Specifications

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.
D) Beam Tone: What a concept! Adding bass
and treble to a sound in space! As can be seen
in the screen shot below left, 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 ‘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.
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.
“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.”
Patrick Hart
WWW.AUDIOHOLICS.COM
8
review