Yamaha LS9 Engineers Interview

Yamaha's latest digital mixing console designed for live sound applications, the LS9 was launched in September 2006. It doesn't replace any existing Yamaha product but starts a new category of super-compact, high value for money digital mixers dedicated to the rigours of the live mixing environment. LS9 has a lot in common with Yamaha's other live mixers; four band parametric EQ sections, on-board gates, compressors and SPX 2000 quality effects, and it has graphic EQs, scene memories and a really flexible bus structure with plenty of mixes and matrices. But LS9 offers all this at a greatly reduced cost.

Who are the people in Yamaha responsible for achieving this breakthrough price point?
When you think about the cost savings that have been achieved its natural to assume this is an accounts solution to mixer design, but amazingly LS9 is another product of the digital mixer engineering team that brought us M7CL and PM5D. If that decision to make a lower priced product had come from accountants the story might have been very different; it's not difficult to imagine an alternative route to a cheap digital mixer; low quality, non-recallable preamps, cheap non-standard effects package, fixed I/O configuration without the MY Card options, less output buses and no matrix, adapted generic computer operating system and parts, cheaper faders, monochrome screen, no Studio Manager software and no innovation whatsoever! Do all this, and of course save huge amounts by getting it built outside of Japan away from the obsession with quality and reliability and into the quantity and cost saving environment.

The design team for this new mixer is based at Yamaha headquarters in Hammamatsu, Japan. With the help of Taku Nishikori translating I interviewed them to find out how and why this new mixer came to be...

Tree; Yamaha has the widest portfolio of digital mixers; why do we need another one!

Mick; Live audio digital mixing desks like PM1D, PM5D and M7CL are very popular for mid and upper levels and they have brought some great benefits both in terms of audio quality and commercial advantage. We wanted to offer those advantages to the areas of the commercial audio industry that currently have neither the space nor the budget for top quality audio solutions. Some of our existing mixers like DM1000, O1V96 and M7CL have been used in this area, but there are issues of cost or feature set that make LS9 much better suited to many purposes. Yamaha is a company focused very much by engineering excellence and the idea that we could make a mixer at this new price point came from my colleagues in the engineering department. Perhaps a marketing led company would have just pushed the DM and O series mixers, but LS9 is specific to the live market in the way the other small mixers are not. LS9 offers the digital advantage to a new range of customers but it inherits the quality and easy-to-learn selected channel user interface that is common through all our digital mixers. We really feel LS9 is something new and that people will enjoy using it.

Tree; When did you first start thinking about LS9?

Mick; It was around Christmas time back in 2004 (I wished for a great idea!). We had followed a theme from flagship PM1D, past PM5D and down to the latest M7CL. None of us felt it had to stop there and so we came up with an even smaller system as our new target for digitization.
Back then there was no strong demand for small digital systems. However, we expected that everyone would appreciate improvements in size and weight factors, system setup time, feature sets, audio quality and efficiency of investment and we saw that our digital consoles were becoming the norm for larger shows. We concluded that it is surely worthwhile to provide the market with a 'real all-in-one' solution. Cost and engineering issues prevented such a mixer then, but we have a much greater experience now; the operating system is developed, the DSP hardware is available and the market is expecting and demanding it. In addition, we had learned on our research tours for M7CL that in most small installations you can't expect to have a dedicated full-time sound engineer. So we developed the benefits provided by total recall and the hierarchical user management (that allows you to manage the parameters to be locked out with password protection) features and incorporated them into LS9. So like M7CL, LS9 can be a fully assignable sophisticated tool for the experienced engineer or locked out to the level of a simple analogue mixer for others.

Tree; You were responsible for the LS9 preamp design how did achieve your cost saving target?

Shinji; The preamp is the analogue portion of the mixer and in fact it is dependent on good quality components and good quality design. I was dreading the demand to make a high quality preamp without the budget for good components. Fortunately the project is led by an engineer who understands this and not an accountant! We have learned, through 34 years of console manufacture that compromising either the sound quality or the intuitive user interface cannot lead a product to success. LS9 has a new design that draws on the experience I gained working on the PM1D and PM5D. I had to make many alterations as the project progressed, but we always provided the fundamentals: well-managed grounding, clean power source and carefully selected components. Finally we conducted extensive listening tests, made last minute tuning changes using the prototypes and we feel very proud of the audio result.

Tree; Without a touch screen you must have had to remove some popular features.

Kotaro; Not really; in fact we still use the well tried and tested selected channel model and this doesn't need the screen for many button presses, the screen is just to help indicate the settings of the encoders. LS9 still has the same channel features in terms of EQ and dynamics that our bigger mixers have. Touch screens are really helpful with set up menus but they are not useful tools for mixing with, for that we kept faders, encoders and hardware buttons. Access to some dynamics parameters can be slower without a touch screen, but still faster than the analogue route of turning around and looking through an external rack! Please check out my favourite new key: HOME. This takes you swiftly to the standard selected channel view from any other screen.

Tree; Why are there no DCAs?

Kotaro; LS9 is intended to be a very simple 'input-to-stereo' type of console; unlike the M7CL which is targeted to a DCA style of operation. VCAs are not common on consoles in this price range and so we don't think many users will expect DCAs on LS9, but the same could be said of a frequency conscious noise gate or many other advanced features. In fact it is a matter of fader space; DCAs really require a dedicated fader bank in addition to the inputs, and on LS9 we could only have a DCAs layer or an input layer showing. To get round this we introduced fader linking; it's like a DCA without a master fader. I recommend you try it, it does a good job of replacing DCAs and it's easier for people to understand.

Tree; What problems did you encounter in getting LS9 to be so small and light?

Endo; Well, the experience was actually terrible (laugh). The concept 'small and lightweight' was, in fact, a big and heavyweight challenge for us. Honestly I couldn't imagine a 32-fader mixing console in that size and weight when the team first met. It is never as simple as it appears, not just making the faders closer to each other! Generally a digital console is tough to design as it consists of very sensitive analog circuitry lying just next to very noisy digital circuitry. So we spent huge amount of time with 3D CAD to simulate / analyze the internal construction in order to properly place each component without interfering each other.

Izumi; Given the result of analysis, I put everything together to the first prototype. Although the analysis really worked out, there still was a certain gap between the computer calculations and the real world. I cannot remember how many times I had to check and modify the boards to fulfill the requirement! But at the end of the day, I finally achieved this cute small console. Who else can make a 32-fader (64 mixing capable!) mixing console which you don't need to bother anybody else to help you carry around?

Tree; Why did you put the USB recorder/playback device inside the LS9?

Hagi; Digital mixers have been successful at reducing the amount of gear at the mix position by having internal effects, GEQs and dynamics, but until now there was always the need to add a playback machine like CD or Minidisc. Now LS9 is a complete mix position! In fact, we have happened to think about integrating a CD-R drive or something like that with a console several years ago, but we chose to wait for the best convenient technology to become popular enough- yes, that's MP3. Needless to say, MP3 has become extremely popular now; everybody knows what it is about. This is very important in terms of 'ease of use' in true sense, as the users don't really need to struggle with what it is about / how it works. Now I can call the LS9 the real all-in-one solution.

Tree; Why can the recorder not record at CD quality?

Hagi: Originally we thought about other possibilities such as uncompressed recording rather than the MP3. I wanted to keep LS9 compact and affordable. I didn't think people really wanted to pay extra for this feature and have it lead to handling the uncompressed audio files of over 1GB made from every show? MP3 is a perfect partner for LS9; it's compact and affordable too! MP3 saves memory capacity very effectively, and it's one of the most suitable formats for webcasting. So with this product, we chose a good balance between the practical advantage and the cost.
On top of that we have realized that the bit rate is not all about quality. Have you ever used a MP3 recorder/player equipped with professional-quality preamps and built-in compressor/effect/GEQ? Yeah, you'll see...

Tree; Are there any other new innovations for LS9?

Mick; LS9 was developed utilizing all the available internal knowledge matured through our long term experience manufacturing digital consoles such as PM5D / M7CL. We couldn't have made this console without developing them. The breakthroughs in terms of technology are rather mundane, but the many minor innovations in the engineering result in less internal cabling and consequent improvements in reliability, assembly time and costs. We also introduced a new Yamaha chip on the Ethernet port which gives faster communication and also has auto MDiX so you can use either a straight or cross cable for Studio Manager connection. The engineering team has done minor miracles to make the LS9 so small, so affordable and yet retain our values of quality and reliability.
By the way, there are various new 'possibilities' implemented in the LS9. Just for example, it has another set of input 'channels' buried in the second layer. This is, in fact, not just for expanding the number of channels; if you patch all the preamp inputs to the second layer as well as to the first layer, you can use it for creating another mix for recording. You could also use this concept as for having the FOH mix and the monitor mix from a single console. This kind of unstated usefulness is really the thing we have achieved through the experiences.

Tree; What are you working on now LS9 is finished?

Mick; Needless to say, we are always working to provide something new and valuable for our customers. I am proud to be working on DSP5D which will provide expansion possibilities to all our existing PM5D users and I think in the future we will concentrate on more integrated products that provide the 'the true all-in-one system' as we have with LS9. Yamaha is the only manufacturer who can provide high quality mixing consoles as well as DSP processors, amplifiers and even loudspeakers. From now on, rather than releasing bits and pieces which don't really collaborate to work together, I will strongly concentrate for providing the market with valuable, organically related 'system solutions'. Well, systems just like our design team…

Written by: Tree Tordoff from Yamaha CA Support Centre Europe.
Tree joined Yamaha in 2005 as a product specialist for digital consoles after a long career as a freelance sound engineer and pioneer user of PM1D.