RAY DOLBY CHALLENGES COMPACT DISCS

When Ray Dolby (yes, that Dolby) first began installing his buttonless, switchless and knobless noise-reduction boxes in recording studios in New York and London, engineers and producers were convinced the man was dabbling in the occult: You put hissy tape recordings into it and got quiet programming out of it.

“People kept talking about magic; they were all convinced I had elves working for me at the time,” Dolby recalled with a chuckle.

Now, Dolby is out to work another wonder: to make traditional analog recordings sound every bit as good as the high-tech arrivistes on the market, the digital recorders and compact disc (CD) players.

(Analog recording takes a magnetic picture of sound waves, stores them on magnetically charged plastic tape and then reproduces those pictures electronically during playback. Digital recording translates sound into a series of numbers, stores them that way, then reassembles these numbers into sound waves on playback.)

Actually, Dolby said that making analog sound the equivalent of digital sound has already been achieved. During a recent presentation to movie industry executives and members of the press, he asserted that his company’s latest product, Dolby SR, provides twice the usable dynamic range of the latest digital recording techniques while using existing analog tape recorders--a fact that just might make those studios who haven’t made the expensive jump to digital rather happy.

“That was the idea,” Dolby said after the presentation at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “We wanted to give the analog people an out and provide a means of giving movie theaters the benefit of great sound.”

He laughed, and added: “I also want to stay in business, of course.”

The desire to mount a challenge to the increasingly prevalent digital recording method added a note of urgency to the unveiling of Dolby’s professional SR system. Dolby C, Dolby HX and Dolby FM, the last three products of the San Francisco-based engineering firm, have not been as universally accepted as the original Dolby A system, which first appeared in 1967.

Will Dolby SR become an industry standard?

“I think so,” replied Dolby. “Of course, there’s something you have to remember: These days, recording techniques are so good that digital and analog represent two schools of thought and taste rather than warring camps of technology. They’re like competing religions, each with their adherents. On the basis of pure sound, both are becoming so perfectible that it’s really a matter of psychology and emotion, not engineering.”

Dolby is more comfortable discussing the emotional aspect of recording music than one might expect.

“I love going out into unknown territory and seeing what I can pull back out,” he said.

An electrical engineer by training (BS, Stanford; Ph.D, Cambridge University, England), Dolby, now 53, played several instruments as a youngster and taped musical performances whenever possible, even while working in India as part of a UNESCO engineering team in the early 1960s. He is on the board of directors of the San Francisco Opera Company and is a governor of the San Francisco Symphony.

While self-effacing about his achievements--which also include designing the bulk of the first videotape recorder’s electronics at age 23--Dolby clearly loves a challenge. He admitted the six years spent “mulling over” the SR system could have been fewer if hadn’t had such a good time exploring the possibilites.

“I’m more of an inventor, a tinkerer, than an engineer,” said Dolby, smiling. “This time, with SR, I just had an urge to create something useful, and bringing analog into the digital age seemed a good place to work in. And there was a lot of work involved, for me and my staff.

“To be honest, the first two years of putting this project together were spent mostly on my boat. I like to think I conceptualize things better at sea.”

Dolby laughed softly. “The truth is, I suspect, that I just wanted a bit of a holiday. I had been working fairly nonstop for 15 years on noise reduction and needed a break.” He shook his head. “The itch to invent is a terrible itch, though, so I had to come back to shore and try it again.”