Yamaha YSP-1 Setup Part 2

   

To the right, my living room is 25.5 feet long. To the left, toward the front door, it measures 21 feet. The loveseat, whose top cushions are just visible looking over the YSP-1, is 8 feet out and 15º down. In this corner placement there are only two beam modes available, Stereo and 3 Beam Mode. Be sure to press the 3 Beam Mode button first. Then, starting with the "a) Subwoofer Set" screen here's how to set up the YSP-1...

   

In this author's opinion, the YSP-1 must have a subwoofer added to consider it a true home theater system. For my tests I used two high power subwoofers from my standard home theater rig. For "Bass Out" the choices are SWFR, FRONT or BOTH. I chose SWFR and tried the 3 available frequencies, 80Hz, 100Hz and 120Hz. The 100Hz frequency seemed to give the subwoofer-to-YSP-1 the most open, unstrained sound.

Next, when the "b) Speaker Level" screen is selected, the YSP-1's pink noise is heard. And it is here that the first bit of screen confusion comes in. When the arrow is on "FR" the pink noise alternates between right and left. These channel levels are tied to each other. So when you think you are setting FR you're actually setting FR and FL. There is one bar for both.

When you set the arrow to Center you get pick noise which alternates between FL and C. On the YSP-1 this screen is done correctly and syncs up with the sound heard. I used my Radio Shack SPL meter (C-weighting, slow) to set the levels when listening at 75dB SPL.

   

On the next screen of this sequence, with the arrow pointing to SL you'll see *OUT: FL > SL. What actually happens is that the pink noise alternates between C and SL, center and surround left. Once you get that figured out (by letting your ears tell you what you're hearing) you can set your levels accordingly. I set my levels with SL about 3dB higher than C because my listening position was much closer to the YSP-1 and I reasoned that SL or SR signals would have to travel much further in my room, bounce, and come back to the listening position. As it turned out, that decision worked well.

The final screen of the sequence shown above on the right adjusts the two rear surround levels to each other. This one's easy. Again just use the Radio Shack SPL meter and set SR to the same level as SL.

The subwoofer level was one that I had to go back and tweak a couple of times. This is because you basically don't have any other signal with which to compare and balance your sub(s). And because the sub's sound, properly done, is omni-directional you'll need to actually hear how your 3 Beam Mode's left, center and right channels articulate and form "sound in space". Only the center channel is actually localizable to the YSP-1. You'll have to get accustomed to this 3D effect before you'll have a handle on setting the sub level properly.

Dynamic range. Parents take note! If this system is for some very lucky Sponge Bob fanatics you might want to consider setting the dynamic range to MIN or STD instead of the MAX which floated my boat in my main listening area. I 舖 m betting that 99% of readers intend to keep the Dynamic Range at Max so let's continue with the set-up...

The YSP-1's mute level is configurable in several ways depending upon your needs. I set my mute level to -20dB because my TV mute goes to completely off. This way I keep using the YSP-1's sound most of the time. The "e) Tone Control" screen I completely missed the first couple of times through the menu because it's on another page all by itself. At first I was going to recommend that this overall system tone control be somehow moved forward to another screen. That is, until I learned that, through a sequence of button pushes I could access this single screen via the YSP-1's blue display window (no onscreen display required) and thus make overall sound system balance decisions while a movie was playing. One you get the hang of how to do this on-the-fly sound- tweak you'll use it often for differently balanced movies.

Reasoning that YSP-1's tiny drivers might work better if the sound were bounced off a close surface rather than one further away I measured 14.5' at a 55º-60º angle from the YSP-1 to the 8" wide column you see in the left-most room photo. (The half-open shade is in front of the column and an antique lamp hangs out from it.)

On the left side there was no surface nearer than the front door (with coat rack seen in the right-most room photo) so I set the left room distance (under "Parameters") at 21' (the entire width of the room) and the "b) Beam Adj" sub-menu "a) Horiz. Angle" to 65º. That 65º is the angle I estimated from the YSP-1 center zero position, looking out, toward the vicinity of the door. What you're trying to accomplish here is figure the angle at which the YSP-1's beamed sound will go out, hit a hard surface and bounce back to the listening area. As I discovered, the initial guesstimate is good for getting you in the ballpark. And that's all you are really trying to accomplish at this point. Once you go through the menu a second time, with the pink noise on, you'll find that you can hear the pink noise volume increase at your listening position. Keep your first settings wherever you first hear the volume increase. Once you're within ±15º or so you won't hear too much of a change.