The fact is, we don't always process all of what we actually experience, and that is the basis for compressing audio and visual information over the Internet.

This has profound implications for technology - and for our own reality. It may be that technology can mirror our own semi-reality and by using our own neural structure, reproduce it, false as it is. In fact, it may be that's the only way to do it functionally, inside our brains or inside a computer. It not only runs to the fundaments of perceptual reality, but to the algorithms of Flash and MPEG-4 as they try to transmit a facsimile of our perceptions.

Where It All Began
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. In recording technology, this all began back in the 1960s and had nothing to do with codecs or digital transmission. At the time there was no such thing as digital sound or pictures as we know it. The closest thing to digital was the screened (and thus pixellated) newspaper photographs sent over telegraph and phone lines - remember that little "AP Wirephoto" in the lower right hand corner? That was digital, sort of.

Those of us in the recording business way back then had a problem with what we were recording on, which was the Scotch 205 family of reel-to-reel tape. Magnetic iron filings glued to acetate (or later mylar) backings were intrinsically noisy. You could do everything possible to make your electronics quiet and faithfully relay their analog signals, but once it came to aligning zillions of iron atoms on a piece of tape in the twinkling of an eye, you met your weakest link. Not every atom lined up like you wanted, and when you played back the recording, that turned into noise - the dreaded tape hiss that could not be driven away and which made the listener constantly aware that this wasn't live, it was tape, distancing the experience and making the Grail of perfect high fidelity ever out of reach.

Two Forefathers
In the summer of 1965, American physicist Ray Dolby devised the first of many solutions to this problem and founded Dolby Labs in London. Dolby's noise reduction and compression solutions for audio and video are still at the leading edge of technology today. What he originally did was note that most of that hiss was in the upper range of hearing, where virtually none of the fundamental tones produced by voices or instruments lay. Why not, he thought, just forget about that frequency range, just toss it out? What he did, using analog electronics related to the synthesizer technology Robert Moog had been developing, was simply reconfigure the signal so it fit into the lower frequency spectrum, then reconstruct it in playback, without the hiss. Voila!