Yamaha YSP-1 Listening Impressions

My open floor plan living room with corner placement is the space I used for most of my testing. The corner placement condition is the one which my comments have alluded to up to this point, so let's talk about the YSP-1's performance in this most sonically challenging situation...

After studying conceptual top-views of the different beam modes I concluded that my more open floor plan, with corner placement, was quite a bit larger than the largest room-choice given in the YSP-1's Easy Set-up menu. It seemed apparent that I'd be asking the YSP-1 to strut its stuff in an almost worse-case scenario.

By inputting and re-tweaking different Manual program settings for a couple of days I felt I had reached a point where I was getting close to the maximum performance out of Yamaha's Digital Sound Projector in my particular environment. So, what better way to wring out Yamaha's magic box than by renting the newly-released DTS 6.1 Special Edition version of 1986's Top Gun?

Using the 3 Beam Mode with my dual subs (one front, one rear) I set the YSP-1 level to -14dB as Top Gun's opening sequence with its tension-filled, slowly building musical score began to define, then expand the surround environment within my listening space.

I would describe the sound envelope of the YSP-1, operating from a corner into such a large space as a puffed-up trapezoid. This tall trapezoid runs front-to-back with the top, shorter base placed slightly behind the YSP-1 and bottom, longer base spread out quite a bit more way behind the listening area. This bloated trapezoid listening bubble might, with sources like Top Gun S.E. begin to approach a circle in a smaller listening space. For the most part though, the boundaries of the YSP-1's trapezoidal acoustic bubble handily trumped, in true 3-D spaciousness and realism, the "ideal" circle-of-surround-sound usually defined by actual surround speakers.

Listening to Top Gun's slowly building musical theme wherein new and more complex elements are added to Harold Faltermeyer's score every few bars, the adrenaline build-up from Yamaha's Digital Sound Projector splays sound out further and wider into the room as the SPL levels build naturally along with the score. When, at the music's crescendo, the F-14 jet hits full afterburner's on the carrier deck you feel the jet's explosive thrust slam you as the music transitions to the expansive, gut-thumping rhythm of "Danger Zone".

This scene was equally as exhilarating for my significant other who is usually screaming "Turn that down!" way before this point. That my fiancée could immediately enjoy such a scene, for the first time ever, is a tribute to the enhanced, palpable realism of the YSP-1's immersive and believable 3D soundstage.

Another reference-quality disc, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, was next in the rotation. This disc, like most music-centric DVDs, does not appear to have had its upper mid and treble frequency spectrum attenuated when the transfer was made to DVD. Cue up Chapter 5, the Joan Osborne rendition of Martha and the Vandellas' hit "Heat Wave" and you'll hear what I am describing.

With full orchestration by the Funk Brothers, the YSP-1 spews forth a soundstage which, though not as wide as would be the case if left-center-right speakers where at -30º, 0º and +30º angles, is far more realistic, exciting and convincing because of the YSP-1's 3D spatial capabilities. Close-up's of Joan's front-and-center vocal, do not command an expansive soundstage. Yet the realism of her voice is like all vocals I heard with Yamaha's magic box. It is clear, natural, open and nuanced. Her voice appears not to come from the speaker, but instead it is out-of-the-box real.

This particular cut does, however, begin to point out one of the trade-offs that evidently has been made with the Digital Sound Projector. The frequencies the YSP-1's small drivers are most capable of throwing furthest would appear to be in the 3-6 kHz range. It is this same relative frequency range that famous theater speakers like Altec Lansing's A7 500 "Voice of the Theater" used in the '40s and '50s to generate enough sound power levels out to the audience.

Back in that time, movie theater interiors were often entirely surrounded by heavy drapes. The natural bump in the 3-10 kHz frequency range of Altec's horn mid-tweeter was the solution for achieving flat sounding frequency response for most theater goers. Today's home theater is a different application. Nevertheless, this Yamaha's beam-throwing, frequency response curve is complementary to most DVDs. So the design of the YSP-1's response curve appears to have been carefully tailored for the most realistic surround effect that can be thrown furthest.

Turn to Disc Two from the Standing in the of Motown disc and listen to three jam sessions by some of the world's best musicians. These cuts sound like what you would experience if you carried the microphone around the room while next to the camera man. The ambience of this famous recording studio is stitched into the space of your listening room by the YSP-1. You hear the juxtaposition of the different musicians, the reverberations from those hallowed Motown walls. You hear it all! I'm talking about being immersed in the musical exhilaration of an event which only a lucky few ever experience. The YSP-1's three dimensional portrayal of this musical event is simply phenomenal.

Again though, when the camera moves to the Funk Brother's tambourine man, the front-and-center energy of his instrument so highlights the 3-6 kHz frequency region that the overall sound becomes grating and loses delineation. This segment is one of the many reasons why Standing in the Shadows of Motown " is such a great reference disc. This scene in particular is torture in the extreme for even very high-end tweeters. It is infinitely harder for the YSP-1's much fuller range drivers to be expected to handle.

For the two movie examples just described, the average SPL levels, measured at the listening position (8 feet away), ranged between 95-98dB using the Radio Shack meter. At these very loud levels the YSP-1 remained very clean and unstrained sounding except on the most over-the-top interjections of sound such as when the F14's afterburners kicked in. At this instant it did appear that the YSP-1 went into hard clipping. But I must emphasize that this was the only instance when I could actually say yes, the unit is clipping.

For the rest of my listening it seemed as if the YSP-1 was playing impossibly loud and cleanly when producing its prodigious SPL output. So I would conclude that some very clever soft-clipping circuitry has been designed into these 10-channel digital chips. Better than I've yet heard from any moderate power digital amps up to this time.

1 Ltd's Design Engineer adds:
One of the subtle but very powerful advantages of generating all of the 5-channel sound from the same set of loudspeakers and amplifiers is that there is inherent dynamic power sharing; so that when one channel is quieter it leaves all its unused headroom available for use by the other channels. Thus, the continuous max power available on any one channel is the same as the continuous max power available on all channels simultaneously.

Okay, any other nits? Yes, a couple:

The Yamaha YSP-1, in order to sound its best, must have a least one subwoofer to supply the required low frequency balance if you want to crank this puppy hard. In my set-up I was using a 650-watt, sealed 10" and an 850-watt sealed 12". Both subs had been equalized in my listening space to within ±2dB from 20Hz to 100Hz. It was only with this monstrous bass accompaniment that I was able push the YSP-1 hard enough SPL-wise to induce audible clipping .

Second, in my open floor plan living room with corner placement, the YSP-1 cannot synthesize a fully round "sound bubble" like an actual set of -90º and +90º dipoles or bipoles can. This is almost an impossibility given that the sound-beam-throwing phenomena exploited by the YSP-1 depends on the ear-brain being able to triangulate a point of sound using the sound source and both ears . Once one ear is blocked by one's head, such as would be the case for a sound at ±90º from the 0º listening position the "full-round-surround" effect is much more difficult to synthesize.

The upshot of the preceding paragraph is that for the YSP-1's power and small driver size, sound "beams" can only be made so narrow and therefore project only a specific distance with a limited amount of power before the beam spreads out and loses both power and focus. The YSP-1 does, therefore, have the potential to perform even better in a smaller, rectangular room, mounted not in the corner but against one of the wall surfaces. I plan to follow up this first review with a further thoughts piece when I move the YSP-1 into my smaller, almost square home office. Stay tuned...