January 18 – Happy Birthday, Ray Dolby

nPostednon January 18, 2016

nYounknow who Ray Dolby is, right?

nHownmany times have you been in a movie theater and saw something like,n“Presented in Dolby Sound” or “Dolby Surround Sound?”

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Dolby Laboratories has won at least
11 Academy Awards for their
contributions to movie sound systems.

nRaynDolby was the American engineer who invented the noise reductionnsystem called Dolby NR. He also helped develop the video tapenrecorder and started a company that is still going strong today innaudio encoding and compression technologies.

nDolby,nborn in Portland, Oregon, on this date in 1933, has been so importantnin entertainment technologies that he was inducted into the NationalnInventors Hall of Fame.

nHowndoes someone get into such a field?

nDolby’snfather was an inventor, and Ray Dolby himself was raised in the SannFrancisco Bay Area. He was a teenager in the decade after World WarnII, a time of great prosperity and opportunity, and he held a summernjob at a company called Ampex. He worked with their first audio tapenrecorder in 1949, and his work with the company on the company’snprototype Quadruplex videotape recorder, which was presented in 1956,nwas while he was still going to college. n

nDolbynwent to a couple of great universities—Stanford, located near hisnbirthplace in California, and Cambridge, in England—and he earned anB.S. In electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in physics.

Dolby lived innseveral places. He was in the U.S. Army for two years, and he got anjob as a technical advisor to the United Nations in India. Dolbynactually started his company, Dolby Laboratories, in London, and hisnfamous Dolby Sound System was first used by Decca Records in the U.K.

nDolbynLaboratories are now headquartered in San Francisco. I’m not surenwhat year Dolby himself came “home” to the Bay Area, but I donknow that he loved the University of Cambridge so much, he left $52nmillion to the university!

nSo…howndid Dolby do his famous noise-reduction?

nDolby’snoriginal system works by increasing the volume of low-levelnhigh-frequency sounds during recording and then reducing them duringnplayback. That reduction in high-frequency volume reduces tape hiss.

nAlsonon this date:
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