ATI's History, Design and Manufacturing Philosophies

The Amplifier Technologies, Inc. team has been designing and manufacturing power amplifiers for almost 50 years.

In their early teens, at the beginning of their long audio friendship, Mike Pontelle and Morris Kessler built amps in Kessler's bedroom. In 1967, Kessler formed SAE and a year later Pontelle became his partner. For almost two decades, they made some of the best known home audio amplifiers.

At ATI we make heavy-duty amplifiers with proven circuitry, meticulous assembly and rigorous testing designed to deliver state-of-the-art audio for years; all designed by us and built in our own US factory. It's a simple story, "American Muscle built by American muscle."

No Shortcuts, No Compromises

We design, engineer and assemble all ATI products in our 50,000 square foot Southern California factory. Everything is built completely to our specifications and we monitor every aspect of the process ourselves. We're convinced, that our efforts pay off in dependability and sound quality. Our customers agree.

Here's the Beef - Toroidal Transformers

At the heart of any amplifier is the power supply. Its foundation is the power transformer. To assure the highest quality, we wind our own. For the transformer's core we use MOH with magnetic properties that increase efficiency 18% over conventional units. We wind the core two wires at a time, a technique called "bifilar winding" that ensures perfectly symmetrical transformers that maximize efficiency and reduce distortion Each amplifier channel gets not only its own set of transformer windings, but its own rectifier and storage capacitors, thus giving each channel its own separate power supply. Even if the left channel is pushed to the limit by, say, a loud car crash on a movie soundtrack, it does not affect the power available to the other channels.

Enclosures

We house our products in rugged chassis with powder-coated finishes that resist scratches and prevent corrosion. Our hardware is equally durable and rustproof, made from teflon-coated, 18-8 stainless steel. We use inserts instead of threading metal parts, resulting in a stronger unitized chassis.

Circuit Boards

We use double-sided FR-4 glass epoxy circuit boards in all our products. Not only does a double-sided board handle twice the electrical current of a single-sided board, it produces much more solid connections to the components on the board. The solder joints that secure the components to the board over both surfaces of the board, plus the inside of the hole into which the component leads are inserted. As a result, our circuit boards are practically perfect, with nearly zero failures due to bad connections or cold-solder joints. The components we use on our circuit boards also add to the quality of ATI products. To insure that each and every circuit board functions exactly like the last, all of the gain stages in our products employ high-quality metal-film resistors with a 1% tolerance.

Wiring

Chassis-Mounted RCA Jacks

The gold-plated RCA input jacks on our amplifiers are mounted directly to the rear panel and not to the circuit board. While this technique complicates assembly, it results in a more robust connection and the jack cannot be accidentally broken off by the tight-gripping RCA plugs used in some audiophile interconnection cables.

Trouble-Free Circuit Breakers

Our higher power multi-channel amplifiers use magnetic circuit breakers to protect against AC overloads. If the breaker trips, it's a simple matter to reset it. Most amplifiers, however, use fuses for overload protection; if a fuse blows, you must have the proper value available in order to restore power to the amplifier.