Yamaha Sound Projector

What is a projector? It takes a light source, passes it through an image (celluloid film or LCD filter) and beams on the wall in front of us. The wall reflects the image and the reflected light comes into our eyes. Very simple idea, nobody even wanders how this stuff works these days, as projectors have been with us since the Lumière times. But what about sound? Can we project sound and bounce it off the walls? Sure... every loudspeaker does that. But there is a distance between a loudspeaker and a sound projector... similar to the difference between a light bulb and an image projector. To project an image, we need to seer the light very precisely. Dim some areas, tint some other...

To project sound we have been using multi - speaker setups, commonly referred to as home cinema. It takes two speakers to recreate a flat musical scene, it takes a few more, to create a surround scene and have some sounds come from the places in front of us, and some other sounds coming from behind. Basically with four speakers placed on a square plane we should theoretically be able to recreate the full surround sound stage. In practice it takes a few more to make the setup really good - usually a center speaker for dialogs and a subwoofer to pump the low frequencies. The downside of a setup like that is a room full of twisted cables, as every speaker needs to be connected to the sound source and an amplifier. Of course there are some wireless audio transmission systems (most of them proprietary), to allow us get rid of the cables around the room. But then each speaker needs to be independently powered, so in fact we swap amplifier cables for power cables. Not good at all (yes, I hate cables :) ).

A while ago Yamaha came out with a working product, named YSP (for Yamaha Sound Projector). You can say the YSP took the Texas Instruments' DLP concept used for years to power special class of image projectors and applied it to sound. DLP engine consists of many micromirrors, where essentially each mirror is a precisely controlled light source composing an image. In YSP there are "just" 42 individually controlled speakers in one box, but the concept stays the same. The intelligent DSP (Digital Signal Processing) engine inside controlls individually each speaker to precisely focus sound, after the system learns its surroundings (the walls, room size etc - fully automatically by using a "setup microphone".

The amazing thing is this really works. My room is not perfect square, but the YSP delivers true surround, precise sound scene, all from just one box, without any unnecessary cables - just one power cable and a fiber optic connection to the sound source (you can use standard copper as well). The YSP belongs to the product's category I really admire - things that solve old problems new and elegant way. In a few years every TV set should have a system like that built-in.