50 years of the Audio Cassette and Ray Dolby
Sep 16, 2013 at 10:39AM There's been 2 very siginificant events in the last few weeks
1/ It's the 50th anniversary of the Audio Cassette developed by Philips
2/ The passing of a man named Dr Ray Dolby
These 2 events are inextricably linked and one can't be mentioned without the other.
In the early 60s Philips developed a compact cassette based tape format primarily for the recording of speech. (a dictation device). Little did they know at the time ( in fact they failed miserably at securing a reasonable patent for the format that must have cost them billions!) that it would become a primary carrier of music for over thirty years.
The problem as previously mentioned was that the fidelity of audio cassette was barely enough to record voice well, let alone the extended frequency response needed for music. This prompted a guy by the name of Ray Dolby to look at ways of improving the noise floor and quality of recordings that could be placed on to a 1/8th inch tape running at 1&7/8th inches per second (by comparison modern reel to reels ran at 30 IPS). And in 1965 Dolby Laboratories (visit the Dolby website to learn more) was formed and out of all the research and hard work was the noise reduction system that we know so well as "Dolby B".
There are now literarlly billions of items that use the Dolby technology, from domestic audio players such as cassette and minidiscs to professional applications in cinema and recording studios.
Dr Ray Dolby truly changed our audio and video world. Here's a fantastic tribute to the man
Remembering Ray Dolby from Dolby Laboratories on Vimeo.
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