Science & Tech Quote by Thomas Dolby

Dolby is doing something sly here: he’s smuggling a creative demand through the side door of engineering common sense. By framing his argument “from a technical point of view,” he disarms the usual industry excuses - budget, taste, market timing - and pins responsibility where it stings. If “existing technology” already makes “very high quality audio” feasible, then muddy, compressed, or careless sound isn’t an inevitability of the era. It’s a choice.

The kicker is his timeline jab. Digital graphics, he says, is still in its loud, public growth phase - the visible boom everyone celebrates. Digital audio, by contrast, has “already happened,” which reads like both pride and frustration. Pride because audio quietly solved a lot of its foundational problems earlier than people credit; frustration because the cultural conversation didn’t keep up. We fetishize what we can see. We treat sound as supporting infrastructure until it fails, then we blame the speakers.

Dolby’s context matters: he’s a musician who came up alongside synthesizers, studios that increasingly resembled computer labs, and the early promises of digital as a fidelity revolution. He also lived through the moment when that promise got rerouted into portability and convenience - smaller files, more distribution - sometimes at the expense of richness. So the subtext lands as a rebuke to an industry that acts technologically “limited” when it’s really aesthetically complacent.

Underneath the tech talk is an artist’s ultimatume: if we’ve already crossed the threshold, stop treating great sound like a luxury feature. Treat it like the baseline.