The person
behind PhaseAlign.
I’m Tom Holmes, founder of PhaseAlign Ltd. I’ve spent around 35 years working as a carpenter, but my fascination with music and sound goes back much further.
I grew up in a musical family, playing piano and listening to records. From an early age, I was curious about how audio equipment worked and how it shaped what we heard. I would listen closely, convinced that music could sound better.
By my late teens, I was building my own loudspeakers from materials and components I could find. I experimented with cabinet sizes, solid timber baffles and driver positions, learning through making and listening. My practical skills gave me a way to explore those ideas, adjusting the construction until I achieved a sound I liked.
Alongside that, I experimented with basic recording, capturing instruments and everyday sounds, playing tapes backwards and exploring early sampling keyboards. I took tape machines and amplifiers apart and rebuilt them. Over the years, that curiosity developed into a lasting interest in synthesisers, sampling, recording and music production.
Around three years ago, I began investigating a harshness I disliked in my studio monitors. Using correction software got me thinking about another approach: could I change how the equipment itself responded, with the benefit remaining after the treatment signal stopped and I played music again?
My early experiments produced subtle listening differences that encouraged me to keep going. What interested me most was that those differences remained after the treatment signal stopped, while I listened to music again. Over time, I developed a signal treatment that produced more pronounced listening differences in a shorter period.
That work became PhaseAlign: a treatment applied to loudspeakers and headphones before listening. After the treatment signal stops, you play music through the treated equipment and hear the retained listening differences, with no physical modification and no processing added to the playback chain. In our A/B demonstrations, listeners have consistently preferred the treated equipment, describing clearer separation, cleaner bass and a greater sense of space.
I’m a practical experimenter with decades of experience making things and listening closely. I commissioned independent acoustic testing at the University of Salford. Measurements recorded changes in frequency and phase response in the tested equipment, with loudspeaker changes still present after 24 hours. The size of the changes varied between the units tested. See the results in 03 — Measurement.
With listening demonstrations and independent measurements already carried out, I’m now inviting loudspeaker and headphone manufacturers to evaluate PhaseAlign on their own products and discuss its potential for commercial use.
PhaseAlign brings together the things that have interested me since childhood: music, craftsmanship, curiosity and the desire to hear more from the equipment we use.