Peter Scheiber
Peter Scheiber (April 30, 1935 – January 18, 2023) was an American musician and audio engineer who helped create surround sound. He is credited with starting multichannel matrix audio formats, a mathematical way to encode four audio channels into two and then decode them back to four. He also invented a 360-degree spatial decoder. His work laid the groundwork for the surround sound systems used in theaters, sometimes described as a precursor to Dolby Surround.
Scheiber was born in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, and grew up in Peekskill. He trained at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and earned a scholarship to study with top players of the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood. At 22, he studied with the Chicago Symphony’s first bassoonist and later played first-chair in the Chicago Chamber Orchestra. As a professional, he performed with the Ottawa Philharmonic and the Dallas Symphony orchestras.
In 1967, at age 32, he developed the idea of encoding four channels into two and decoding back to four. He licensed the patent to CBS and later fought Dolby Laboratories over patent rights, pursuing legal action for infringement. He also worked with Jim Fosgate of Fosgate Electronics and Tate Surround Technology.
By the early 2000s, Scheiber had become relatively reclusive due to the legal battles. He received royalties from Dolby and Harman from 1983 to 1994, totaling over a million dollars, but the payments stopped when Dolby claimed the patents had expired. In 2002, a Seventh Circuit judge ruled against him. He passed away in Bloomington, Indiana, in 2023 at age 87.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 12:42 (CET).