Ray Dolby

In his early years he worked at Ampex on both their first tape-based audio and video recorders. Later, whilst a PhD student at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he would make tape recordings of classical concerts in the college chapel, but was frequently frustrated by the poor quality of the results. It was this obsession towards high-fidelity music that ultimately led him to found Dolby Laboratories, Inc. where he developed Dolby A Noise Reduction, a system which would soon become ubiquitous in recording studios around the world.

Dolby A was designed for professional tape recorders, but as consumer cassette tapes become popular Dolby realised his technology could improve the quality of music in the home, too. Thus was born Dolby B Noise Reduction, the technology that firmly established Dolby as a household name. Ray would continue his pursuit of ever-higher quality analogue audio, culminuating in his magnum opus, Dolby SR, introduced in the 1908s and still used in analogue recordings today.

Meanwhile, an ever-growing corps of researchers and developers at Dolby Labs were advancing the forefront of digital audio technology, including the highly-successful surround-sound format Dolby Digital. What started as a technology for moive theatres went to become the domninant audio system for DVDs, game consoles, and televisions around the world.

"To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer."

Today, Ray Dolby's legacy as an innovator in media technology lives on. The company he founded with four employees in in London 1965 now spans the globe with almost 1900 employees in over 30 countries. Dolby expanded their audio formats to include Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Atmos and their latest next-generation audio system, Dolby AC-4, and also branched out into video enhancement with Dolby 3D and the Dolby Vision high-dynamic range display technology. Dolby has even found their way into the workplace with their Dolby Voice advanced teleconferecing system.

Find out more about Ray's life and work on dolby.com and Wikipedia.