Passion. Our hobby/interest/vocation is all about passion. There is a lot of passion in the high-end audio universe and James Bongiorno, the head of Spread Spectrum Technologies, has a consuming passion for his creations. He has been building and refining the Ampzilla amplifier concept since 1974 and holds a patent on the design. From his Web site:

“At the time, James was the director of engineering at SAE. Prior to that he had been the director of engineering at Dynaco where he created the renowned Dynaco 400. While at SAE, James conceived the concept of the full dual differential full complementary amplifier topology which has since, for the last 27 years, become the defacto world standard road map for virtually all high end power amplifiers made today. Ampzilla was originally designed as a construction project for Popular Electronics Magazine. However, the response was so overwhelming, after the rave reviews, that James left SAE to found “The Great American Sound Co. Inc.” (GAS CO.). The rest was history.” Read more here.

The Ampzilla 2000 amplifier, a 200 Watt (into 8 Ohms) mono block, is the latest thinking from the mind of James B. It is relatively compact, runs warm but not hot, and weighs a manageable 52 pounds. There is a single pair of speaker terminals and inputs for RCA and XLR interconnects. Interestingly, in the Owners Manual, the point of manufacture is listed as Cullen Circuits, also the manufacturer of the Wyred4Sound ST-1000 amplifier, which was reviewed here on 10Audio.com. Based on my experience with the high quality of other Cullen Circuits’ products, SST’s selection of Cullen to build his amps was a wise choice. Personally, I was especially pleased to see the selection of an on-shore, US manufacturer to produce a new product.

Spread Spectrum Technologies Ampzilla 2000 Amplifier Specs:

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What is the highest frequency you can hear? The common belief is that the range of human hearing is from 20 Hertz (cycles per second) to 20,000 Hz. Young people can often hear frequencies at or near 20 kHz, but as we age and our hearing is damaged by years of loud music, gunfire (hopefully from sporting arms), civilization, and possibly vocational noise, our hearing acuity decreases in the upper frequencies. This is not usually a problem for the purpose of listening to music, because as frequency increases, the amount of musical content decreases. Above about 10 kHz, only the upper order harmonics of fundamental notes remain. Nevertheless, these harmonics are critical to hearing the character of the instrument that created the original sound.

Otologists use a steady tone at the frequency of interest to test your hearing. They increase the volume for you and you signal when you can hear the tone. This may be an adequate test of your ability to hear speech, music and other natural sounds at a given frequency, but I suggest that you can hear far higher frequencies than the doctor’s graph of your hearing might indicate. In other words, a hearing test is only partly valid.

What is the frequency of a drum stick hitting the rim of a snare drum? Or a guitar pick touching a string? Or, for that matter, the leading edge of any sound. These impulse sounds do not have a frequency because they are instantaneous. They happen NOW and are gone. There is no note, little tone, and no significant harmonic trail afterwards. If you could put enough of these sounds together to be able to measure on a cycles-per-second scale, the number would be very high. Certainly there could be over 20,000 of these impulses per second, and possibly 50,000 or more. Can you hear the tapping of a stick on a triangle? You bet you can!

Euphonia RS3 Specs:

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