CASE STUDIES

Open Business Solutions > Case Studies > Dolby

Dolby Laboratories develops and delivers products and technologies that make the entertainment experience more realistic and impressive. For more than four decades, Dolby has been at the forefront of defining high-quality audio and surround sound in cinema, broadcast, home audio systems, cars, DVDs, headphones, games, televisions, and personal computers.

Dolby Laboratories is the industry leader in developing sound processing and noise reduction systems for use in professional and consumer audio and video equipment. American engineer and physicist Ray Dolby founded the firm in London in 1965 and moved it to San Francisco in 1977. Whilst it does make some of its own products, Dolby mainly licenses its technology to other manufacturers. The firm has over 950 patents and 850 trademarks worldwide.

Dolby’s original success came from their invention of the Dolby noise reduction system for tape recordings, and from that success they have diversified into providing digital techniques for packing sound into small digital files. This is particularly useful for modern digital music devices using MP3 files and the like.

Dolby has sold their expertise to many companies - the Dolby logo appears on most music devices for example the Apple iPod products. Consequently a large part of their business today revolves around the management of royalty payments.

In addition, their expertise in sound management has been applied to the cinema, and they manufacture cinema systems for the ‘big screen’. There are two main manufacturing sites for cinema systems, these are at Wootton Bassett in the UK and San Francisco in the USA. Both sites use INFOR software provided by Open Business Solutions to manage their operations. Since it’s launch in 1971 into the movie industry, the Dolby Digital format has become the de facto audio standard - its systems equip more than 42,000 cinema screens worldwide.