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The man who founded Dolby Laboratories Inc

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Page 1: The man who founded Dolby Laboratories Inc

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• The man who founded Dolby Laboratories Inc. - Ray Dolby.

with the team of Ampex engineerswho developed the first practicalvideotape recorder.

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• While still in college, he joined the small team of Ampex [Ampex Corporation inRedwood City, CA] engineers dedicated to inventing the world's first practicalvideo tape recorder, which was introduced in 1956.

• After six years at Cambridge leading to a Ph.D. in physics, Dolby worked in Indiafor two years as a United Nations Adviser to the Central Scientific InstrumentsOrganization.

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• He returned to England in 1965 to found his own company, Dolby Laboratories, Inc.in London.

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• The company moved its headquarters to San Francisco in 1976 (1976 - 1986).

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• In the mid 1920s, we saw many technologies brought to the table, but during the1930s, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences established a standardfor sound-on-film.

• A sliver of space to the side of the picture frame was home to an optical track throughwhich light was driven and picked up by a photo sensor.

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• By varying the width of the opening, the amount of light delivered to the photo cellvaries as the film passes, creating varying voltages in the sensor, and a soundtrackis created.

• The basic principal of the Academy Optical Mono soundtrack is still employed inpart today.

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Magnetic Strip

In the 1950s, magnetic recording became popular.

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Magnetic sound-on-film had a couple of advantages over optical at the time:

- Magnetic was stereo, while optical was mono. - Magnetic had better sound quality.

But there were disadvantages, too:

- Magnetic had to be added to the movie after it was filmed. - Magnetic was more expensive. - Magnetic didn't last as long as optical. - Magnetic was more easily damaged.

Even though magnetic recording provided as many as six discrete tracks of soundon a film, the expense was simply too much. There had been experiments with stereooptical tracks, but there was too much noise to make that sound system worthwhile.

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• Dolby Laboratories introduced Dolby A in 1965, a noise reduction methodoriginally developed for professional recording studios, the movie industrysaw an opportunity to reinvent the optical track.

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C

Dolby A breaks the incoming audiosignal into four discrete bands.

A technique called pre-emphasis booststhe signal of each band above 10 decibels(unit used to measure the intensity of asound ), the level of ambient noise.

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C

Each signal then travels through acompander, where the signal iscompressed to further eliminatelow-level noise and is thenexpanded again. The signals arecombined, and the result is muchcleaner sound.

The main compromise in Dolby A is a narrower frequency response, resulting in asmaller dynamic range. Dolby noise reduction has evolved from Dolby A toDolby Spectral Recording, an enhanced process that reduces noise twice as muchas Dolby A.

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Even Dolby A couldn't compensate for the level of noise if more than two optical trackswere put on the film. A major breakthrough in surround sound came whenDolby Stereo was created.

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Using an amazing process called matrixing,Dolby devised a way to use the two opticallines on the film to create four distinctchannels of sound:

• Left • Right • Center • Rear

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Quite possibly the most popular of the digital formats is Dolby Digital, which is also known by several other names:

- Dolby Digital 5.1- Dolby AC-3 (Dolby's third audio-coding design) - Dolby SR-D (Spectral Recording Digital)

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Dolby Digital uses the space between thesprocket holes to encode information.

Look at the photo and notice the graydots between the holes.

If you look closely, you can even make out theDolby Digital logo in the center of each segment!

The Dolby Digital reader mounts on top of theprojector (some projectors now have the readerbuilt right in) and scans the film as it passes through.

Light from an LED shines through the film onto a CCD.The image, containing little specks that represent 1sand spaces that represent 0s, is sent by the readerto a Dolby Digital Processor unit that turns the binarydata back into sound.

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Dolby Digital uses six tracks: - Center - Left - Right - Left surround - Right surround - LFE (low-frequency effects)

5

.1

This configuration is commonly referred to as 5.1, for five main channels plus aneffects channel. The effects channel uses a subwoofer and is often called the boomchannel because its main use is for explosions and other powerful, teeth-rattlingsounds.

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In the event of failure of the Dolby Digital reader or problems reading the digitalinformation, the film has Dolby Stereo analog tracks.

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The newest Dolby format, Dolby Digital Surround EX was introduced in 1999, andadds a third surround channel to the Dolby Digital format. Enabling improved realism,more precise sound placement, and exciting special effects

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.......

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www.dolby.comwww.surroundassociates.comwww.cinenow.comwww.hometheaterhifi.com www.filmsound.org www.recording-history.orgwww.mtsu.edu/~smpte/timeline.html www.thx.comwww.dtsonline.com

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