dolby decoding?

thing is, there's no non-dolby-encoded track. dolby is a compression algorithm -- may be some equalization in there, too, but i believe it's mostly compression. this isn't compression in the digital sense, but in reduction of the dynamic range, with the range between the loudest and softest sounds reduced. the iea is noise reduction, but a non-decoded dolby trck is actually much noisier, because the floor hiss is amplified in the encoding. essentially the noise floor is raised -- a lot -- so while the track is dolby encoded the signal-to-noise ratio is just awful. it might be possible to "eardrum" it with an expander, but the right way is to use dolby's formula for decoding it.

hence my question. is there a plugin or filter or effect -- or even a free-standing application -- that will decode dolby-encoded tracks?

(actually, these tracks are kinda weird -- avidemux, for instance, doesn't recognize the audio format at all, which is puzzling.)

as far as i know, there's only one dolby stereo encoding. it's been around for a couple decades and is purely for noise reduction, not surround sound. it's employed in many inexpensive digital video recorders and is typically called dolby 2.0; also dolby digital and ac-3. it's encoded on recording and decoded on playback, but in that i'm not playing it back on the machine that encoded it, it doesn't get decoded -- hence, too bright a sound and a very noticeable hiss.