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Enjoy the Music.com Boston Audio Society The BAS Speaker Magazine
Ray Dolby Remembered
Article by Mark F. Davis, Senior Research and Development Engineer at Dolby Laboratories
December 2013 Boston Audio Society Volume 35, Number 4

 

Ray Dolby  For many years, Tuesday was Ray Day at Dolby. Ray would come in and check with president Bill Jasper that the business was still shipshape. Then he'd stroll around talking with the engineers about our various projects. I looked forward to these informal sessions, albeit with a touch of apprehension. Ray typically would ask a few softball questions about a project; then the questions would get more insightful and challenging until with an innocent smile he'd ask, "Why don't you try doing it this way ...?" and you'd realize that it was because you never thought to try that, and that it might just work. That left Wednesday through Monday to prepare for the next Ray Day. It made for a stimulating environment.

When I started at Dolby, Ray was just putting the finishing touches on his masterpiece, the Spectral Recording (SR) noise reduction system. This was an incredibly complex analog circuit that took a long time to design, but he had very detailed, specific ideas about how it should operate, and he continued to refine the design until it did exactly — precisely — what he wanted. Back in college, Barry Blesser had taught us to never fall in love with one of our designs. Ray took that a step further — he was his own toughest critic and he strove for designs that were nothing short of optimal, a notion that is still part of the Dolby corporate culture. I worked on two SR-related projects that involved interacting with Ray. One project involved writing the automatic SR-alignment software. Not surprisingly, Ray insisted that each SR module meet not only the published specs and the more-stringent in-house specs, but that the alignment had to be flat-out optimal. It took months to get the software to do that reliably, but the result was that every SR module shipped was functionally identical to every other SR module, and generally stayed that way.

Some years later, I was asked to generate a DSP-implementation of SR. Digital audio systems act fundamentally differently from analog circuits, so emulating a complex quasilinear, time-varying analog circuit like SR was a nontrivial undertaking. Ray warned me that SR was "like a Chinese puzzle", and wished me luck. He got that right. In only a few weeks I had something that worked vaguely like SR, but it was the better part of a year before the emulation was accurate enough to consider using. What made it possible were many conversations with Ray about the fine points and subtleties of the SR design, things that Ray had never told anyone. It was a fascinating exploration of not only the circuit but the imagination, inventiveness and integrity of its designer.

The last time I saw Ray Dolby was a few months before his death. At his request, his son David brought him down to the Labs so he could see what was going on. He looked frail that day, but mentally he was on his game, and it was heartening to see his face light up at the various demos that were run for him.

His passing marks the end of an era. It's doubtful we shall see his like again. He will be missed.

Ray Dolby talks about film soundtracks in a 3:37 AES oral history project interview.

 

Other Ray Dolby obituaries and remembrances:
Rupert Neve wrote of "Coming to Grips with Ray Dolby" in the 18 October 2013 AES Daily (the magazine published each day of the AES convention). Neve described his concern, in 1968, that the input and output transformers in Dolby noise reduction systems would impair the quality of Neve's console sound. Neve met with Dolby, who as they talked about noise reduction systems said that "the real money was to be made in the consumer market [and that] he had developed a simple version". Dolby "held the opinion that it was more profitable to let others do the manufacturing and collect a royalty on the design". In the 2000s, Dolby told Neve that "he employed 60 design engineers, but 120 lawyers".

 

Some quotes from Ray Dolby:
"I was never a gold-digger, or an Oscar-digger, or anything like that. I just had an instinct about the right sort of things that should be done in my business. So all these things just fell into place."

"I think I was both lucky and I was also straightforward with people, and I think they liked that attitude."

"There is no major next step. It's a matter of constantly being aware of one's environment, of keeping track of what's happening in the various industries that we're operating in and just sort of sensing what's possible and what's not possible, what's needed, what's not needed — just having all your antennae going, sensitized to all the signals that are out there."  

 

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