10.2 is the
surround sound format developed by
THX creator
Tomlinson Holman of TMH Labs and
University of Southern California (schools of Cinematic Arts and Engineering). Developed along with Chris Kyriakakis of the
USC Viterbi School of Engineering,
10.2 refers to the format's slogan: "Twice as good as 5.1". However, there actually may be 14 discrete channels if the left and right point surround channels are included. He states that 5.1, a name which he himself came up with in 1987, was chosen as it was "the MINIMUM number of channels necessary to give a sense of spaciousness". Holman and others state that higher
sampling rates, which is a recent trend in digital recording, does not have a significant perceivable effect and that the next frontier in sound engineering is to increase the number of discrete channels to meet human spatial sound perception. , several decoding,
UHD, or virtual expansion processors have approached numbers as great or greater than 10.2.