TechStuff Classic: TechStuff Listens to Dolby

to this classic episode. If you've ever owned a stereo in the history of ever, you've probably seen the Dolby logo, which is that Yeah, certainly in the history of the past thirty years, which I think for most of our listeners that that qualifies. Uh. I know that we have some listeners who maybe have owned stereos that are older than thirty years. We appreciate you as well, of course. So Dolby, who was this guy? What did he do?

While he was an electrical engineer famous for his work in developing audio technology which was used in everything from movies to uh to studio equipment to the stuff that you could buy like consumer electronics. And he has absolutely no relation to the musician Thomas Dolby known for us. She blinded me with science, right. Apparently Thomas Dolby took

that stage name based on Dolby. Yes, yeah, his his actual name is Thomas Robertson, but his stage name is Thomas Dolby, presumably taking the name because of Dolby Laboratories and Dolby himself, Ray Dolby, Ray, by the way, had still has a son named Tom. So also a little

confused and confusion there um. But apparently and and you uncovered this little tidbit that that Thomas or yes, yes, Thomas Dolby, the musician stage person, had an agreement laid out that he would not name any electronics equipment under the Dolby brand, right right, he could not he you know, there was some initial um tension between Dolby Labs and Thomas Dolby, but that eventually got kind of settled down in the agreement essentially was kind of a gentleman's agreement.

It was that Thomas Dolby could perform and and record under the name Thomas Dolby as long as he didn't put out like the Dolby stereo because I could be confused with the actual Dolby Labs brand. So let's talk about Tom, not Thomas Dolby. I mean, that's a totally different podcast that we could do, because Thomas Dolby has been very active in digital distribution. But Ray Dolby, so he was born back in nineteen three in Portland, Oregon. His father was a salesman. Yep. Ray Dolby as a

kid got interested in electronics. He apparently, according to one report I read, at age nine, Line, rigged up an electronic signaling system that would allow you to alert someone, similar to using something with Morse code. I imagine this is something similar, like like a simple switch and uh, something that either made noise or lit up. There weren't details about exactly what it was. Yeah, I think that this was from an interview that he had done with a member of the m I E. The I Tripolie

back in the eighties at some point. So I didn't have extreme details, but I found that very charming. He was also fascinated as a child by the mechanics of music. As a kid, he apparently played clarinet and remembered being just engrossed by the vibrations of the reads and in fact that fascination with music would go throughout his entire life. His sons would talk about how he was not just an engineer, nor did he ever wish to be seen

that way. He was an adventurer at heart and a musician at heart, someone who truly appreciated the sound of talented artists making music. And that was part of what he was so interested in when he got into electronics was being able to have a device that could record and play back such stuff without any other artifacts getting in the way. So in high school he uh joined the projectionist clubs. So clearly a big man on campus. Uh, obviously these are the the kids who are really interested

in cinema. They're interested in in all aspects of electronics technology. Yeah, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And through that, in nine he met one um Alex Panto excellent. Yeah, he was the founder of a company called Ampex Corps yep. And uh, and so here's here's the deal. Here's the scenario.

Alex Pontia comes to town and he's going to have a meeting and in order, part of this meeting involves showing a film and he needs to have someone to run the projector so he reaches out to the local school and says, hey, can you send me a kid who can run the projector? And Dolby volunteers. He says, this sounds like something I would really like to do. So he comes over and runs the projector, and he

and Poniatof hit it off. I mean they you know, it's clear that Dolby is truly interested in technology, and Ampex was really getting into building recording devices, both for industry like geophysical recorders and also for you know, entertainment industry as well. Eventually, so he Dolby shows this incredible interest in the subject matter, and Poniatof is obviously impressed

and tells Dolbie, hey, you know, kid, listen. I know you're in school and all, but I tell you what, on weekends and on vacations, if you like, you can come and work for me. And Dolby says sure, yeah. Delbie was only sixteen years old at the time and wound up working a little bit more than I think that they originally expected. Dolby said that he was far enough I had with his credit it's in high school, that he wasn't really worried about getting into colleges. He

figured he had it in the bag. So he wound up at a certain point spending like three hours a day at school and five hours a day at AMPEX. It turns out that eventually Delby's not so it was so concerned about staying in college either, at least initially. So. Yeah, his he was obviously really eager to get hands on experience with this. It was, you know, he didn't want to just learn theory. He wanted to actually be working,

and he found it really exciting. By nine fifty one, he was attending San Jose State College in California and had picked the major of electrical engineering. Uh, and he was still working with Ampex at that time. And within the first year of his schooling, actually just after he was just about to start a sophomore year, Ampex began to develop something that would revolutionize the entertainment industry and the home entertainment market. Eventually, the video recorders, So videotape

recorders were not a thing yet. Right, this is a brand new technology, and he had the opportunity to work on an early implementation of that. Videotape had the potential to be a truly disruptive type of technology, which of course, as we all know, that's what happened. I mean, you saw it happen again and again. But he had the chance to get in on the ground floor, and he was so excited by that that he made the decision to drop out of college and work full time at AMPEX.

But that also meant right, this was during during the Korean War was about to really ramp up, and he was He's spoken about being very aware at the time that this decision would make him eligible to be drafted and being a little bit concerned about that, which would turn out to be a fair concern. Yeah. He um, you know, by not being a college student, that made him eligible for the draft, and in fact, he was drafted and he went into the army on April first,

nineteen fifty three. He was drafted into the army. And during this was during the Korean War. Delby later said that, uh, that was worth it because he got to work on the heal recorder. Meanwhile, even you know, Dolby was removed from the picture. He had to go and serve in the army. Uh, AMPEX ended up shelving the video recorder project, not because Dolby was removed from it. I mean Dolby himself said, it's not because I wasn't there. That's not why they did it. They did it because the company

itself was in financial trouble. There was a recession going on at the time, and the company was hit pretty hard by it, and so to to save money and and to cut back on things that were, you know, obviously big projects that could pay off, but it would be a long term gain, they decided to pull back on those. So this was one of the projects they shelved. So he goes off and he joins the army. While he's in the army, he teaches classes on electronics because

why not. Yeah, he still hasn't completed college himself. But on January one, nine, he was discharged from the army and rejoined Ampex, which had started UH decided to go back and and launched the video records project again, so he was working on that. He also went back to college this time. He did not go to San Jose State. He went to a little college called Stanford UM and he completed his degree at Stanford. So by nineteen fifty six,

the video recorder goes into production. So this is a big deal and Dolby, I think his name is even on one of the patents, at least one of the patents. Yeah, this is Ampex's specific video record. Yes, and it's the first to go into production. So Dolby goes to then he applies and is accepted to go to Cambridge University to work towards a PhD in physics. Um. He would finally receive that in nineteen sixty one. Yeah, and uh, and of course you know, obviously PhD in physics, he's

looking at acoustics, right, that was his main focus. No, that's not his main focus. His main focus actually was an X rays, long wavelength X rays. He was, yeah, he was. He was convinced that this was what he really was going to do for the rest of his life. He was going to work and experiments and build things

that worked with X rays. Apparently at the time very popular guy in Cambridge, partially because he had access to professional recording equipment, and there were a lot of musical groups in the area that wanted to be able to record stuff, but they didn't have access to professional recording equipment and you would get these really poor recordings. So he started getting invited to all sorts of events and he would have people over at his place to play music.

Not keep in mind this is you know, this is great stuff for Dolbie who loves music. You know, this is again him continuing this, uh, this keen interest in music. So I'm sure he found it to be a wonderful time of his life. Oh sure. He was also making a big impact on the community in general. He around the same time was consulting for the UK's atomic energy authorities,

so getting some good stuff on his resume. Oh yeah, yeah, I know this for someone who was interested in making the first video recorder, he's already branching out quite a bit by this time. Also in nineteen sixty two, he meets Dagmar ballmert Uh in Cambridge and she would become

the love of his life. I mean, every report I ever read about the two of them talking very sweet, talked about how parties they were always right there, you know, backing each other up, and they they complemented one another in various ways. So she was actually from Germany. She was in Cambridge for a summer program when they met. And the rest is, they say, is history. We'll we'll talk more about them a little bit later on to um.

But then in nineteen sixty three, really cool. Yeah, don'll be read about this opportunity in a newspaper for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization a k a. UNESCO as most people would know about it. Um to to go to India and help consult to to build up a little bit more of a kind of infrastructure, Yeah, scientific laboratory in structures, specifically in the Punjab region which is known as a very culturally rich area. And he

spent two years there. And while he was doing that, he continued to be really interested in creating equipment that would be allowed to allow you to make high fidelity

audio recordings. Well, he had brought one of those professional level Ampex I think it was the Ampex six hundred tape recorders along with him, and UH would would invite musicians to complay at his house so that he could experiment with recordings and UH and he started to really be bothered by something that is inherent in magnetic tape recordings analog recordings, which is that you get this hiss sound,

particularly if you're playing the tape at lower speeds. And we'll talk more about that as well, because in nineteen sixty five, once he had concluded his two year stint with Unesco, he decided to go back to London. There was a dressmaker factory. I assume it was a factory for dresses, not for dressmakers. I think they actually built dressmakers. I think the robotics wasn't quite it's advanced at the time,

I don't think so. Yeah, he rented essentially what was a corner in an old factory and created Dolby Laboratories. He was using twenty dollars in startup money, which was what he had saved plus borrowed from other folks, and it had a grand total of four employees when it first started. And their first product that they were working on was something called Signal to Noise stretchers. Now that's the technical name for what Dolby created. However that they

are to this day called Dolby's. Yeah, in the industry they're called Dolby's And it didn't take very long for that to happen. So the whole point of signal to noise stretcher, it kind of comes in the name signal to noise. So if you think of something that's been recorded to magnetic tape, the signal is whatever it was you were trying to record, right, Noise is noise, it's stuff you don't want, it's artifacts, it's it's static. Yeah,

it distracts from what you were trying to capture. So if your goal is to create a recreation of the moment that a sound was created, then you want to reduce that noise as much as possible. And so this was a method really of recording and playing back stuff so that you would reduce that noise so that it was inaudible, it was unnoticeable. And we'll talk about how he did that in the second half of this of this episode. But anyway, this was, you know, really meant

to be kind of a side project. It was meant to be the thing that allowed him to make, you know, to fund the other things he was going to do, specifically X ray experimentation. But as it turns out, don't be hit on something that a lot of people found really fascinating and valuable and it took over his life. Well even even at the time, very high quality media like a like an LP, like a record. Um, we're

recorded from a master tape, a master magnetic tape. So this impacted a huge segment of a few different industries. Oh sure, if your master tape has a hiss on it, then that hiss gets transmitted to every other copy that you make. Right, So if you're able to create a system where you remove that hiss so that you have the highest quality master tape, then whenever you are making a new copy, then you are there across your copying the hiss as well. Yeah. So if you if you

can get rid of the hiss, that's awesome. And that's why it ended up being such a big deal. Um, And so early on it was really focusing mostly on on studio level quality, right we're talking professional recording studios, not something that you would find in your average the playback device that a consumer would have right right right there. Their first customer was Decca Records. Yeah, yeah, and ended

up being a pretty import customer. So Decca Records they come up and they say they want to use the Dolby System on a series of recordings made by Vladimir Ashkenazi of Mozart Piano Concertos, which you know already it's speaking to Dolby's heart, and so Dolby says that, uh, you know, he realized that the noise reduction, which he thought was gonna be that little side project was going to become, uh, the main thing he worked on for

the at least the foreseeable future. So nineteen sixty six, Dolby Mary's Dagmar So uh, they end up eventually having two children, Tom and David. Tom is a novelist and a journalist and editor, and David sits on the board

of directors for Dolby Labs. So they're both very successful. Um. In nineteen sixty eight, Dolby is convinced by a man named Henry Class, who at that time was president of the k l H Research and Development Corporation, to create a consumer version of his signal to noise stretcher technology.

All right, because up until this point it had all been these these really high end, pretty expensive versions for for that professional studio that for doing like doing those master tapes, right, it was it was meant as a as an industry thing. So it was you know, originally Dolby was thinking that his stuff that he was working on, it would trickle down to consumers, but in a way that the consumer would never notice, or in a way

that the consumer would never have any direct participation in. Yeah, exactly, because because you know, the consumer would be able to enjoy the benefits by playing something and not hearing that sounds better than that other thing, right, but they wouldn't be able to create their own stuff. Right well, Claus ends up saying to to Dolby that, hey, you should really make a consumer version of this. Dolby says, well, there's not really a market for it. I can't see

consumers jumping at this. So then what Clus does is something kind of sneaky to convince Dolby otherwise. He goes back and he tells some of his engineers, hey, eyes, let's kind of reverse engineer this. Take Dolby's Type A what would eventually be called the Type A Dolby's um and reverse engineer so that we can make a consumer level of our own. They do that. He then takes that to Dolby and says, look at what I did. I took your stuff and I made a cheaper version

for consumers. Someone else is gonna do that and they're gonna beat you to the market, so you should do it first. And Dolby says, huh, how about that. You're right, I should do that, And so Dolby that goes to create a consumer version of his signal to noise stretchers called Type B. So Type A is for the professional studios, it's it's more sophisticated, it covers a greater range of sounds, and we'll go over that in the second half. To

Type B is less expensive, more limited. But then for your average consumer it was perfectly right, unless unless you're an expert in the field and have an extremely good year and etcetera, etcetera. Was basically fine, and then they're on Dolby Labs would end up releasing updates. They had a Type C come out that was a more sophisticated version, and then eventually they had a spectral recording which was an even more sophisticated version of the same basic approach.

Class would wind up continuing to to interact with Delby in this industry. Yeah, he ends up creating a company called Advent Corporation, which would produce the first consumer cassette deck that had the Dolby technology in it. Now that wasn't the first one that was a consumer product. The first consumer probuct was real to real deck. So this is before cassettes really had had started to become a thing.

But real to real recorders. If you were, you know, an amateur musician or even a professional musician, but you want to record your own stuff, then this is the kind of technology you were using at the time. So nineteen seventy one that's when Dolby Labs begins to experiment by going outside of just the audio recording industry. There's still very much it's still audio centric, but they're looking at an other industry that they can impact, and that

that was movies. And this would be this would be a huge, huge player in in a Delby's personal success and and be just the film industry. Yeah, so they're looking at making movies sound match the quality of the images because uh and Lauren, I saw that you you pulled this into the notes as a perfect example. The problem was that movies at that time we're relying on the same basic sound systems that have been developed decades earlier.

Oh yeah, there had been so many innovations in um in film quality itself over the past, of the recent past, of of the nineteen sixties and fifties, but really like gone with the wind was the industry standard of audio production. And that had happened thirty five or forty years previously, right, So Dolby ends up looking into creating a system that

would make much more clear, crisp sound for movies. Uh. And so the first home that gets released that has the Dolby treatment to it is a little film called Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange and Oh, my Drew gees if you don't vitty, well what I say, things changing s scory these days and people quick to forget. Just remember that without this, our movies wouldn't sound nearly as good.

And here here's the reason why Dolby was so influential, really early early on, because not only did it work, but it wasn't expensive for theaters to incorporate into their systems. Like this is this is not surround sound we're talking about here. This is just the sound quality. Yeah, this is just the clarity, removing that hiss, because the same hiss was apparent in uh in film as it was

in yeah, in magnetic tapes. So this was a way of being able to create this, this crisp sound that theaters didn't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to fit. Yeah, they didn't have to do that. So it ended up becoming an industry standard because it worked and it was cheap. And when it works and it's cheap and becomes a standard, that means you have a constant supply of customers. So Dolby had struck gold with this.

This was going to end up being one of the biggest businesses for Dolby moving forward, because you had an entire industry dependent upon that that particular methodology to make movies sound good. And it became one of those things where if you saw that the movie incorporated Dolby Sound, you knew you were in for a special treat. We'll be back to talk more about Dolby and just a moment, but first let's take a quick break, all right, getting

back to ray Dolby. So he was already seeing success in audio, uh well, audio hardware, both on the on the the professional side and on the consumer side. He was starting to see success in the motion picture industry. Um, and then it starts to work on some other stuff for movies. In nineteen uh a lot of things happened. First of all, he relocated the headquarters of Dolby Labs. It had been in London, as we had said earlier, they moved it over to San Francisco, California. So he

goes over to to to uh. I was gonna say San fran but boy, they hate that. I would also say Frescope. If they hate that more, We'll just say the city. So he takes it to the city in California. Well, they still keep their London office, and they still keep the London office open, and they then introduce a multi channel technology for films that becomes known as surround sound.

So multi channel is pretty self explanatory. There are multiple channels for the sound, and you have multiple speakers and you send different channels to different speakers to create the effect of sound surrounding the person in the in the theater. So that way, if you have action on the screen that's heavily taking place on the left side, you can amplify the stuff that's on the left rather than on the right and give the impression that you are right

there in the middle of things. You can even isolate sounds so that particular sounds play either more on one side than the other or just on one side. And if you've been keeping up with surround sound, both in the film industry and in just home entertainment center centers, you know that the numbers keep going up, like you had five point one and then like six point one

and seven point one. Then mostly that really refers to the channels, all right, it's the number of channels that are involved, and it's usually uh, I think it's five channels. And then the point one is technically the effects channel. It's point one is that technically the subwoffer because if you have a five point one's set up, it usually means that you have a front center speaker, front left, front, right, back, left, back right, and then you have the sub wolfer right

for forgetting those those vibrated soul shaking effects. Right, you know, that's the that's what makes the movies like uh like like Event Horizon really watchable, you know when you get that. So, yeah, any any time that you have the elder gods coming for you, it's great if you can really feel it in your spleen. Yeah, if every time the Taranto source Rex takes a step in dress a park, the water on your table actually actually shakes, then you know you've

got a really good sound system exactly. So yeah, it surround sound comes out. And there were some there were a few movies that that took advantage of it early. But there was one in particular close to my heart that really leveraged it, little independent film that came out in nineteen Star Wars. I was thinking Close Encounters of the third kind of Star Wars is good too. No, of course it was Star Wars. And both Star Wars and Close Encounters did take advantage of surround sound. Both

did come out in ninety seven. And those movies had so much going for them. I mean, they were capturing people's imaginations, they had incredible scores. John Williams worked on both. Uh, they were they were movies that hit just at the right time. They were so big budget, there were such blockbusters. That was kind of the beginning of the entire blockbuster era.

And and it's kind of a chicken and an egg issue of whether they caught on so well because they had this terrific sound quality, or that the sound quality, because it was attached to these incredibly popular movies, thus became more popular. It doesn't really matter. I mean, I would say that the sound was certainly an integral part of what made those movies an amazing experience. And in fact, George Lucas gives incredible amounts of credit to Dolby and

Dolbie Labs for making Star Wars immersive. He said that, you know, that's what gave me the ability to create the experience I had imagined. Grant he said that way back in the in the late seventies, I suppose when he went back and decided to ruin the Star Wars movies with all the special editions, he was thinking that maybe he didn't really achieve what he had planned on achieving. That's kind of commentary will skip on the rest of that.

But but but at any rate, this was you know, this was a huge industry game chain and I believe that tech stuff that that Jonathan and Chris, you guys did a whole episode on surround sound back in Yeah, So if you want to learn more about how surround sound works, definitely go back and listen to that podcast. It's from August time. The name is what is surround sound?

If you're looking for it, yep, yep, So go check that out because we're not going to cover surround sounds so much as we're gonna cover the signal to noise stretchers. At the end of this episode. Um, now, when we're getting into an interesting time in Dolby Labs is history. At this point. In nineteen seventy nine, William Jasper joins Dolby Labs, and Jasper was a little different from the

average person who worked at Delby. Basically everyone who worked there at the time was a technician, yeah, including Dolby himself. And so that works great when you're building products, but any person who is especially handling a complex business will tell you if you don't have the expertise and things like managing a budget and people and cetera, yeah, that that your company can end up going straight, uh, even if you are working your hardest to make sure that

doesn't happen. And they were working their hardest, I mean there, but their response to having any kind of monetary problem was to innovate wonderful new technology, which is, you know, a fine thing for a business to do, but also so expensive and also yeah, it's also not the best plan.

So essentially what's saying what we're saying here is that anytime Dolby Labs got into some financial uh you know, like like they're starting to creep toward the red right, like they're gonna lose more money than they bring in then they would end up making some sort of new product and that would stave off that and make make

sure that they were doing okay. But that was a lot of short term reactions, and bringing Jasper on as a manager was sort of a long term solution, saying, well, let's get someone in here who knows how to manage people. And that's exactly what Jasper's background was in. So Jasper starts by making some pretty tough choices. For example, he ends up laying off about a third of Delby Labs

employees in both the San Francisco and London offices. He said that the purpose for that was because of budgetary problems, like you had to do it in order for the company itself to remain strong. Um, so they continue to innovate. Yeah, yeah, despite all of those, all of those layoffs. Um, you know, Jasper kind of got the system working again, and over the next decade they would they would introduce surround sound

systems for television, compact discs, and laser discs. Nineteen eighty, Dolby Labs would introduce the C type Dolby's that I mentioned earlier in this episode, which you know, the higher grade consumer version of the those original type stretchers right. Um. In two they would introduce Dolby Surround for home video right, which again for people who are big home entertainment theater enthusiasts, that was a huge deal. In nineteen eighty three, William

Jasper would become the president of Dolby Labs. By the way, all through this time, Ray Dolby retained ownership of the company. He was the chairman of the board until the late the late odds, the late two thousand something, so he he was, um, you know, he was actually at this time the really the sole owner of the company, so it's still privately held company. At this time seven, Ray Delby becomes an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, which means, I guess said O B

E at the end of his name. It does not mean he's a knight. Knighthood would require a higher ranking than O. B. E. But still he was not more highly regarded in the eyes of Her Majesty the Queen than I don't worry, Jonathan, I'm still waiting them. She never returns my calls. Yeah, anyway, I'll have her over for tea sometime. I swear it So nineteen eighty nine, Dolby receives an Oscar for his contributions to the motion picture sound Uh seven, he received an award from then

President Bill Clinton. Stn't when we can still call him President Clinton. He's not the current president. No, but you get that title forever, you know, I mean, I don't have that title. But one day he doesn't return my calls either for the for the record, at any rate, he was awarded. Dolby was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. And here is Dolby's speech, which I love. The first part of your life is education, the second part is hard work, and then you get discovered and

people start handing you awards. That's exactly how short and sweet, very very modest man by, a very humble according to all reports that I read, where he loved working on the stuff he worked on, and he loved also we'll talk about some of his hobbies. He loved those very much as well, and of course his family. But was not the kind of person to, you know, revel in these things or boast in them. He was just very

determined and enjoyed working on something. Yeah, yeah, I think he was just one of these people who had that drive to create all of this stuff in the experiment. Um. For for that, he was awarded in two thousand three by the Emmy's with a Lifetime Achievement Award yep, and two thousand four he was inducted into the Royal Academy of Engineers. In two thousand five, Dolby Labs then finally goes public and this move ends up getting uh, Ray Dolby around, like his shares are worth around two hundred

million dollars at that point. Yeah, he became a pretty much instant billionaire. Yeah. Yeah, that that rocketed him to billionaire status. And in two thousand nine Dolby retires as the chairman of the company board. And uh yeah it was, um, you know, pretty pretty remarkable time for Dolby Labs and also sadly for Ray Dolby because it was around this time also that he discovered that he had contracted Alzheimer's.

So uh and by two thousand eleven he had officially retired because even even a stepping down, he was still working on things. He was still working on systems and um yeah, so that that kind of is the you know, and of course he passed away September twelve. Yes, yeah, so that that's a look at his life. But more than that, I mean he obviously he won multiple awards.

He won Oscar Awards, Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award. He has a theater named after him, the Theater where the Oscars are held every year, theater right as a as a tribute to him, his Adobe Labs secured the name of that for the next twenty years. Yeah, that was formerly the Kodak Theater. I've actually visited that theater and um, because I I've stayed in Hollywood a couple of times and I stayed near that theater. It's a really it's a really interesting place. I mean, it's a cool design.

I like it a lot. Um And then you know, let's talk about some of his hobbies, some of his interests. He was. He sat as the director of the San Francisco Opera for a while. Um, he was also on the He was a governor of the the Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony as well. Obviously, that love of music doesn't go away. Sure, And when you're as big a person as doll be Er, as as you know, influential, influential, then I'm not sure if he was that tall. That's not what I was saying. Um. He also was an

amateur pilot. Yep. He loved sailing and boating. He had a yacht. He also liked to drive for pleasure. I loved reading about some of his driving adventures. Like he he drove a vintage Jeep around for a while just to explore the San Francisco area and California in general. He also for a while enjoyed driving essentially what was the same thing as a tour bus, like a like a tour bus that rock musicians would use. He liked driving one of those around us. So curious. It's a

very interesting character and um. Also he and his wife both uh were philanthropist. She still is obviously, She's still very much involve and philanthropy, all right. She she inherited his his his multitudinous fortunes, and he was worth around two point four billion dollars at the time of his death.

And one of the projects they donated money to was they donated like thirty five million dollars to the University of California, San Francisco for stem cell research projects and instead of flowers when when they announced the passing of Ray Dolby, the family said, well, and lieu of Flowers, why not make a donation too, And they listed a couple of different medical facilities that specifically do Alzheimer's research and a little bit into leukemia as well, which is

he actually passed away from right right, So uh, you know there they were very much active, and she still is in scientific endeavors not you know, it's all sorts of philanthropic endeavors, not just the arts, but also the sciences. Um. So that's and to really, I think, to be fair to Dolby, he would not distinguished between the two. He felt art and science really it were interwoven. Oh sure, well, you know it's he he was so influential in bringing

in bringing the two together. You know, it's you can't have you can't have art without the applications that allow more people to experience it. And you know, this has been a fun time to look back on on his life and his contributions. We've got more about the Dolby Sound System coming up, but first let's take another quick break. Let's take the last part of this podcast to really talk about what put Ray Dolby on the map. The signal to noise stretchers, Like what exactly was that all

about and how did they work? Yeah? Yeah, okay, So what actually causes tape hiss? Okay, So magnetic tape you know, has a little magnetic particles in it that that's what stores, you know, and encoded. So it's that grain structure that let's see store it, right, and that grain structure actually

creates that hissing noise. So it's the it's the medium itself that produces the hiss, which means you cannot remove You cannot remove it because if you if you had a smooth tape, then you wouldn't be able to store anything on it. So that's the that's you know, the kind of the double edged sword. It allows you to store sound, but it also will create this his So how do you handle this? Well, you know, first of all,

it's really noticeable. Uh, if you have something that's playing at a low volume, particularly at a higher pitch, or something that's that's recorded at a low volume, right right, right, So when you play it back any of those low volume parts, you're going to be you're going to notice the hiss more if it's a louder part in the recording.

Like let's say that you've recorded a symphony and the symphony starts off softly but then builds to this well, during the crescendo, you may not notice any hiss at all. I mean, it's just the the sound itself is at an intensity where there's no noticeable hiss, but maybe at the softer, slower parts you can kind of detect it. And that was what Delby found to be infuriating and needed to be wiped off the face of magnetic tape.

So what he did was well. And also we should mention that this is more noticeable if you're playing the magnetic tape back at a slower speed, so real to real tape plays tape quickly compared to cassette tape. Right, So if you're doing real to real, that speed is about seven and a half inches per second, which equals out to be about nineteen centimeters per second. But a cassette tape plays magnetic tape much more slowly, at about one and seven eighth inches per second, or about four

point eight centimeters per second. So cassette tapes move slowly compared to real to real. So at that slow speed with that narrow band, if you're playing a low volume, high pitch sound, you're gonna hear a lot of hiss comparatively speaking. And and as Dolby was noticing that cassettes were becoming more of a thing, you know what, more of a capable technology. Sure, yeah, yeah exactly, he was like, well, we've got to address this because otherwise no one will

ever want to listen to anything. I certainly I won't, so yeah, So what he decided to do is he came up with a system for both recording and the playback of of stuff that you were recording onto magnetic tape. The recording element was a system where you would boost low volume signals going onto the tape, so you would artificially intensify them, you make them where they would essentially

overpower the hiss uh. And then when you would play it back, a decoder would interpret this and be able to play it back at the low volume right, so that you wouldn't get the the high volume played back at additional volume. Right. So, so here's how they would target the low volume parts, so parts of their quieter that gets targeted by a system and then it gets

artificially boosted and then recorded to the magnetic tape. When it's played back at the you know it and the decoder says, okay, play this at a lower volume the original volume that it was intended to be at. It reduces the hiss down by the same amount that the signal itself had been boosted in the first place. And so the his is still there, it's just inaudible because

it's it's so quiet, so uh. And then since you're not treating the high volume parts, you don't have to worry about blowing out the capacity of the magnet tape to record that sound and then distored everything right, and the hiss also is not noticeable at the or or it's not very noticeable at the high volume things because as we said before, the sound is already drowning it out exactly. So in other words, it doesn't really remove the hiss. It kind of masks it, which is brilliant.

I mean, you don't have to remove it if you're not able to hear it, right, it just goes this is not the hiss you're looking for. It's kind of to me, it's like theater. So if you're in a theater like a stage theater, and you're watching a play. You know, the set you see looks gorgeous, but if you were to walk behind that set, it would just be plywood and you know, stands and stuff like that, because it only has to look good from the side

that you can perceive it. So if you can't perceive the rest of it, don't don't bother building a set that's never gonna be seen. Peter Jackson, um. So anyway, Uh, that's you know, that's kind of the low down the basics of how this worked. Now Type A Dolby's did this with all frequencies of sounds, so whether it was a low pitch or a high pitch, it would handle that all of it, So that way you would have it would make all of the his the least amount

of noticeable. It's possible, exactly. That's really awesome grammar. Sorry, I do it too. But the consumer version focused mainly on high pitches because that was where the problem was most noticeable, and so it didn't really bother with the low pitches so much. Because most consumer quality recording equipment you didn't have to worry about it as much. You didn't have to be so good that this is the

master recording for something. Then uh, the Type C, like we said, handled a slightly wider range of frequencies than the Type B did, and once you get up to UH, I think it was spectral recording where they introduced the ability to handle pretty much all volumes below a certain

threshold and all frequencies. So it the goal was actually to do as little production as possible, to remove hiss without affecting the final sound, because the other risk you run whenever you do this sort of thing is that you actually affect the sound of the thing itself, where you might remove the hiss, but you also somehow otherwise affect the sound and thus it's not a good recreation of what the original sound was. So, you know, it

was a delicate line to walk. But as technology improved overall, um with with with computers and algorithms and everything that could go into this kind of process, and um, they were able to, I mean because because keeping costs down was always an important part of this Dolby system. Yeah, and of course we're talking here all about analog. Dolby himself resisted the digital revolution quite a bit in the

early eighties, but eventually Delby Labs did come around. Obviously, because if you've seen Dolby Digital everywhere now, but at the time, the the whole spectral recording idea that was mostly to try and extend the life of analog recording beyond what most of the industry thought it was going to do. You know, they thought it was over. Spectral recording comes out like, okay, well you've extended a lifespan by like five years. And eventually Dolby Digital would become

a big player in that space. But it was one of those things that Dolby himself resisted for a while. He had a real soft spot in his heart for analog. Um. He felt felt that digital was a little a little cold, and you know, early implementations were not the best, right were they were perfect? We'll say yes. Although Dolby Labs has certainly gotten into the digital space, yes, as we said, and they lead it now so or at least they are a leader. Um. Also, I mean they're they're continuing

to bring out new systems. For example, Dolby Atmos, which is a sixty four speaker theatrical sound system. Some two theaters installed it when it first came out. But what was really cool about this system, the sixty four speaker system is that it's so precise that you could even program a sound to come from only one of those

sixty four speakers. So if you wanted to pinpoint a specific point of origin for a sound in a theater, you could do that, which would be interesting because it would mean that your experience of that film would depend heavily upon where you sat, because if you sat closer to the speaker, it would be louder to you. If you sit sat further away, it would be softer. But either way, you sure there's I mean, there's always going

to be a sweet spot in the theater. And I think that the general rule is that when when they're designing these kind of theater systems, the people designing them are sitting kind of two thirds of the way back

and dead center in the room. And so if you really want to get the best sound system, and Holly Holly Fry did an excellent brain Stuff episode about this, and if any of you guys are watching brain Stuff over on YouTube or test tube, but it's generally designed so that so that anyone will get a pretty good experience, right right, So let's let's close this out with a couple of quotes from the man himself from Ray Dolby. Um, here's one of mine, and it's it's the longer of

the two. It's uh. I've often thought that I would have made a great nineteenth century engineer, because I love machinery. I would have liked to have been in position to make a better steam engine, or to invent the first internal combustion engine, to work on the first car. All my life, I've loved everything that goes. I mean, bicycles, motorcycles, cars, jeeps, boats,

sail or power airplanes, helicopters. I love all of these things, and I just regret that I was born in a time when most of those mechanical problems had already been solved and what remained were electronic problems. That's kind of funny. No, No, it's it's it's beautiful though. That's that's so and that

really uh. I, especially having done a bunch of episodes relatively recently about some of the build up to modern technology, right and and talking about what was going on and in the eight in the early early twentieth century, that was just fascinating to me. Another one that that I really love, and that wraps up this classic episode of tech stuff hope you guys enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions for future topics we can cover on tech Stuff,

let me know. The best way to do that is to hop on over to Twitter and use the handle tech stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.