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The marvel sound engineer falls silent
Ray Dolby, the man behind Dolby laboratories died on Thursday at 80. He was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and acute leukemia Over the...
Ray Dolby, the man behind Dolby laboratories died on Thursday at 80. He was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and acute leukemia
Over the years Dolby earned 50 patents, two Oscars, multiple Emmys and a Grammy
Lata Jain
A pioneer in the field of sound, Dolby will be remembered as the man who took the hiss and the pops out of sound recordings. With a fortune of $2.4 billion at his death, Dolby truly did make silence golden. During mid-1960s, a young electrical engineer Ray Dolby was not satisfied with the hissing, pops and seeping in sounds while recording. In 1966 he was able to perfect a noise reduction system that eliminated all those imperfections. Thanks to this innovativeness, sound recorders were free to produce tracks that sounded clearer than if you heard it performed live, or songs that could blow you out of your seat with bass and power.
Since the 1960s, Dolby Laboratories has been a leader in audio innovation. Beginning with Dolby noise reduction, a form of audio compression and expansion that reduces background hiss in tape recording, Dolby Laboratories has developed many groundbreaking technologies, advancing the science of audio reproduction.
Dolby Labs also blazed a trail in business models by mainly choosing to license technologies rather than make consumer products itself, making money from royalty payments from its partners. Dolby logos became a fixture on devices such as cassette tape players and at the beginning of movies.
Over the years Dolby earned 50 patents, two Oscars, multiple Emmys and a Grammy. At a ceremony honoring Dolby last year, film editor Walter Murch said, “you could divide film sound in half: there is BD, Before Dolby, and there is AD, After Dolby.”
He is survived by his wife, 47-year-old Dagmar and two sons Tom and David. With his death, Dagmar assumes his fortune and is placed on the Forbes 400 list. Dolby, who received a PhD degree in physics from Cambridge in 1961, worked at tape-recording pioneer Ampex Corp before forming his own company in 1965. When you think of high quality sound, you think of Dolby.
