RAY DOLBY INTERVIEW (1989)

by Joelle Steele (Nancy Martelli)

When I was working on my Swedish-Finn family history in 1977, I co-owned a recording studio. So, I was very interested to find out that I was a distant cousin of Ray Dolby, inventor of Dolby Sound. I contacted him to get information about him and his family. Years later, in 1989, I interviewed him about Dolby noise-reduction for a piece in a music magazine. This is that interview.

NM: Let's start with some personal information. We're distant cousins.
RD: Yes, we are. Our families came from Terjärv, Finland and my mother lived across the street from yours in Rochester, Washington. Her best friend was your mother's oldest sister Elsie.
NM: Yes. I'm surprised you know that. All I knew was that your mother was Esther Strand, that she had a lot of red-headed siblings, and that her parents used to host the 4th of July and other holidays in "Strand's Grove" on their farm.
RD: Well, I inherited my hair from my mother (laughs). She often talked about life in Rochester and the gatherings in the grove. She also talked about Elsie and about her sisters Lillian and your mother Norma.
NM: When I was a young teenager, my parents, me, and my brother visited your parents a couple times in Cupertino, but I don't remember much about them.
RD: Well, you know all about my mother's side of the family. But my father had the biggest influence on me. He was Earl Milton Dolby. I probably inherited my technological abilities from him. He was a surveyor, a mechanical, electrical, and photographic experimenter and inventor. He also compiled the first aircraft manufacturing dictionary during World War II. And, he was a writer and publisher of several Start Your Own Home Business books.
NM: That's a lot to inherit!
RD: Yes, but what was most important to me was that he always told me and my brother "Don't trust the nay-saying experts. You can think of a better way."
NM: Great advice, and apparently you followed it. So let's talk about your career path.
RD: Sure. And I did follow my father's advice. He was industrious, and that's me. I was always working. During high school and college I had part-time jobs, one of them was at Ampex in Redwood City. That was about 1949, and I was part of a team that developed the first audio tape recorder. I graduated from Sequoia High in 1951 and went to San Jose State College. From there I went to Stanford University where I got my Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering in 1957. College took awhile because I was also in the army for a couple of years. Afterwards, I got my doctorate in physics at Cambridge in England. And after that, I joined UNESCO.* That was in about 1963.
NM: And was it on behalf of UNESCO that you traveled to India?
RD: Yes, I almost immediately visited India after joining UNESCO. That's where I started working on my noise reduction process. I was recording a lot of local musicians and I wanted to remove the hiss from my reel-to-reel recordings, because it tended to drown out the subtleties of the musical instruments and vocal sounds. Records already had a way to do that by cutting out the needle noise, but tape didn't have anything like that. I realized that I would have to find a place to study and experiment with noise reduction.
NM: So where did you go to do this?
RD: Back to England. I set up a lab there in the Fulham borough of London. But after just a few months I had to find another space, and that was in Wandsworth Road. That's where I started making progress. I had a library of books that contained information about different kinds of noise suppressors. As I read about one of them, I realized that the problems with all these suppressors could be fixed with a dual circuit approach. You see, when all the high level signals go through the system, the dynamic processing takes place somewhere else. This problem is completely eliminated when you stop processing the high level signals. And that's how I created the Dolby A noise-reduction system in about 1966.
NM: So how does it work?
RD: I invented electronic circuits that suppressed the hiss, which is actually just a high-frequency static. To put it more simply, the circuits boost the highest frequencies during the recording process. This is done during the softest parts of music, which is when you would be able to hear the hiss. Then, the circuits reverse that process during playback to reduce the volume of the hiss making it inaudible.
NM: This must have been immediately in demand.
RD: No, unfortunately, not that much at first. It was difficult to get manufacturers to use my circuits in their tape recorders because there wasn't a lot of music being recorded in that format. And, in general, people in a position to use the system were just not very interested. They weren't even really aware that there was a problem with hiss.
NM: When did it finally catch on?
RD: It wasn't until the mid-1970s that it really started to take off. You probably had it in your recording studio, didn't you?
NM: No, we didn't. The studio had old 8-track machines that we upgraded with old 16-track equipment. We sold the studio about the time that digital was becoming the next great thing.
RD: Digitizing was something I didn't foresee, and that's when I started investigating movie theater sound systems. I got noise-reduction for movies and theaters working by about 1975.
NM: And then DBX came along. How did that affect Dolby Sound?
RD: Not well at all. I had the monopoly in consumer noise-reduction products until DBX came along in about 1980. The company that invented it had sold its system to another company that developed a miniature noise-reduction circuit for Sony's Walkman which was a very hot product back then. By 1982 they were way ahead of me.
NM: Why was that?
RD: DBX reduced noise by 40 decibels, and mine only reduced it by 10 decibels. This made DBX more appealing for  professional recording. I tried a few updates to my existing products, but in the end I re-focused my effort on movies.
NM: But you still worked on music recording, didn't you?
RD: Right, I did. Just a few years ago [1986], I released SR - Dolby Spectral Recording. It worked on sound tracks and music cassettes allowing for greater sound clarity from existing analog systems.
NM: Why was it different?
RD: It was like my original circuits. It made it possible for a recording studio to use it instead of digital. Might have been an answer for your studio had you not sold it earlier on.
NM: Ah yes, missed that train … Took a different train.
RD: (laughs) We all miss the train from time to time. But we keep on riding it.
NM: You've received quite a few awards. And I hear you even received one from the Queen.
RD: Yes, just a couple years ago I became an honorary Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire – an OBE.  
NM: And why is this awarded?
RD: It's in recognition of a person's achievements and charitable works.
NM: Congratulations, Cousin! Thanks for this interview.

* UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It strives to promote world peace and security by working internationally in education, the arts, sciences, and culture.

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