Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff. The name AMPEX is an acronym, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence. At one time public, Ampex is currently a privately held company.

Alexander Matthew Poniatoff established the company in San Carlos, California, in 1944 as the Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company. The name came from his initials plus "ex" to avoid using the name AMP already in use. During World War II, Ampex was a small manufacturer of high quality electric motors and generators for radars that used Alnico 5 magnets from General Electric. Ampex's first offices were at 1313 Laurel St. San Carlos California, "Howard Ave. at Laurel".

Near the end of the war, while serving in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, Major Jack Mullin was assigned to investigate German radio and electronics experiments. He discovered the Magnetophons with AC biasing on a trip to Radio Frankfurt which gave much better fidelity than shellac records. Mullin acquired two Magnetophon recorders along with 50 reels of BASF Type L tape and brought them to America where he produced modified versions. He demonstrated them on May 16, 1946, to the Institute of Radio Engineers in San Francisco.

Ray Dolby (born January 18, 1933) is the American engineer and inventor of the noise reduction system known as Dolby NR. He was also a co-inventor of video tape recording while at Ampex. He is the founder of Dolby Laboratories.

Dolby was born in Portland, Oregon. He was raised in San Francisco, California and attended Sequoia High School (Redwood City, California).

As a teenager, in the decade following World War II, Dolby held part-time and summer jobs at Ampex in Redwood City, working with their first audio tape recorder in 1949. While at San Jose State University and later at Stanford University (interrupted by two years of Army service), he worked on early prototypes of video tape recorder technologies for Alexander M. Poniatoff and Charlie Ginsburg. As a non degree-holding "consultant", Dolby played a key role in the effort that led Ampex to announce quadruplex videotape in April 1956.

In 1957, Dolby received his B.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford. He subsequently won a Marshall Scholarship for a Ph.D. (1961) in physics from Cambridge University, where he was a Research Fellow at Pembroke College.