ATI Technologies AT602 User Manual download pdf (Page 4)

An Interview with Morris Kessler,

ATI Founder and Chief Engineer

Is there an overall philosophy in the way you design and build products?

In all the products I’ve designed—even going back 30 years ago—the focus is on value and

performance. ATI products aren’t inexpensive, but you always get your money’s worth.

You’re not buying a boxful of air.

What’s filling all that space?

Big heat sinks, for one thing—we could save space by using fans, but that creates a lot of

noise. Big transformers, and separate power supplies for each channel. We also ground all

of our amplifiers at a single, central point, instead of grounding them in the transformer.

That

improves the grounding and lowers noise, but it means we have to have extra rectifiers in

the power supply. As a result, we create a weight issue, too. Heat sinks and big transformers are

heavy, so you need an extremely sturdy chassis to support them. We could save some cost by,

for example, using cooling fans, but the end product wouldn’t be as good as I want it to be.

You seem to take your design cues from Henry Ford–all of your products come

in whatever color you want, as long as it’s black.

People should get what they pay for. Using a faceplate that costs as much as the rest of the

amp costs doesn’t make sense to me. An amp’s chassis should be sturdy and have a nice

design, and that’s it.

How do you assure that all of your

products achieve the quality

standards you set?

Well, we manufacture or assemble

everything right here in our own factory.

I do have an office in the factory, but my

real office is out on the production line.

I spend a lot of time there making sure

everything’s running right.

How has ATI evolved over the years?

I’ve been manufacturing amplifiers for

decades. Around ’93, I got interested in

computer-aided design [CAD], and built a

stereo amp just for fun. I got the bug again,

and brought the amp to the 1993 Consumer Electronics Show to see if we could drum up

any interest. I ended up getting requests to build amps for other companies, and we’ve

since built amps for at least a half-dozen companies whose names you would definitely

recognize. In between those jobs, we started building ATI amps. The first ATI amps were

very successful, and we’ve expanded the line greatly from there.

ATI Manufacturing:

No Shortcuts, No Compromises

We assemble all ATI products in our 50,000-square-foot Southern California factory.

Everything is built 100 percent to our specifications, and we monitor every aspect of the

quality-control process ourselves. Here are some of the steps we take to make ATI products

the best value in the audio industry. All of these improvements pay off in dependability

and sound quality.

Toroidal Transformers

An amplifier starts with the power supply,

which starts with the transformer—the

source of an amplifier’s power. We wind all

of our own transformers in our own shop, to

assure the highest quality. The transformer

cores in our amplifiers are made from

MOH, with magnetic properties that make

the cores 18 percent more efficient than

standard transformer cores. Each amplifier

channel gets its own set of windings, which

minimizes interaction between channels.

We wind the cores two wires at a time, a

technique called “bifilar winding” that

ensures perfectly symmetrical

transformers that work more efficiently and produce less distortion. Our techniques and

materials combine to create the highest

quality power transformers in existence.

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 that the other channels receive.

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.

Bifilar transformer winding process

Transformers produced in ATI factory

We assure the quality behind the name

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ATI Technologies AT602 User Manual Page 4

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