There was a time when his name wasn't commonplace in every home, emblazoned on electronic devices and printed on the jacket of every DVD. In the mid-1960s, Ray Dolby had developed the first of his industry-altering technologies, but it wasn't until he heard an exchange in a London elevator that he understood what his name had come to signify. At a record company he was visiting, he heard an engineer say, "We have to take the Dolbys from Studio A to Studio B," Dolby recalled in a story that became part of his legend. "My hair stood on end. I'd never heard my name used that way."
An engineer whose inventions revolutionized recorded sound and the winner of two Academy Awards for technical achievement, Ray Milton Dolby, '57, died September 12. He was 80.
Musicians and music lovers had never heard what Dolby brought to their world. And at first, that was the point. Dolby invented a noise reduction system, originally used in studios for analog recording and eventually used in home cassette recording devices. By increasing the volume of quieter high frequency sounds during recording and reducing it during playback, Dolby removed the hiss common on recordings and improved the signal-to-noise ratio.
In 1965, while in London, he founded Dolby Laboratories—a company that would eventually move to San Francisco and earn 10 Oscars and 13 Emmy awards for its work improving sound for the television and movie industries. Films began using Dolby technology in 1971 with A Clockwork Orange. Within a few years, Dolby added multiple audio channels to the technology, bringing Dolby Stereo and surround sound to theaters. In 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded Dolby the National Medal of Technology. By the time of his death, Dolby Labs held more than 50 U.S. patents.
Dolby grew up on the San Francisco Peninsula, tinkering in the workshop his father had set up at their home. At age 11, he did a valve job on his father's 1932 Plymouth. By the time he was at Redwood City's Sequoia High School, a chance encounter with the founder of Ampex, an electronics company, led to him working on early tape recorders. Dolby worked a deal with his high school (he later told the Los Angeles Times) attending classes three hours a day and working at Ampex for another five hours. In his ensuing years with Ampex, he would help develop a videotape recorder.
He spent two years at San Jose State before serving in the U.S. Army and ultimately transferring to Stanford, where he earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. After graduating, he earned a Marshall Scholarship and a PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge.
Late in life, living in San Francisco, Dolby developed Alzheimer's disease, followed by acute leukemia. He is survived by his wife, Dagmar, sons Tom and David, MBA '06, and four grandchildren.
"Ray really managed to have a dream job," Dagmar Dolby noted in a tribute video released by the company, "because he could do exactly what he wanted to do, whichever way he wanted to do it, and in the process, did a lot of good for many music and film lovers. And in the end, built a very successful company."
Brian Eule, '01, is a frequent contributor to Stanford.
