Ray Milton Dolby (January 18, 1933 – September 12, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor of the noise reduction system known as Dolby NR, which has been said to have "transformed sound reproduction".
In the 1950s he contributed to development of the video tape recorder while at Ampex, and in 1965 he founded Dolby Laboratories in London. There he invented and patented a method of noise reduction for use in analog recording which was widely adopted for the cassette tape. The company moved to California in 1976 and went on to develop audio and video formats for films, home video recorders, home theater, television broadcasts, and video streaming services.