Dolby Deterioration

Definitely.
I have listened to recordings made in the 30's (German monaural), that sound better than a Dolby encoded recording.
There are movie composers who swear Dolby ruins music.
Bob

Hey gang, so few different things are involved here.
1- The Dolby noise reduction professional (Dolby-A) was a monster card of parts and op amps. Dolby was not particularly careful with their designs when it came to noise and distortion. I know because I've taken some of those cards and others apart.

2 - Dolby Surround was awful for movies and music. It was impossible to get an enveloping, natural sound field, as it focused completely on effects and big screens with people seated in sub-optimal locations. On top of that, their processors were noisy and high distortion.  I worked with prototype decoders that let you turn this down, and my god, you have never heard 2 channel movies like that.

3 - Dolby Digital eliminated the forced channel pumping of DS but the poor data rate forced high compression.

Post DVD I believe (but I am not a composer/editor) that things have gotten a lot better for music and movie production.

Dolby SR is IMO terrific. I use a pair off Dolby 363 units with Cat 300 SR/A cards for my R2R machines. You can get >90 dB S?N ratio with 1/4 inch tape at 15 IPS and Dolby SR. SR sounds really clean too - I'm a fan.

Dolby SR!! I haven't heard that term in ages. As far as I knew it was a very short lived experiment in multi-band compression. It was (like Dolby A) a pro-only noise reduction format which came out after Dolby C.


Like DBX. I vaguely seem to remember they attempted to use it for film and this did not last long. Not enough benefit, and getting the cards to match was difficult due to the high number of discrete parts.  Then it vanished from my consciousness.

I found the change in recorded sound between Rubber Soul and Revolver jarring; I much preferred the sound on Rubber Soul, and still do. It wasn't until years later that I read Abbey Road had switched from tubed recording equipment to solid state between those two albums.