Ray Dolby

Ray Milton Dolby OBE ( born January 18, 1933, Portland, Oregon; † September 12, 2013 in San Francisco, California ) was an American engineer and inventor. He invented several important techniques in the context of magnetic sound recording and playback. In 1965, he founded the company Dolby.

Life

Ray Dolby learned in his childhood piano and clarinet. For a time he toyed with the idea of ​​becoming a cameraman in Hollywood. In 1948, he worked as a projectionist. In this work, he met Alex Poniatoff, the founder of Ampex Corporation. This was impressed by the young Dolby, so he invited him to work with him. Dolby walked three hours a day to school and five hours to work at Ampex. After high school, he graduated in engineering from Stanford. He received in 1961 at the University of Cambridge, England a doctorate. After training, he spent two years in India as a UN consultant with the creation of a scientific laboratory. Overall, he filed more than 50 patents. Its estimated assets amounted to $ 2.7 billion; so that he was number 149 on the Forbes list of the richest Americans.

Effect

Dolby has developed in the 1960's to improve the playback quality of the Compact Cassette be Dolby B system. As further developments followed Dolby C, Dolby S and Dolby HX Pro. Dolby's name has become a synonym for noise reduction in magnetic recording using this method.

In addition to the magnetic sound recording is Dolby employed with optical sound. The film A Clockwork Orange in 1971 was the first production with Dolby soundtrack. With Dolby Stereo Dolby introduced in 1974 a multi -channel sound system one that can encode four channels (left, center, right, rear) on a two-channel stereo track (see also quadraphonic ). In the cinema the four channels are decoded from the two channels of the stereo sound with a decoder again. This is a relatively inexpensive introduction to surround sound (Reusing existing film projection equipment ) was possible. Without Dolby stereo decoder still two-channel stereo sound was screened at the cinema; the films were so backward compatible.

Awards (selection)

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