Always looking to bolster it’s cadre of industry experts, Leo Laporte tweeted on Wednesday morning that Apple had hired Tomlinson Holman to run Apple’s audio initiatives.
Now who is Tomlinson Holman and why should you care?
Well, Holman an acclaimed audio engineer and the mastermind behind Lucasfilm’s THX sound system. Further, Holman developed the world’s first 10.2 surround sound system. Holman currently teaches film sound at USC while his book Sound for Film and Television is often required reading in college film course curriculum’s.
In 2007, Holman was awarded the IEEE masaru Ibuka Award which is given annually to people recognized for their contribution to consumer electronics.
Now as to what Holman will exactly be doing while running audio at Apple remains to be seen, but this is certainly a promising hire. Not to get all soap boxy, but while many folks seem to have the misconception that Steve Jobs is Apple and that the company will wither away and die in his absence, the truth is that Apple is a huge corporation with over 24,000 employees, many of which include some of the brightest engineers in the world in their respective fields. The hiring of Holman serves to reinforce the fact that Apple’s products are the result of talented engineers who work hard to help develop the products that so many people love to use.
May 5th, 2011 at 10:11 pm
My guess is that this is actually for an Apple branded TV. I’ve been thinking through what could differentiate such a TV from the vast sea of flat screens available today. The best differentiator (aside from integrating current AppleTV functionality) is to have good sound. Not top of the line audiophile “I’ve got to have solid gold connectors and at least 7 channels of audio” but rather something far better than a normal TV but simple to set up. My guess is something akin to the Bose 123 system but with the controller and amp built into the set (or the maybe the amp housed in the bass booster). So you hook up the bass and either leave your front speakers connected or mount them separately and then turn on the TV using a single remote and BOOM – very good sound that, through a tuning process, could produce reasonable surround sound.
My other guess is some kind of cable company partnership so that the cable box would be included in the TV as a “cable card” type element.