THE THX INTERVIEW
Some years ago, I interviewed Tom Holman for Home Cinema Choice magazine. Out of some sort of daft misplaced aged loyalty to a new editor that NEVER forgave me for not introducing him to my brother. (I know, a bit sad, huh?) I have never republished stuff from there. Also, it got edited down to hell… and I never thought to publish on Talk Audio website.
Thus, in advance of my getting hold of a tiny headphone amplifier that is THX rated to boost the sound to exciting levels, as sent to me from a CES exhibitor (utterly thrilled to be able to do this, meanwhile) here is that interview, in full, unexpurgated. But first, a reminder of what THX is, given the limits of YouTube. Put on your headphones and turn it up.
The Tomlinson Holman Interview
Adam Rayner gets an audience with the TH of THX. Starstruck as a rock groupie in Bono’s Presence, he managed to keep it together long enough to bring you this interview.
If you are a Trekker (never say Trekkie) then you might recall an episode of the original series (season two I think) when Captain Kirk gets court martialed. His title and decorations and qualifications are read out in court. It is an unending list of awards for gallantry and generally being a totally state of the art bloke. Well, to the art of cinema and television sound, Tomlinson Holman is right up there with Jim. He’s the TH of THX and you know what? That’s the very tip of the iceberg of terrifying brilliance, drive and educational zeal that is industry shaper and shaker Mr. Tom Holman. I will admit that when I was asked blithely whether I would like to interview Tom Holman, I said “yes, of course I would” while not actually daring to believe it’d actually get set up, let alone happen. But sure enough, pretty much first thing on a Monday morning Pacific time, (makes it afternoon here) I get a call from California…
Rob Sinden of Gecko is the bloke with the industry-aristocracy connections and while he’s a passionate and erudite man, I just wasn’t quite as over-excited to be visiting him before as I got when he called and let me know it was on. “What’s on? I said brilliantly. Tom turned out to be an extremely down to earth guy. There was none of this, “I have a call for you” stuff. It was just “Hi it’s Tom Holman here..”
“…what surround sound is all about.” Gary Reber: Widescreen Review
I had a bunch of questions for him. The intelligent ones were from the other chaps on the team, the stupid ones are all my own.
Q: When I saw my first THX movie, it was an Indiana Jones title and the demo was done with laser beam animation following a dedicated THX soundtrack. When it finished, the audience burst into spontaneous applause and that was before the film had even started. I called the projectionist (I was in pro audio and yet years before I became a journalist) and he gave me a half hour of his time and told me all about the acoustic requirement of getting THX certified. It was in the West End of London at the Empire Leicester Square. Did you have to go any cinemas around the world yourself to check they had done the right thing before THX certification was issued?
A: “Well, I did the very first five theatres, after that, we hired staff. Good staff. I was there (the Empire) before it got THX, but not after. There’s a wonderful story that comes out of that theatre. Warren Beatty, director of Bonny and Clyde, had recorded a bunch of gun shots (for B&C) and had hated them. The ones they wanted were the ones in Shane. So they went to the original director and asked how they had done it. By shooting Winchesters into a barrel, by finding this particular canyon in Arizona… They went and recorded this and put it in the movie and it played fine here. (in the US) Then it went to England and the performance was utterly flat. Warren Beatty was in the cinema and he goes up to the booth and asks the projectionist what’s going on? Little old projectionist says, ‘You know, I have helped you out here, Mr. Beatty. I have remixed the movie, see here’s where the meter goes for each reel. I haven’t had problems like this since Shane…’”
Q: I nearly died laughing in the cinema during the Over the Hedge THX macro porcupine-quill plucking and flinging joke. Did you enjoy the gag?
A: “I think I’ve seen that one once…Of course I left THX in ’95 after fifteen years, that was quite enough Alice down the rabbit hole,”
Q: More sensibly, what field of endeavour are you most actively pursuing these days?
A: “I’m teaching and I’m working with Audyssey Laboratories and I’m writing. I’m working on the second edition of my surround sound book right now, for Focal Press.”
Q: Do you feel that the Audio side of home theatre is being overshadowed by the HD issue at the moment?
A: “To tell you the truth, I think that’s absolutely true. I go only intermittently to Cedia and what I find there is just leaps and bounds of improvements in picture. I was just in Pride Store – a sort of massive electronics supermarket – and I was looking at the pictures (on their TVs) and while there are differences among them, certainly among brands and types of technologies and so forth, for the man on the street, the differences between LCD and LED and Plasma; it’s pretty minimal and the best sets that are available for $2,000 maybe to $6,000 are awfully good and I’m sure anybody could get used to their anomalies. Whereas I walked into their demo room and it was THX and the sound was completely screwed up. It was just dead wrong. So it’s once again back to what Walter Murch talks about the dominance of vision over hearing but how hearing does work all around us. He says ‘It comes in the back door.’ It sneaks up on you. You can do emotional things.”
Q: What do you think about the new HD audio formats of dts and Dolby– are they truly a step forward or is it a missed opportunity in terms of something perhaps more radical?
A: “It always depends on a lot of other things. The first time that both a dts disc and a Dolby disc were available my friend the technical editor on Sound And Vision magazine put the discs into a spectrum analyser and measured them. He called me up and said ‘They are different.’ There’s other stuff in the chain. Things like Dolby’s dialogue normalisation, lowering its level of movies by 4dB and comparing it to dts who don’t so it sounds 4dB louder, so of course you choose dts. On normal average programme material the advantage of the higher order coding is going to be very minimal. That’s not say that any individual disc won’t sound better. If there is better mastering behind it, better traceability to the original, then all bets are off. You’re not really comparing the format. Unfortunately, you won’t really know what it means about Dolby HD and dts and so forth, listening to something in the commercial marketplace, because you need to track the whole chain.”
Q: Your 10.2 sound system impressed my editor, who asks what’s the state of play?
A: “We’ve done eight permanent installations, we’ve done twenty in total counting exhibitions and so forth. We have them in a large theatre, a home theatre that’s open to the public, a university and in a big army mission simulator that plays very loud. (At this point I confessed I’d really like to review that install – while wearing a heart rate monitor) What happened is that DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is kind of out there – they’re not directly building weapons or anything like that, they’re pushing the envelope. They developed the internet – they realised that a Sony Playstation was more visually engaging than their $2,000,000 Lockheed simulator! So they said, we’ll throw some money at USC, they have a strong engineering school. They built this thing called the Institute for Creative Technologies and we put in the high powered 10.2 system with the Tesseract system I developed, a three-way tri-amplified system. Here’s what happened; The mission pilot from Mogadishu who is represented in the movie Black Hawk Down, one of those guys in one of those helicopters, comes in the room, hears a helicopter mission. He has to leave the room. He’s found out in the hall, shaking. He’d seen the Lockheed simulator. It had two million dollars worth of picture and an eight inch loudspeaker. We’d gone out and recorded the helicopter with the full low end.”
Q: What about any new books in the pipeline?
A: “There’ll be the second edition of the surround sound book at the AES; Sound for Digital Video has been out a year now and Sound for Film and Television is in its second edition and indeed I go on sabbatical for year soon and I’ll write the new edition then. I only have three books in print, because you’re constantly revising them.”
Q: How about your TMH qualification training in the UK?
A: “If we did that it would be through Audyssey. I spent all those years with THX manually tuning theatres. I ran up and down the stairs (of each theatre) for five microphone positions, seven loudspeaker channels. So I was up and down those stairs seventy times. That’s where it began. I wanted to remove myself from the room EQ equation. They worked for about five years with double-blind A/B comparisons with me as the subject. Their tuning versus my tuning until they could beat me and that’s what became Audyssey. It doesn’t use averaging, it uses this spatial fuzzy clustering method of measuring responses. Several PhDs and a tenured professor now; that’s where it came from.”
Q: Are our installers UK good enough in your opinion, with regard to the standards in the USA?
A: “I don’t really know, to tell you the truth. I’m so glad they are in the Cedia process, though, with all their training. All I know is old saws like how your rooms are smaller and you’ve got more neighbours. I was recently in the UK for an AES meeting at Bletchley Park. We had a lecture about how WWII digital coding systems have ended up in today’s digital audio. Vocoders, MP3 and more. There are eleven digital inventions from World War two that are with us today!”
Q: Do you think the UK is ready for TMH products? They look awesome and my fellow reviewers are all blown away.
A: “I’d have to check our own contract with Martinsound. We decided we couldn’t afford our own marketing and sales staff, so their marketing people do it for us.”
Q: How do you choose your dealers for your own proprietary TMH sound system?
A: “These are all old relationships rather than ‘dealers’. We’re promoting an idea. It’s sort of like an industry trade group. It isn’t an association. It’s closest to an industry federation. It’s to promote the whole idea of multichannel music.” I commented that Sting was one of the top ambassadors of this and Tom told me; “I’ve got a Sting story for you. He loaned us a video tape and a 24 track tape to remix in 5.1 THX. It turned out that when they came, the video tape was from Milan whereas the audio 24 track tape was from Barcelona. So we said, ‘Oh this is horrible, we’ll never be able to synch this up.’ We laid it down and guess what? It sunch up! He was working the click track on stage.”
(This shouldn’t be possible without SMPTE time code unless your musicians are synapse-tight every time – a great compliment to Sting and his musicians…)
Q: Do you think you will ever retire?
A: “I can afford to retire at age seventy-nine.”
Q: Do you reckon you are old enough yet to get described as a legend? Or has that accolade already been bestowed? If not I do so now. I’m honoured and privileged to have interviewed one of my own personal heroes.
A: “We are always laughing because very early in my audio career back at Advent, someone called me a ‘Young Lion’ of audio. So I think I’m old lion now….”
And with that I thanked him as nicely as I could for his time and was left slightly stunned with a dose of the “Did that just happen?”-effect that the star-struck experience when they meet their actual heroes – even on the phone! I am such a lucky git to have this as a job. At least I know it…
Tom Holman
Professor of Film Sound at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television Engineering
A Principal Investigator in the Integrated Media Systems Centre’s Research Centre for multi-media of the National Science Foundation
Founding editor of Surround Professional magazine
Honorary member of the Cinema Audio Society and the Motion Picture Sound Editors
Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society
Fellow of the British Kinematograph Sound and Television Society
Fellow of Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers
Member of the Acoustical Society of America and the IEEE
Lifetime/Career Achievement awards from the CAS and the Custom Electronics Design and Installation Association
Holder of 7 U.S. and corresponding foreign patents totalling 23, licensed to over 45 companies.
Was chief electrical engineer at Advent Corporation
Founded Apt Corporation
Was Corporate Technical Director at Lucasfilm Ltd for 15 years
Developed the THX Sound System and its companions the Theatre Alignment Program, Home THX, and the THX Digital Mastering program.
Author of three continuously updated seminal reference titles used as textbooks in college courses
Tom Holman’s 10.2, the next generation surround sound system – a quote or two
“It was the most amazing multichannel sound I have ever heard. I was simply in the space occupied by the performers, with no sensation at all of the locations of the speakers or the true size of the listening room… there were live music recordings that sounded…live.”
Tom Norton, Technical Editor, Stereophile Guide to Home Theatre
“I have never experienced a more holosonic three-dimensional soundfield from a loudspeaker system. Bass extension was extremely deep and powerful, yet always natural sounding. Clarity throughout the full frequency range was exemplary, as was dynamic capability. Imaging was lifelike, creating a sense of realism rarely, if ever, experienced in recordings. The whole experience was a dream come true for me. This, I thought, is what surround sound is all about.”
Gary Reber, Publisher and Editor,
Widescreen Review
NOW, here in 2021, this the state of the THX art…