Ray Dolby

Dolby (left) is inducted into the NIHF

Ray Dolby (born January 18, 1933) is the American inventor of the noise reduction system known as Dolby NR. He is the founder and chairman of Dolby Laboratories, and is a certified billionaire.

Dolby was born in Portland, Oregon in 1933 and raised in San Francisco. As a teenager he held part-time and summer jobs at Ampex, working with their first audio tape recorder in 1949. While at Stanford University from 1953–57, Dolby continued at Ampex, working on early prototypes of video cassette recorder technologies for Alexander M. Poniatoff and Charlie Ginsburg.

Dolby received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1957 and subsequently won a Marshall Scholarship for a Ph.D. (1961) in physics from Cambridge University, where he was a Research Fellow at Pembroke College.

After Cambridge, he acted as a technical advisor to the United Nations in India, until 1965, when he returned to England, and founded Dolby Laboratories. That year he officially invented the Dolby Sound System.

In 1997, Dolby was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Technology. In 2004, Dolby was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Dolby is a fellow and past president of the Audio Engineering Society, and a recipient of its Silver and Gold Medal Awards. In 2005, his personal wealth was estimated to be $1.5 billion.