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The T-Amp. It was just a cheapo "$39 battery-powered amplifier that hooks up to chintzy cardboard speakers," and so Richard Bracke of Sonic Impact Technologies was dumbfounded when sales of the T-Amp surged suddenly last fall, as reported by Daniel Lyons in Forbes (10/3/05). The T-Amp, powered by AA batteries, was intended as nothing more than a "plaything for kids at the beach." After all, "its sound turns ragged at high volumes, and it comes with low-quality plugs and speaker connections." But audiophiles quickly realized that the T-Amp was something else again, that in fact "it produced music as sweet-sounding as amplifiers costing thousands of dollars."
And so word of the T-Amp spread quickly on the web, with one critic on an Italian website calling it "the most amazing product in 25 years," and one customer hooking "it up to an $18,000 pair of speakers and a $6,000 CD player." What makes the T-Amp so special is that it uses an innovative chip that "amplifies signals by pulsing power on and off like a light switch" instead of by "varying the voltage (higher voltage equals louder sound)." The result is a more efficient amplifier that's "always either at maximum voltage or off, nothing in between, so they waste less energy and produce less heat." Yes, they tend to produce more distortion, but that problem was mitigated by figuring out a way to accelerate the on-off pulses -- "millions of times per second."
The chip used in the T-Amp "puts out 15 watts of power and costs $3." At the highest end -- 500 watts -- the chip costs just $45. Bottom line is, Richard Bracke and his partners are now cranking "out 4,000 T-Amps a month" and plan to introduce a 50-watt version, priced at just $349, next year. Sales of the T-Amp actually represented just $250,000 of Sonic's $5.5 million in sales last year. But the T-Amp has really put Sonic, www.si-5.com, on the map, and the hope is it will help drive sales of other products, such as i-Fusion, "a new speaker-cum-carrying-carrying case for Apple's iPod." As Richard Bracke notes: "The T-Amp has created this little whirlwind for us, a sort of underground buzz."
Tim Manners
editor
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©2005 reveries.com |
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