio Engineering Society.

Death

Dolby died of leukemia on September 12, 2013, at his home in San Francisco at the age of 80. Dolby was survived by his wife Dagmar, two sons, Tom and David, and four grandchildren. Kevin Yeaman, president and chief executive of Dolby Laboratories, said "Today we lost a friend, mentor and true visionary." Neil Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, said Dolby had "changed the way we listen to music and movies for nearly 50 years" and that Dolby's "technologies have become an essential part of the creative process for recording artists and filmmakers, ensuring his remarkable legacy for generations to come."
In his will, Dolby bequeathed £35 million to Pembroke College, Cambridge, the largest single donation received by the University's current fundraising campaign. In December 2017 it was announced that his family has donated a further £85m from his estate to Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory and a new Ray Dolby Center will be established in 2022.

Awards and honors