Specifications

Projecting surround channels
acoustically
The design premise of Yamaha's Digital
Sound Projector is contained in an in-house,
training-oriented "white paper" of sorts entitled
"The Goals of a High-Quality Sound Field
Creation (System)." This title hints at the
inherent 180º difference between the YSP-1
Digital Soundfield Projector we're reviewing
here vs.1986's Yamaha DSP-1 Digital
Soundfield Processor which, to this author's
way of thinking, was a digital sound field re-
creation device.
The Yamaha DSP-1, Stereo Review's
Product of the Year for 1986, had algorithms
built-in which were said to recreate the sound of
famous concert halls, jazz clubs and stadiums
from around the world. That product, launched
when the only home theater format in existence
was three-channel Dolby Surround, required a
minimum of four amplifier channels and four
loudspeakers plus a subwoofer to make the full
system really blast off. And at the time,
Top
Gun,
played thousands of times in dealer
showrooms nationwide, introduced well-healed
audiophile/movie aficionados to the joys of a
movement which became known as Home
Theater.
As spectacular as Top Gun was back then it
required at least a couple thousand dollars in
auxiliary equipment (extra boxes) to reach the
system's full surround potential. Let's now
come back to the present and take a look at the
lofty product goals set for Yamaha's single-box
sound field creation machine (as paraphrased
from the Japanese-to-English translation):
Natural, Speaker-less Surround
"What makes a playback sound field
artificial is the presence of speakers."
Agreed. From the beginning of home theater,
the goal of the surround speakers has always
been to generate a sense of immersion or
envelopment of making the surround speakers
seemingly disappear. But before THX's
doctrine of sound "immersion" was widely
marketed, and with little understanding of
surround's psychoacoustic implications, one-
brand stereo systems began to be sold with
two, small-box, single-driver surround
speakers.
Power to these rear channels was usually
from a low power "chip-amp" which at most
would put out 20 watts at 10% THD. Driving
low sensitivity, inexpensive "full-range" surround
speakers, the end result would typically be a
huge sound quality unbalance between clean,
truly full-range front channels and an annoying,
tinny "surround sound" signal emanating from
behind the listener.
The sound of the Yamaha 's YSP-1 is light
years ahead of that first generation of product.
First off, all of the channels have a more
natural, out-of-the-speaker-box sound. This is
particularly apparent on center-channel dialog in
which voices on a good recording are imbued
with their natural timbre.
This clarity of vocal articulation is fairly
startling to hear for the first time. When you're
used to hearing the slight side-to-side
cancellation effect of a horizontal D'Appolito
center speaker, the YSP-1's natural sound is a
very welcome change.
Seamless, Virtual Speakers
"The key is the size of an audio image. In the
past it was said that a point source was the ideal
for a sound source. That was correct for stereo
but what about surround sound? The YSP-1 has
been designed with the intent of paying more
attention to the connectivity or extensity of a
sound field than to the presence or localization
of the sound image"
(Extensity: In psychology,
the quality of sensation which permits the
perception of space or size.)
Extensity is an accurate description of the
spatial envelope this Digital Sound Projector
can portray. One gets the very new and
somewhat eerie sense of the space within the
room being defined by a movie's surround
content. To illustrate; without the oft-times
intrusive consciousness of in-wall speakers
installed in the corner behind me and to my
sides I can now sense the "sound bubble" of a
particular movie from the prospective of the
bigness or smallness of the effect itself. In other
words, I think I'm hearing what the director and
sound editor
may have intended when he mixed
in-studio from his fixed-position surround
speakers.
It is this effect, this ability of the sound field
to expand and contract depending on program
content that is most difficult for my auditory
memory to wrap around and get a firm grasp of.
Many of us, after all, have been listening to
surround from known, fixed speaker locations
for almost a generation.
Putting aside the tremendous strides in direct
surround vs. matrix, plus the ever increasing
level of sound quality, one constant with
surround speakers has always been that we
know where our surround speakers are. We
know how we expect them to "sound", no
matter how wonderfully immersive and diffuse.
And we expect that sound to come from the
general direction of the rear and side wall
perimeters.
It is this single aspect, this “floating-in-space”
effect which helps to define the new sound of
Yamaha's Digital Sound Projector. Before we
were 2D surround, trying to make the case for
that last dimension with wall mounted speakers.
With the YSP-1, the surround sensation always
exists in a 3D space and the "willing suspension
of disbelief", as THX calls it, becomes easier to
achieve.
Sound Creation with Extensity
Now that we have surround images floating
in space, another apparent benefit becomes
more obvious - that of the three-dimensional
size of the floating image. It is here that my
mind tells me this surround sound field is being
portrayed unlike any I've heard from a point
source, mono-polar surround speaker.
Depending on the frequency content of the
image, say, above 1 kHz, the projected image
can have a greater sense of width and depth
than is usually possible with wall-mounted
surrounds. Conversely with the YSP-1, lower
pitched sounds or effects, above the
subwoofer's omni-directional frequencies can
sound truncated or recessed.
In making that last statement though I would
say it takes a trained ear, along with a good
audio memory of what a particular moment in a
film sounded like over a conventional surround
system, to realize what may be missing in the
sound reconstruction as projected by the YSP-
1. And again, the honest-to-goodness 3D
dimensionality of the surround soundstage
greatly overwhelms the ear/brain's ability to
determine the frequency envelope of an effect
to your side or from behind.
Design and Construction
Yamaha designers are acutely aware of the
import a category-defining product such as the
YSP-1 can have. Not only with first adopters
but also with the second and third generation
design variants which are sure to follow. GK
Design has been closely aligned with the
Yamaha family for decades. For all this time GK
and Yamaha have shared the same basic
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