Yamaha YSP-1 Setup Part 3
Here's a trick that worked for me: If, for instance, you are listening to pink noise from the right side, you can plug your left ear and vice versa. With so much wide band noise bouncing off so many surfaces the finger-in-the-ear trick seems to help your brain localize the proper pink noise direction a bit better.
The "c) Distance" parameter is a measurement of the distance the sound beam travels from the YSP-1 to the wall, bounces, and back to the center of the listening position. I found getting these dimensions pretty accurate seemed to give a better surround effect at the listening position.
The "d) Focal Length" setting: Yamaha's manual recommends a Center = -1.5 feet to give a similar frequency response across the listening positions. This recommendation worked well so I left the Center setting there. Focal Length Right and Focal Length Left seemed to be a different story. Focal length appears to attempt to focus the beam's width more widely (and less powerfully) with short distances and more narrowly (more acoustically powerful) when distances are increased.
Again reasoning that we're dealing here with real world limitations as to how much a sound beam can actually be "focused" and how far it can therefore be thrown, I found it made little difference whether I set the Focal Length at the distance to the room's wall or out to the maximum YSP-1 menu parameter (which is at 80 feet). So I set this distance parameter at 45 feet and left it there. I suspect, however, that when I move the system to a smaller rectangular room with against-the-wall as opposed to corner placement there may more audible benefits to fine tuning this distance.
Dr. Hooley adds:
Actually, we use the Focal Length to determine, for positive focal lengths, the distance from the YSP-1 where the beam most tightly converges . There are two considerations:
1) If the required outgoing beam direction takes the beam close to the listeners on the way out, it's often helpful to minimize the beamwidth at the listener distance (i.e. set Focal Length to ~distance of listeners from YSP-1 in the direction of the outgoing beam), as this minimizes "cross-talk" - i.e. hearing the direct beam rather than the reflected beam.
2) Where crosstalk as in 1) is not such an issue, one can often pull-in (reduce) Focal Length to perhaps 2m or 1m so that beyond this close-in focal "point" the beam thereafter spreads out again, so that by the time it has reached the wall and bounced back to the listeners it is coming from a large area of wall - which of course just adds to the spatial / diffuse surround quality achievable with DSP, which cannot be attained with single-box surround speakers.
D) Beam Tone: What a concept! Adding bass and treble to a sound in space! As can be seen in the attached screen shots, each of the five channels in the 3 Beam Mode have treble and bass boost or cut capability. When I initially listened to the system in Easy Set-up Mode these tones were factory set at flat.
In the initial boulder-chasing-Indiana Jones scene from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" the boulder has its very low frequency rumble coming from the subwoofers. But there is also upper bass and low midrange frequency content of the boulder's sound against the two tree-rails it's riding on as it chases Indy from behind. With the Beam Tones set flat for all channels the boulder sounds as if it were made of steel and it is sliding and skidding on steel rails. Once +5dB of boost was added to the front left and front right channels the boulder once again sounded like a true rock riding on round tree rails. In short, the effect of adding bass in the Beam Tone menu does work.
Lastly we come to the "e) Image Location" screen and the three User memories. The YSP-1's Owner's Manual has this to say about Image Location. "Use this feature to redirect audio signals if the sound coming from the left and right speakers seems unnatural, such as when your listening position is not the center of your listening room". Fair enough. My listening position is in the center of the listening room so the Left and Right outer speaker positions were left at zero %. (Zero in this case is supposedly for maximum front left and right sound spread, away from the actual locations of the left and right speaker clusters on the YSP-1. As you go up in % you ostensibly move the left and right speakers closer to their true positions, on the actual face of the YSP-1.)
We're at the end of the program. To freeze all these settings pick one of the three available user presets and hit 舖 Enter.' I found that once I had the system performing well, I could navigate through the menu quickly. It was easy to go in, change one parameter in the whole menu, and put this new parameter template into another User memory. It was then simple to A-B the results while watching favorite movie scenes. And rather than being the cumbersome chore this menu at first seemed, it became fun after the first week or so to continually make minor changes to see how the sound of a favorite scene would be changed.
