Dolby
March 8th, 2009“Trust the … HISS … Force, … POP… HUM … Luke.” If that doesn’t match your memories of Star Wars, you have Ray Dolby to thank.
While still an engineering undergraduate at Stanford University, Dolby worked on the team at Ampex Corporation that perfected the first video recorder. After his return in 1965 from a stint in India as a UN advisor, Dolby established Dolby Laboratories to explore his ideas for removing the hiss and other noise that then plagued most tape recordings. Dolby’s insight was to separate the good sound from the bad noise by filtering the output of the tape into separate audio channels, allowing the noise to be removed without muffling the remaining sound as all then-existing techniques did. Once Dolby had perfected his multi-tracking technology, it revolutionized both the studio recording industry and the home tape player market, ushering the demise of the long-playing record.
In 1975, Dolby Labs introduced a similar revolutionary technique for quieting the noise on film sound tracks, and George Lucas was one of the first directors to put the new tools to use in his film Star Wars, the success of which Lucas partially credits to his Dolby-enhanced sound track. Dolby systems are now employed in nearly all movie theaters.
