Founder and Director Emeritus, Ray Dolby

Dolby Laboratories' founder, Ray Dolby, was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1933. While still in high school, he went to work for Ampex Corporation, where he ultimately became responsible for developing the electronics for the first Ampex professional videotape recorder, the precursor of every professional and consumer videotape system today. He received his BS degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1957 and, as a Marshall Scholar, left Ampex to pursue further studies at Cambridge University in England, where he received a PhD degree in physics in 1961.

In 1965, Ray founded Dolby Laboratories with the initial goal of developing electronic systems for reducing the background noise, such as hiss, introduced by the tape recording process. With the success of those systems and many analog and digital innovations since, the Dolby name has come to be associated worldwide with quality audio from film soundtracks, home theater systems, audio- and videocassettes, DVD, TV audio, and cable and satellite transmissions. Ray makes his home in San Francisco with his wife, Dagmar. Learn more.