Ray Dolby, Dead at 80, Praised as ‘Legend,’ ‘Pioneering Visionary’

CEA President Gary Shapiro, typifying others, praised Dolby as “forever known as the man who took the hiss out of tape recording and transformed movie sound.” Dolby’s “groundbreaking work” led to the development of breakthrough technologies such as noise reduction and surround sound, Shapiro said of the “true legend and pioneering visionary” who was inducted into the CE Hall of Fame in 2000, among his many other honors. Ray Dolby “founded and built one of the most successful companies in the world, forever changing how we listen to music, movies and television,” Shapiro said. “His legacy lives on each time we marvel at and are moved by the amazing clarity and immersive sound of our audio and video entertainment."

Many of those who praised Dolby on his passing took pains to describe how the man had touched them personally and professionally. One example was Chuck Pagano, ESPN’s chief technology officer, who started in the media business as a “radio guy,” both as an engineer and as a DJ, he told us by email. Pagano helped work on the construction of a new facility at his college radio station, and that experience “gave me a great exposure” to where Dolby noise-reduction technology was headed, he said.

But Ray Dolby, the iconic inventor, made his biggest imprint on a young Pagano during a chance meeting in Northern California in the mid-1980s, Pagano said. Having become “firmly cemented in the TV space at ESPN” by that time, Pagano attended a meeting of the NCTA’s engineering group in the Bay Area, he said. “I actually arrived a day early, had some time to kill and did that by visiting Stanford University’s bookstore to look for some technical books,” Pagano said. “After sharing space at a couple of bookcases with a gentleman that I did not recognize, we actually came to the conclusion that we were zeroing in on some of the same books. That gentleman was Ray Dolby and from our brief time together I remember how gracious he was with his time and desire to help a young electrical engineer get his technical bearings.” Ray Dolby’s “technical contributions to the radio and TV world are infinite,” Pagano said. But “his brief physical connection with me that day was geometric in my own personal development,” he said.

In later years as Dolby Labs chairman and when he was no longer inventing, “Ray’s contribution to the industry was that he had a fertile greenhouse of engineering talent,” and allowed that talent to nurture innovations such as Dolby Digital, said Atlantic Technology President Peter Tribeman. Ray Dolby “wasn’t the hands-on Steve Jobs,” when it came to “roadmapping” Dolby Digital, nor did he seek to be, Tribeman said. “That wasn’t Ray. Ray left that to his engineering talent,” which include visionaries in their own right, including Ioan Allen, Craig Todd, Mark Davis and David Robinson, Tribeman said. As Dolby Digital flourished theatrically and as a home theater adaptation, Tribeman said, “Ray’s genius was not to interfere, but to allow talented people to grow the business."

Todd, now Dolby Labs CTO, was quoted on the company’s corporate website as praising Ray Dolby’s management style. “If he had an idea for you, he wouldn’t just say, ‘Do it this way,'” Todd said. “He would sort of drop a little nugget of wisdom on you that would get you thinking, and, like, three days later, you'd realize, Oh! That would really help, if I did it this way.” As for Ray Dolby’s impact on society, the website quotes Allen, now Dolby senior vice president-cinema relations, as saying “the public doesn’t really know about Ray Dolby. He’s out there somewhere.” But the public is aware “that a cassette labeled Dolby sounds good,” Allen said. “That Dolby Surround sounds good,” and that Dolby on a theater marquee also sounds good, he said: “But all those things are possible because of Ray Dolby’s inventions, which are at the heart of the whole process."

Barry Fox, Consumer Electronics Daily’s longtime U.K. correspondent, interviewed Ray Dolby many times in the early years when Dolby Labs had recently been founded and first based its headquarters in London, Fox said. Fox recalled him as being “patient and gentlemanly,” even toward competitors when a heated format war broke out between Dolby Labs and several rival noise-reduction systems.

Ray Dolby also had quite the sense of humor, Fox recalled. In the late 1980s, when he launched Dolby S analog noise reduction at a lecture before the U.K. Institute of Broadcast Sound, an engineer in the audience asked him if there were any more, even better, systems in the pipeline, Fox said. “I like to think we are nearing the end of the line and can stop designing for a while,” Ray Dolby replied. “It must have been like this several hundred years ago in the Scotch whisky industry. There came a time when the blenders said to themselves, ‘Hey, let’s stop developing, and start just enjoying the product.’ And since then everyone else has been doing just that."

Though Ray Dolby in later years retired from full-time research, he took up flying private planes and helicopters as a personal diversion, he told Fox, who asked him if it was tricky learning how. “When I was a child I had no one to teach me how to ride a bike,” Dolby replied. “So I just figured it out by falling off, getting back on and trying something different. I don’t want to offend any flight instructors, but I found learning to fly a helicopter much the same.”