From Noise to Nirvana - The Ray Dolby Story

From Noise to Nirvana - The Ray Dolby Story

Hey everybody, it is the Trout once again here on Vinyl to Viral, you know as part of the Trout Show podcast family, where we talk about music industry standards and things that have happened in the past that made it interesting and changed music landscape. And today we're going to talk about a guy, one guy that changed the music industry for the good that you may not even recognize his name, or you might, but I guarantee you that you've heard what this gentleman did and accomplished in the music industry on every recording you've probably listened to. That story about Ray Dolby is next on the Trout Show.

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Call David today at 469-372-1587. Welcome back to Vinyl to Viral. You know, I'm old enough to have been able to hear recorded music on almost every way that you can.

I heard it on 33 RPMs. I heard it on 45s, what we called 45s back in the day. I heard it on cassettes.

I heard it on CD-ROM, and now I hear it on streaming. And even when my parents were alive, back in the day, they actually had 78 records where I could listen to the old-timey music with people like Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald. Back then, before digital recording, everything was recorded on magnetic tape.

I don't know whether people that are young enough know what a magnetic tape looks like, but I can tell you that it was prominent to do all the major recordings in the studios back then. And magnetic tape is pretty much what it is. It is iron oxide particles put on a backing, run through a recorder, through a bunch of recording heads, and the magnet changes the way the information goes on to the tape, and then it comes out music, and blah, blah, blah.

There you got music. But the problem with this was the fact that because an inherent problem with magnetic tape is there is this thing called hissssssssssss, that you would hear when the tape passed by the record head or the playback head. Now, if you're a musician, it's like, I don't like that, but if you're a consumer, you had to put up with it.

You would hear it occasionally if you had really, really good stereo equipment back then, but most the time you never did because the recordings weren't as good as they are now. But when cassettes came along, it really became prominent because people started just like me. I had a Sony Walkman.

Everybody did. Tapes got smaller, but the sound got compressed and you could hear the hiss more. But you still didn't have the ability to hear it as well as we did later on when they took music and put it on CDs.

They went from analog to CDs, which was digital, analog to digital. Then you could, and that equipment got better obviously, your headphones got better, everything got better, and you could start hearing the hiss in the music, which was irritating because you'd go like, what is that noise? What is that hiss sound? What is that? But as soon as the music started, of course, it would be eliminated because the music and the singing was louder. Well, a guy back in 1965 named Ray Dolby had his Dolby Labs, and Dolby came up with an idea that would actually effectively change the quality of music that we hear now on recordings back then to help eliminate the hiss in music.

I'm telling you, as a guy that was used to it, when that came along, we were like, oh my gosh, it looks how much better the song and the music sounds. Back in 1966, Decca Records, which was a big label back then, were the first to adopt using Ray's Type A noise reduction for classical music, because there's obviously a lot of silence, quietness in classical music, which enabled a clearer and a better high-fidelity sound for people listening to it. But by 1968, some of the major recording studios were starting to use Dolby A, which we didn't know anything about back then, I can tell you.

We had no idea they were using it. But artists like the Beatles and Pink Floyd were using it to clean up their audio and make it sound better. Between 1968 and 1970, Dolby came out with a consumer version of it called Dolby B. It was to help people when they listened to cassettes, because we all had Sony Walkmans back there, walked around with the headphones on, and it became an ability to make high-fidelity home listening viable.

And by the early 70s, pre-recorded cassettes, that's where you took the original tape that they recorded in the studio and made it into a cassette, that's what people listened to. There was no CDs or streaming. And artists like Simon and Garfunkel and Led Zeppelin started using Dolby to make their sounds better on the pre-recorded cassettes.

And by the 80s, Dolby come up with another version of it called Dolby C, and it offered a greater noise reduction. And I'm not going to get into all this unless you're an audiophile, you'll understand that. Basically, it made the sound better on cassettes, especially on high-end consumer recordings when they were using professional equipment to listen to it.

And albums that became huge popular hits like the U2 Joshua Tree, they used Dolby C to make their sound even better. And by the 2000s, Dolby came up with something even better. And with the rise of digital audio, which means there was no tape, he started using a different version of it to help people like the artists like the Eagles.

In 1994, using a new thing, new Dolby, excuse me, new Dolby called Digital 5.1 to make their live recordings even sound better. From the 2010s on, Dolby has added a new product called Dolby Atmos. And some of the most famous songs out there are now using it, like the band The Weeknd, Billie Eilish.

And then streaming platforms like Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music now offer thousands of tracks in Dolby Atmos. And studios like Abbey Road, which I had the fortunate one time going there once, are actually adopting it to make their songs and recordings better for you as a consumer. But one of the things, and I'm going to backtrack a little bit, that Dolby really started on, because even though I like the Dolby use on recordings, especially if you're listening to an older recording that was made in the 60's or 70's, that Dolby really makes a big difference, especially on the equipment that we now have to be able to listen to music.

He really got to start helping movie makers make their movies sound better when you went to the theater. His first place, excuse me, the first movie he used Dolby on was A Clockwork Orange, which was in 1971. By 1975, it became more and more people were using it, studios were using it, Star is Born was used in 1976.

And during that decade, over 6,000 cinemas worldwide were using Dolby when you went to go see a movie. Now we didn't know it, there wasn't anything that told us that, but it made the quality of that sound better when we did go see a movie. And by the 90's, he kept helping movie makers make the sounds better.

He helped with Batman Returns, because then we were going to watch digital. And by 2012, Dolby had introduced a thing called Atmos, which is an immersive, object-based audio, which was debuted in the movie Brave, and later adapted for home theater. So you can see it all come around to be able to use Dolby in your recordings, to listen to recordings in streaming now even is better with Dolby, and your movies you watch.

Ray Dolby was a brilliant person. Unfortunately, he's passed away. He earned over 50 patents.

He transformed the entertainment audio with accolades including Oscars, Emmys, and even got a Grammy for him introducing Dolby noise reduction systems to the music industry. I can't tell you how much I appreciated Ray Dolby, even though he's since passed along and his family's involved with it. They still use Dolby in a lot of music and recordings to make your sound that you hear, whether it's a movie, or recording, or streaming, sound better all the time.

I'm so glad that Ray Dolby came along to make our music that we listen to, the sounds of our lives, better. So the next time you're in a theater, or listening to a recording, and you say, good lord that sounds good, you probably can thank one guy. His name, Ray Dolby.

Well that's it for this episode of Vinyl and Viral here at the Trout Show. Thanks so much for stopping by and listening to it. I hope you enjoyed the story about Ray Dolby, a guy that made music better for all of us, and movies too.

So for more information about the Trout Show, you know where to go and find it. You just go to thetroutshow.com. You can see all the podcasts, all the interviews I do, my music that I do, everything involved with the Trout Show. Always glad to have you stop by, and of course you would like to follow me on Instagram.

My handle is Texas Rocker. Once again a shout out to the guy keeps the lights on, Mr. David Smith with Edward Jones. Thank you once again David for your help.

So until next time people, you know what I always say. It's only rock and roll, but I love it. See ya.