Apple products about to get a THX audio upgrade

It looks as if the sound on your audio devices is about to get a whole lot better. According to a Tweet by ‘Tech Guy’ Leo Laporte that was reported on GigaOm Wednesday morning, Apple has hired Tomlinson Holman as its new audio chief.

Holman is best known for being the guy who is almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of Lucasfilm’s THX sound. During the 15 years he spent working for George Lucas he created the worlds first 10.2 surround sound system and won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement.

Currently, Holman is a film sound professor at USC. That is, until Apple came knocking. If Laporte’s Tweet is true, we might see some of this technical genius come to Apple products.

I would welcome an upgrade to the sound of most Mac products, the speakers on my 11″ Macbook Air are horrendous. But even more exciting would be a huge bump in the quality of sound output from iPads and iPhones.

Currently the screen of the iPad is big and bright enough to show a table full of people a video but good luck getting the volume high enough for them to hear it, leading to that awkward ‘hand-amplifier’ cupping of the speaker and the craning of necks. Perhaps Holman can pump some of that Academy Award-winning sound knowledge into the audio output of the next iPhone and iPad.