Forbes magazine says audiophiles are apeshit over a cheap, $30 amp which sound as clear as high-end competitors. It’s the audiophile version of Two-Buck Chuck:

… the T-Amp was nothing to brag about, just a… battery-powered amplifier that hooks up to chintzy cardboard speakers. A firm called Sonic Impact Technologies introduced it to no acclaim in 2003. Then orders suddenly took off last fall, surging from a hundred to a thousand units a week…

… audiophiles were raving about the T-Amp on the Internet, claiming this tiny plastic wedge produced music as sweet-sounding as amplifiers costing thousands of dollars. The customer had “hooked it up to an $18,000 pair of speakers and a $6,000 CD player,” Bracke says. A reviewer on a Web site in Italy called the T-Amp the most amazing product in 25 years. And an online cottage industry had sprung up around the T-Amp, with companies such as Red Wine Audio, in Auburn, Massachusetts, stuffing the electronic guts of the plastic amps into sleek metal cases and selling them for up to $1,200… [Link]

The secret to this amp is an innovative audio chipset designed by an entrepreneur named Adya Tripathi. Is he the new Amar Bose?

Tripath’s founder, Adya Tripathi, figured out a way to make a digital amplifier that produces very little distortion. Tripathi, a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and a veteran of National Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices and IBM, found that part of the trick involves pulsing on and off at far higher rates–millions of times per second… Tripath’s higher pulse rate creates more chances to offset signal distortion by applying feedback… The T-Amp uses Tripath’s lowest-end chip… which puts out 15 watts of power and costs $3… [Link]

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p>Tripathi is from Benares:

The advance comes from a little chip produced by Tripath Technology Inc., a 150-employee company in Santa Clara, Calif. It was founded in 1995 by Adya S. Tripathi, a 48-year-old engineer from the holy city of Varanasi… Before taking the company public… Tripathi secured $50 million in funding from such high-tech heavyweights as Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc. [Link]

This is when I expect a certain mutineer to roll into Adya uncle’s office as a long-lost relative and then bounce, saying goodbye to the sucka mutineers who fly economy

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p>Tripathi’s invention was even used in Apple Power Mac G4s, Blaupukt car stereos, high-end Aiwa and Hitachi TVs and the now-discontinued Apple Cube:

Apple found Tripath amplifiers were nearly three times as energy-efficient as comparable models — an important factor for the Cube’s design, which has no fan — and had very high sound quality, said Mike Culbert, Apple’s director of system architecture. “They’re miles ahead of what’s out there now,” Culbert said. [Link]

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p>More technical details for the interested:

… engineers at chipmaker Tripath Technology [TRPH] of San Jose, California showed Cotton a tiny amplifier with an innovative chip used to power speakers in plasma TV sets made by Samsung, Sanyo and Sharp.

Typical amplifiers boost audio signals by varying the voltage (higher voltage equals louder sound). Tripath’s chip amplifies signals by pulsing power on and off like a light switch (longer pulses result in louder sound)… [They are] more efficient than traditional models because they are always either at maximum voltage or off, nothing in between, so they waste less energy and produce less heat… [but they] produce more distortion, so usually they are relegated to subwoofers… [Link]

A solution struck Tripathi while he tried to sleep in his dorm room in India one night more than 25 years ago. He figured out a way to make the amplifier work digitally — converting its signals into a series of ones and zeroes that are processed at regular intervals. Traditional analog technology involves processing signals continuously…

Now his patented system, called digital power processing, is behind the circuitry in amplifiers that are a fraction of the size of their predecessors, use far less power and create much less heat. The key ingredient, the power-processing chip, fits on a finger and sells for as little as $4. Rather than coming as a bulky and costly separate attachment, the digital amps fit inside space-deprived devices like PCs… [Link]

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p>Tripath has since expanded into chips for DSL modems and cell phones. But it’s run into business trouble after its IPO.

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I n 2001, Tripath went through a restructuring, and non-desi employees complained the layoffs looked discriminatory:

Last month, Tripath’s staff of about 140 people was a model of diversity. Roughly 30 percent of the workers were Indo-Americans, another 30 percent were other Asian-Americans, and 40 percent were white, many of them European immigrants.

But recently, the company laid off a quarter of its employees, and none of those let go was Indo-American. Since Tripath founder and Chief Executive Adya Tripathi is Indo-American, some workers are now grumbling about possible discrimination…

Employees say Tripath was determined to spare engineers and focused its layoffs on operations. One employee says few Indians happened to work in operations, perhaps accounting for the disparity in pink slips…

The clerical worker suggests Tripathi may have been trying to protect people who had been with the company the longest… A former Tripath executive says Tripathi could be “loyal to a fault” to workers who supported him… [Link]

The leech-like lawyer Bill Lerach, king of frivolous class action lawsuits, sued Tripath last year:

Unbeknownst to the Class, however, the Company’s seeming success was the result of improper accounting that artificially inflated Tripath’s reported results… [Link]

The suit was settled a couple of months ago:

… the lawsuit will be dismissed in exchange for a payment of $200,000 in cash by Tripath and the issuance of 2.45 million shares of Tripath common stock… [Link]

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p>More significantly, Tripath’s revenues have declined sharply from $16M in 2002 to $9M in 2004. Last month Tripath was delisted from Nasdaq’s main board into penny stocks. Despite its engineering excellence, its stock has been underwater (below IPO price) for almost its entire history:

If anyone has insight as to why (beyond ‘not making sales, duh,’) I’d be interested to hear it. The finance boards don’t seem to have much, it’s too thinly traded.