We sometimes hear people say Yamaha Pro Audio doesn’t have a symbolic figure who characterises the company the way Bill Gates or Steve Jobs does to theirs. Well, this is probably true. We certainly had no industry legends in our history of 30 years. Nevertheless, Yamaha brought quite a few monumental products into the market such as PM1000, REV1, SPX90, NS10M, and 02R, and we are very proud of the contribution these products made to the industry’s progress.
We believe a legendary character is not always necessary to make a legendary creation, and that what it takes to beget a good product is the team work of convinced and devoted engineers. Our engineers love audio and work hard every moment to materialise their dream products. They are the driving force that made Yamaha Pro Audio what it is today. We have no Bill Gates, but every engineer of ours is an indispensable part of the spirit of Yamaha Pro Audio. Here you see some of them spill their enthusiasm for their jobs and their babies.
In December of 2006, Yamaha introduced the new Tn series amplifiers. Consisting of three models varying in output power, the flagship series gives you everything you would want from a touring amplifier; True two ohm operation capability with enough power to drive large-scale concerts, exceptional sound quality and reliability you would expect from a Yamaha amplifier, and remote monitor/control features. To give you an insight of the development process of the Tn series and to give you a better idea of what the amplifiers have to offer, Yamaha’s own Tim Harrison interviewed the Tn Development team at Yamaha Corporation headquarters in Hamamatsu, Japan.
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.
Launched in June 2005, the Installation Series speaker range is Yamaha’s first loudspeaker range dedicated to the needs of commercial audio installations. It follows in the footsteps of many loudspeaker innovations Yamaha have made in other areas such as hi-fi, studio monitors and musician’s speakers.
PM1D was the first of Yamaha’s large format digital mixers strictly aimed at live mixing and it has become an outstanding success. Success, that is, as a tool for sound engineers, as an investment for the owners, and as a pioneer of digital technology in live audio. Since its launch in 2000 there have been over 700 systems sold (as of March 2006), and because its combination of quality, features and ease-of-operation are still unmatched by any competitor, it continues to sell.
Launched in September 2005, M7CL is Yamaha’s 3rd digital mixing console designed for live sound and follows in the footsteps of the successful PM1D and PM5D.
Yamaha is not dedicated exclusively to the power amp business, but it doesn’t mean Yamaha is no power amp specialist. We have a history of more than 30 years of power amp development and manufacturing and some of our engineers are thinking of nothing but power amps, awake or asleep, rain or shine.
Please listen to some of the engineers involved in the new PC01N series and feel the hard work and professionalism they apply to their jobs.
Needless to say, digitization and networking are the most important trends in the installed sound industry and the DME64N and DME24N are designed to be the central core of such sophisticated systems. Although they look like nothing more than plain black boxes, these products are fruits of the latest digital audio technology and the labor of Yamaha’s best audio engineers. It took them a few years to bring these products from the planning stage to completion. Let’s listen to key members of the engineering team for their passions and thoughts behind these products.
The ADD-ON EFFECTS are plug-in effect programs for Yamaha digital mixing consoles DM2000V2, DM1000V2, 02R96V2, 01V96V2, and PM5D. Several of the programs employ the innovative VCM (Virtual Circuitry Modeling) technology, which involves a technique to model the analogue circuitry on a component level and faithfully reproduce even the saturated sound of analogue recording in the digital domain. This technology was developed by one of Yamaha’s most progressive engineering groups called K’s LAB. K’s LAB was formed in 1987 to create a new tone generator technology and six years later came out with the world first synthesizers to utilize physical modeling, the VL1 and VP1. We interviewed Toshifumi Kunimoto, head of the group.
