Mondo Knows Facts
Dolby B made cassette hiss bearable
The 1968 system raised quiet treble when recording and lowered it on playback Dolby B works as a compander: it lifts the level of quiet, high-frequency passages while recording, then cuts them by the same amount on playback, so the tape hiss drops with them. It bought roughly ten decibels of noise reduction and became standard on cassette decks. Dolby C and Dolby S followed. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
Dolby put hiss reduction in the homeThe system boosted quiet high frequencies on record and cut them on playbackThe cassette was meant for dictationPhilips introduced it in 1963 as a compact, cheap recording mediumPhilips launched the compact cassette in 1963The tiny tape format was designed for dictation rather than for musicDolby Digital brought 5.1 surround to cinemasBatman Returns carried the first six-channel digital film prints in 1992Dolby Stereo put four channels on an optical trackThe 1977 release of Star Wars helped make the format widespreadDolby noise reduction hushed optical soundtracksThe encoder boosted quiet passages on the print and the decoder turned them down
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Tags: cassette, noise-reduction, dolby
Dolby B made cassette hiss bearable: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- The 1968 system raised quiet treble when recording and lowered it on playback. The figure is taken from NAMM, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a music fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Music shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.