Ray Dolby papers, [c. 1940s - 2000s]

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Summary

Creators:
Dolby, Ray Milton and Dolby, Dagmar
Abstract:
Biographical and research files, correspondence, publications, and assorted materials from the life and career of American audio engineer Ray M. Dolby, covering his education from high school through his doctoral studies at Cambridge University, his employment as a young man at Ampex where he contributed to the development of the first videotape recorder, and the founding of Dolby Laboratories in London, later headquartered in San Francisco. Materials in the collection include Dolby's schoolwork, circuit drawings and engineering schematics for work both at Ampex and Dolby Laboratories, research notes and calculations, patents, correspondence, ephemera from Ampex and from the early years of Dolby Laboratories, and photographs.
Extent:
18 Linear Feet (28 manuscript boxes, 7 flat boxes, 11 map-folders)
Language:
English .
Preferred citation:

[identification of item], Ray Dolby papers (M2959), Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford Libraries, Stanford, Calif.

Background

Scope and content:

The Ray Dolby papers contain materials from and about Ray M. Dolby (1933-2013), pioneering American audio engineer. In addition to personal and professional materials pertaining to Dolby's time at Ampex Corporation, his establishment of Dolby Laboratories, and the development of an audio noise reduction system, the collection includes papers from Dolby's studies at Stanford and Cambridge Universities, correspondence from his time as a UNESCO technical adviser in India, research notes and publications, trade publications, circuit drawings and schematics, memorabilia, patents, and photographs, in particular photographs of Ampex personnel in the 1950s and subsequent celebrations, and of the X-ray microanalyzer at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University. Some objects notable for their use of the Dolby logo are also included.

Biographical / historical:

Ray Milton Dolby was an American engineer whose inventions and company, Dolby Laboratories, have had a profound effect on the storage, transmission, and reproduction of audio and video.

Born in Portland, Oregon in 1933, Ray Dolby grew up in the area that later became Silicon Valley. In 1949, as a 16-year-old student at Sequoia High School in Redwood City, Dolby had a chance encounter with Alexander Poniatoff, founder and President of Ampex Corporation, which had recently introduced the first U.S.-made professional audio tape recorder. This led to Dolby's working at Ampex for the next eight years, full-time when he could and part-time when in school at Sequoia and, later, San Jose State College. Dolby contributed to various audio and instrumentation projects, and from 1952-1957 he was mainly responsible for developing the electronic aspects of the Ampex video tape recording system (VTR), the world's first practical video tape recorder. Dolby continued to develop new ideas for the VTR even during a stint as an electronics instructor in the US Army from 1953-55. The Ampex video tape recorder was first demonstrated in April 1956, and quickly revolutionized broadcast television. Dolby shared in the 1957 Emmy awarded to Ampex for its invention.

Returning to Redwood City after his army service, Dolby enrolled at Stanford University completing a B. Sc. in electrical engineering in 1957. That same year, after being awarded a Marshall Scholarship followed by a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship, Dolby left Ampex for further study at Cambridge University in England. His research at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory made it possible to determine the chemical composition of light elements such as oxygen by adapting X-ray bombardment techniques that had been used previously for heavier elements like iron. He was awarded a PhD in physics in 1961 and was elected a Fellow of Pembroke College (Honorary Fellow, 1983). During his last year at Cambridge, he worked as a consultant to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. In 1963 he joined a program in India sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and became a technical adviser. Relocated to Chandigarh in the state of Punjab, he analyzed India's electronic scientific instruments industry and suggested improvements. He returned to England in 1965 to establish Dolby Laboratories in London.

While in Cambridge, in 1962, Ray Dolby met Dagmar Baumert, a language student from Frankfurt, Germany on exchange from Heidelberg University. She joined Dolby in India, and the two married in London in 1966.

As a hobby in Cambridge and in India, Dolby would experiment with making live tape recordings of local musical performances. Doing something about tape noise had intrigued him since his time at Ampex, and as he studied existing companders (compression/expanders), which added more distortion than they reduced noise, Dolby discovered a solution. Tape noise is only audible on quiet passages and is electrically a very small portion of the whole signal. It could be possible to have a separate path to process only those small signals while letting the loud sounds pass through undisturbed. Low level processing could be applied separately to each of four frequency bands, thereby eliminating another weakness of existing systems, noise modulation. In 1965, during a two-month overland drive back to the UK with Dagmar through Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey, Dolby took time during a stop in Afghanistan to write up his ideas and send them to Paul Flehr, his patent attorney in California. This became United States Patent 3,631,365 for a "Frequency selective, symmetric signal compression expander," which was the essential patent for Dolby noise reduction. The patent application was filed in October 1969 and granted in December 1971.

Dolby opened Dolby Laboratories in May 1965. He first developed a monochrome video noise reduction system which the BBC evaluated, but chose not to pursue because the BBC was then converting to color. Instead, Dolby developed the A-type audio noise reduction (NR) system and embodied it in the Dolby A301 NR unit for use in professional music recording. Decca Records was Dolby's first customer. After months of testing, Decca found that the A301 not only provided significant noise reduction (on the order of 10 db), but that the device did not introduce any side effects. Decca ordered the first nine Dolby A301 units, along with exclusive use of the technology for three months.

In 1967, at the urging of U.S. stereo manufacturer Henry Kloss, Dolby committed to developing an NR system for consumer products, which became known as Dolby B-type. The Dolby B consumer noise-reduction system works by compressing (boosting) low-level high-frequency sounds during recording and expanding (decreasing) them symmetrically during playback, which also decreases inherent tape noise. Like the A-type, Dolby B-type uses dual paths, but with B-type, lower-level signals are processed within a single sliding band of higher frequencies that stands in for the multiple fixed stands of A-type NR. This reduces the audible level of tape hiss. In 1970 the first cassette recorders with Dolby B-type were introduced, and became popular immediately. Applications from manufacturers for licenses to use Dolby technology multiplied. Ultimately the compact cassette encoded with the Dolby B-type became a ubiquitous recorded music medium.

After his pioneering work with audiotape noise reduction, Dolby sought to improve film sound, specifically the limited fidelity optical soundtrack on 35mm movie prints. The first film with Dolby sound was A Clockwork Orange (1971), which used Dolby noise reduction on all pre-mixes and masters, but a conventional optical sound track on release prints. Callan (1974) was the first film with a Dolby-encoded optical soundtrack. The first true LCRS (Left-Center-Right-Surround) soundtrack was encoded on the movie A Star is Born in 1976. In fewer than ten years, 6,000 cinemas worldwide were equipped to use Dolby Stereo sound.

By 1980 Dolby B-type NR had been established in cassette recording for ten years. Anxious for something new, several Dolby licensees in the industry pressed for a more powerful consumer NR system. Dolby introduced C-type NR, which further reduced tape hiss by 20dB versus B-type's 10dB.

Developing C-type rekindled Dolby's ideas for a new professional system, partly impelled by the high cost and reported unreliability of the professional digital audio recorders then coming on line. Dolby believed he could bring to existing analog recorders signal quality at least as good as digital, but with greater reliability and at far lower cost. To free himself for this project, in May 1983 Dolby stepped down as president of Dolby Laboratories and promoted Bill Jasper, then the company's financial vice president, to president. Ray Dolby became Chairman.

For the next four years, Dolby combined everything he had learned including both the multiple fixed bands of A-type NR and the sliding-band technology of B-type to develop his ultimate analog recording process. As well as dramatically more noise reduction, Dolby incorporated developments that significantly improved analog's high-level signal capacity. The net increase in dynamic range was so great that Dolby named the new system Spectral Recording, or Dolby SR. The professional Type A system operates on four different frequency bands, and the final SR (Spectral Recording) system, developed in the 1980s, on ten.

Dolby Laboratories then developed a digital surround sound compression scheme for cinema. Dolby Stereo Digital (Dolby Digital) was first featured on the 1992 film Batman Returns. Dolby Digital uses five main audio channels (front left, front center, front right, rear left, rear right) and one subwoofer channel, and is often called Dolby 5.1 channel digital audio.

In addition to being an innovator in the fields of professional sound recording equipment, cinema sound systems, and consumer electronics, Ray Dolby was a business practices pioneer as well. His facility for writing patents became legendary, and the licensing practice that Dolby Laboratories invented has become a standard across several industries.

After moving his company to San Francisco in 1976, and as Dolby Laboratories became increasingly successful, Ray Dolby became one of the city's leading philanthropists. Dolby donated generously to and served on the boards of the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Opera. Ray and Dagmar Dolby have also donated generously to the University of California San Francisco, to Ray Dolby's alma mater Stanford University, and to Cambridge University's Pembroke College and Cavendish Laboratory.

During the last few years of his life, Dolby was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Ray M. Dolby died of acute leukemia in 2013.

Dolby held over fifty U.S. patents. He was a fellow of and past president of the Audio Engineering Society (AES).

Public recognition for Ray M. Dolby's inventions have included a US National Medal of Technology, two Oscars for scientific and technical achievement, several Emmys, a Grammy, an honorary OBE (Order of the British Empire), and a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, installed in 2015.

Acquisition information:
This collection was given by Dagmar Dolby to Stanford University, Special Collections in October 2023.
Arrangement:

The collection is arranged into five series: 1. Biographical Files, 1946-2024 2. Ampex/VTR, 1949-2007 3. Research Files, Cambridge University, 1957-1965 4. Dolby Laboratories Business Files, 1963-2010 5. Design Drawings, Schematic Diagrams, and Artifacts, 1949-1988

Physical location:
Special Collections and University Archives materials are stored offsite and must be paged 36 hours in advance.
Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Access and use

Restrictions:

Open for research. Note that material must be requested at least 36 hours in advance of intended use.

Terms of access:

While Special Collections is the owner of the physical and digital items, permission to examine collection materials is not an authorization to publish. These materials are made available for use in research, teaching, and private study. Any transmission or reproduction beyond that allowed by fair use requires permission from the owners of rights, heir(s) or assigns.

Preferred citation:

[identification of item], Ray Dolby papers (M2959), Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford Libraries, Stanford, Calif.

Location of this collection:
Department of Special Collections, Green Library
557 Escondido Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-6004, US
Contact:
(650) 725-1022
specialcollections@stanford.edu
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