Tomlinson Holman is a Professor at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and at the Viterbi School of Engineering, Chief Scientist at Audyssey Laboratories, and founder of TMH Corporation. He was Chief Engineer of Advent Corporation and founded Apt Corporation, manufacturer of the Apt/Holman Preamplifier. Tom was subsequently Corporate Technical Director for Lucasfilm Ltd where he pioneered the THX Sound System, Home THX, and introduced innovations into postproduction that became widely used. He named the most widely used multichannel sound system "5.1", and in recent years has been working on a 10.2-channel one.

As a consultant, Tom worked on many postproduction and other technical facilities, and as a recording engineer he made a number of successful recordings, including with the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, for which he served on the Board of Governors. His recording as engineer of Thomas Dunn's conducting Handel's Messiah was reviewed in the Washington Post as "the recorded sound is superb."

Tom holds twenty-three U.S. and foreign patents and is a Fellow of Audio Engineering Society, the British Kinematograph Sound and Television Society, the IEEE, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and the World Technology Network. He was awarded a Technical Achievement Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2002. He received a Career Achievement Award and an Honorary Membership from the Cinema Audio Society, an Honorary Membership from the Motion Picture Sound Editors, an Honorary Membership in the Society of Television Engineers, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association. In October 2006 he received the Silver Medal of the Audio Engineering Society "for more than three decades of work in the advancement of audio electronics, multichannel sound techniques, and motion picture sound production and reproduction systems." In January 2007 he received the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award, "for engineering contributions and innovative developments in audio and cinema multichannel playback systems."

Tom Holman is experienced in standards making, having been chairman of IEC TC- 100 Audio, Video, and Audio-Visual Systems for six years, chairman of the Audio Recording and Reproduction Technology of the SMPTE committee, and co-chaired the Audio Engineering Society Task Force on High Capacity Audio with John Eargle. He was one of five members who wrote the original AES 17 Digital Audio Measurement standard, and contributed to AES TD1001 on Surround Sound.

He is the author of three books, Sound for Film and Television, Surround Sound Up and Running and Sound for Digital Video, all from Focal Press. Various editions of these books have been translated into Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, and a local edition of Sound for Digital Video is available in India. He has written 29 refereed journal articles (17 sole author), and 140 magazine articles. He was founding editor of Surround Professional magazine, is an associate editor of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, and is a member of the editorial board of Motion Imaging, the journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.