7
Introduction
A little history
Like most of us with a passion for radio, Frank Foti started young. He was six years old when he first
dismantled and successfully reassembled his AM/FM radio. (His father is a little vague about how
many radios he took apart
before
he figured out how to put them back together.) By the time he was a
teenager, Frank was building Heathkits in his basement and, as a high school senior, designed and
built his own stereo system. After his high school graduation, Frank received a full scholarship to a
Cleveland, Ohio broadcasting school and earned his FCC First Class Radio Operator’s license in
1974.
His first job was with WELW, a small AM station located in Willoughby, Ohio. He was not only the
engineer, but also wore the hats of production director, morning disc jockey, play-by-play announcer,
and music director. When the grass needed cutting, he did that too! Honestly !!
In 1978, after answering a blind ad in
Broadcasting
, Frank was hired as Assistant Engineer at Malrite
Communications’ WHK/WMMS in Cleveland. This was more than just a better position at a bigger
station. For a rock & roll junkie like Frank, working at legendary album rock station WMMS was a
dream come true. When his boss was fired, Frank was promoted to Chief Engineer of the combo.
Frank did more than hone his engineering skills during the three years he spent at WHK/WMMS. He
began to explore processing, the art and science of enhancing audio and tailoring sound to fit
programming needs. It was here in Cleveland that Frank first tinkered with various processing
theories and “hot rodding” existing audio components.
In 1981, Malrite shipped Frank west to be Chief Engineer at country formatted KNEW/KSAN in San
Francisco.
But the “city by the bay” was not his only assignment. Frank was flown to several stations
in the group to work on their processing chains. He gained experience in a wide variety of formats
and every station he visited experienced a ratings increase due in part to Frank’s processing.
In July of 1983, Frank was assigned to New York to be Chief at Malrite’s just purchased WHTZ-FM
(Z-100). Frank, along with a team that included programming wizard Scott Shannon, had the
responsibility of pulling the lowest rated station in the market out of the basement.
When Z-100 went on the air one month later, it skyrocketed from worst to first in just 74 days! Z-
100’s rise to the top was due to three factors: the format, the promotion, and the sound. Frank
combined several off-the-shelf processing products with some of his own inventions to create a larger
than life sound. (Frank borrows the word of Roger Daltry of
The Who
to describe the sound as
“getting punched in the nose and having somebody say I love you.”)
In 1985, Frank started to sell his first product to other engineers. The
Vigilante
multi-band limiter
