Spread Spectrum Technologies, Inc. Trinaural Processor.

Manufacturer: Spread Spectrum Technologies Inc., 716 N. G St. #2, Lompoc, CA 93436; 805/740-9902; sstinc@earthlink.net; www.ampzilla2000.com Price: $1,500 Source: Manufacturer loan

The name "James Bongiorno" may not be as familiar to audiophiles as it was in the '70s and early '80s. He has been out of circulation for a number years because of some serious medical problems that brought him to death's door more than once. He now appears to be completely healthy and is in charge of a company named Spread Spectrum Designs.

James is perhaps the most important innovator that high end audio has seen in the analog transistor era. He has been directly involved in almost every major breakthrough in power amplifier design. In his field of specialization he is one of the most creative electrical engineers on the planet. Bob Carver is the only other name that comes to mind at the moment. Bongiorno and Carver are both inflicted with some strange disease that mostly limits their vision to things audio. Both would no doubt be very rich if they had chosen to work in another area of the electronics industry. Indeed, the term "spread spectrum" is the enabling technology of 3G cell phones and wireless LANs. One can only imagine what would have happened to Bongiorno had he taken his company in the direction of wireless data systems. He could have done just this, because his expertise spans to RF design (he once designed a tuner called "Charlie" that contained many innovations in the front-end design that found their way into most high-end tuners later in the decade), but fortunately for us audiophiles, he applied his genius to things audio.

Early in his career, James worked at Marantz. He was contributing engineer with the Sid Smith as senior engineer in the project for the Marantz Model 15 Power Amplifier which was the first example of a topology that is virtually identical to most modern power amps. Some high-end designs have moved past this topology to a fully complementary one, which as it turns out was developed by James in 1973 (Scientific Audio Engineering 31B). Slightly later a higher-power version called Ampzilla was introduced by James as a kit design in Popular Electronics. Demand for both the kit and assembled unit created such demands on James's time that he was soon running is own company, GAS (The Great American Sound Co.), producing this 200-wpc unit and its baby brothers with cute names such as Son of Ampzilla (first separate power amp I ever owned -KWN). James also introduced preamps that incorporated the new balanced topology. Other innovations included the introduction of DC servo circuits (Theadra, 1975) and very low-noise phono preamps that did not need a pre-preamplifier stage.

Disagreement with partners resulted in James's departure from GAS. Soon another Bongiorno company called Sumo was in business. It was here that the third-generation amplifier topology was hatched--the fully balanced topology. A 450-wpc monster balanced/ complementary amplifier came out of this effort (Power, 1979). Other balanced amplifiers were produced by others, but problems keeping the amplifiers stable soon led others to abandon the topology despite the fact that it solves a whole series of technical problems associated with amplifiers with the speakers' output terminals referenced to ground. The reason Sumo was left standing alone with this topology is it is extraordinarily difficult to stabilize the DC and AC feedback networks.

Spread Spectrum Designs is now introducing a new set of preamp and power amps. I have seen the amps' schematics and they represent a fourth generation in power amplifier design. This design, like the third-generation Sumo design, is virtually impossible to copy by the "let's replace the yellow cap with a bigger red one" crowd. Only an analog engineer at the highest level could understand what is going on in this amplifier, let alone create the concepts to realize the design.

Now, I am not going to get into an argument on whether modem electronics (i.e. stuff copied from the Marantz 15 or Ampzilla) has a sound that cannot be attributed to measurable nonlinear ...