It’s an unexpected pleasure to consider an accomplished man and see the child he once was. To sense not just the list of awards or years of employment, but the boy, mouth agape, captured by the wonder of sound.

Clayton resident Jeff Riedmiller, director of the sound platform group at Dolby Laboratories, is like a kid in a candy shop when it comes to listening.

“My mother still has pictures of me with a little stool next to an old record player,” he says. “I’m up on my tippy-toes with my head down in the stereo system.”

Picking up a guitar in junior high school increased his passion, and his dream of being a sound engineer is recorded for posterity in his high school yearbook. Riedmiller’s curiosity, the drive to explore how sound is created, captured, stored and played back, burns with youthful intensity. Decades later, he is exuberant not about winning awards, but about the human ear and the aspects of listening to language that unite us.

In addition to owning patents and writing numerous trade articles, he is also an Emmy recipient. Riedmiller and his coworkers created the Dolby LM100 and DP600, intelligent loudness correction tools that measure and normalize audio programming levels.

“A lot of loudness correction tools are destructive,” Riedmiller says, explaining that the Dolby products won Emmys because they are revolutionary.

Prior to his team’s innovative solutions, correction meant a possible change in the artistic intent of a transmission and accepting a “lukewarm” listening experience. The key to breaking through with a unique product was focusing on normal human speech.

“The best loudness estimator is our own ears,” Riedmiller says. And the category of sound upon which people most agree is speech. Studies show that listeners evaluate acceptable loudness levels in dialogue with surprising, but consistent agreement.

Sound effects and music do not yield the same results, so the Dolby products were designed to focus and extract spoken words from programs. Developed alongside proliferating digital transmission modes – which spread like dandelion seeds in midsummer as the world moved away from analog signals – the LM100 and DP600 transformed the wild weed of variable sound into the smooth, clear dialogue home users desired.

This is the result that speaks to Riedmiller. “The award is an incredible moment, but the thing that hits home is when an end user calls me and says, ‘Jeff, this thing makes a big difference it saved me.’ ”

He’s grateful for the recognition, but also for a life of working with people who share his passion. “Success is really a collective effort,” he says. “With a certain set of skills, some autonomy and the right environment, work is almost magical.”