Behind the Scenes at Rockford Fosgate

This week we bring you a Cardomain exclusive look inside of Rockford Fosgate�s state of the art amplifier manufacturing plant and subwoofer manufacturing plant where we will get a chance to see amplifiers and subwoofers being made from scratch, all here in the US of A. They were in the middle of producing Power, Punch and 25 to Life products, so we will show pictures of each in various stages of production, from the raw ingredients to finished product waiting to get shipped to the customer. We will also get a chance to see what is going on behind the scenes, even before new product is released.

Rockford has been at the leading edge of amplifier design since the seventies, and has no plans on changing that heritage of innovation any time soon. We got a chance to go behind the scenes and take a peak at their amplifier skunk works, where all the new amplifiers are being designed and tested. Lots of new products in the pipeline, but there isn�t much we can discuss just yet.

An amplifier consists of a two basic parts, a circuit board and a heatsink. The first step in building an amplifier is assembling the circuit board by placing all the electronic components onto it. This is the process that takes the most amount of time, and is probably the most difficult part of building an amplifier.

The first step in building a circuit board is taking the �raw� circuit board and attaching the parts that can be attached by high speed robotics. These components are usually relatively small in size (from the size of a grain of rice up to about the size of an aspirin) and are attached by computer controlled machines to the surface of the circuit board (as the name implies). The surface mount components come in rolls containing thousands or tens of thousands of parts. On the back of each component is a small amount of dry solder that temporarily holds the component to the circuit board.

The machines used to place the components onto the board consist of a number of robotic arms that pick up an electronic component and rapidly place it onto the surface of the circuit board. They have a number of these machines, with the newest machines being able to pick up 16 pieces at a time before reloading. Because of the number of components in a typical amplifier (and the limit on the number of components each machine can place) a circuit board will generally pass through several machines to get all the surface mounted components mounted.

The next step is passing the circuit board through a computer controlled oven (it slowly heats up the circuit board to melt the solder that is on the back of each component) to attach the surface mounted components and once they are attached slowly brings there temperature back down again to prevent causing any kind of thermal shock to the components by rapidly heating them up and then cooling them off.

After these components are mounted and baked onto the circuit board, the partially finished boards are taken to another area of the building where they have employees �stuff� the boards with all the electronic components that are too big or complicated to mount to the circuit board by robotics. This includes most of the bigger pieces inside of an amplifier including capacitors, transistors, power and speaker terminals. I have had a chance to see a number of amplifier manufacturing facilities and Rockford has taken steps to make sure that they make a great amp on the first try.

Once the circuit board is completed, it is attached to a template and run through a wave solder machine. The components that are mounted to the circuit board by hand require soldering to get them attached to the circuit board. This machine has a conveyor belt that passes the finished circuit board over a pool of molten solder. As the circuit board passes over the molten solder, the components suck up enough solder to attach the components to the circuit board. Very simple, incredibly quick compared to the old way of doing things and it virtually guarantees having great solder joints every time (which is critical component in making reliable products).

After the circuit board emerges from the wave solder machine, the amplifier is almost done. All that is left is to mount the circuit board on the raw heatsink, test the amplifier, finish assembly and then wrap it up for shipment to the end user.

The next step is mounting the heatsink to the amplifier. They use a pneumatic screwdriver. Each screw that is placed in an amplifier is mounted with the right amount of torque to make sure the amplifier�s screws don�t loosen with time and at the same time it doesn�t cause any sort of damage from over tightening. The process is very repetitive so to prevent injuries they put the screwdrivers on a retracting cord so that the technician isn�t holding the full weight of the screwdriver all day.

Every amplifier is tested to make sure that it works and exceeds rated spec (all of the Rockford Fosgate amplifiers that they are currently making will make more power than they are rated for, some twice as much if not more). The first step is to mount it to a testing jig (this allows the technician to quickly attach the speaker and power leads without having to actually loosen and tighten all the screws, and instead clamps onto these leads from the top down). Only once the amplifier has passed a battery of tests (including running the amp at full power) will the testing station print out the birth certificate that all amplifiers come with. This birth certificate tells you who inspected the amplifier, when it was made, and how much power it made. As soon as they finish testing the amplifier and it passes, they finish assembling it by putting on the cover plates.

Once they finish adding the components, they place the amplifier in a shrink wrap bag, place it in an oven to shrink the wrapping and then box it up. They attach the label that prints out at the time that the amplifier passes with power output, serial number and model number and attach it to the finished box. From here it goes directly to their warehouse, before it ends up in some lucky person�s trunk.

Here is a look at a Power T15004 being assembled (the same process pretty much applies for all the amplifiers made at this Rockford plant). This is the flagship 4 channel amplifier of the line, measuring almost three feet across. Why would someone buy an amp like this? Because they can!

A Punch 75 25 to Life amplifier in various stages of assembly and testing. The original Punch 45, Punch 75 and Punch 150 were originally released in 1980 and were one of the most popular amplifiers of all time, with a number of them being used to win world championships at all levels in the car audio competition arena. In 2005, to mark the 25th anniversary, Rockford released a limited edition anniversary edition commemorating the originals.