Yamaha DSP-AX2 AV amplifier
DSP is a great power in multi-channel sound of home cinema: it is able to form a frequency response of any shape, add strictly dosed reverberation or time delay, mix existing channels, synthesize new ones in any proportions and so on.
Yamaha itself writes algorithms for Digital Sound Processing, produces processor chips and, finally, make AV-processors, one of which is the newest model DSP-AX2. In addition to processing blocks it has the modules of output amplifiers in a quantity that allows realizing multi-channel formats of sound up to 7.1. Such device is commonly called a receiver, but exactly wide use of DSP algorithms distinguishes it from a traditional device of this class. The processor Yamaha DSP-AX2 is designed in the spirit of the Cinema DSP ideology, embodied with a help of its own achievements, particularly new 32-bit chips - YSS-928 - with floating point and digital-to-analog Burr-Brown converters 24/96 in main channels.
Cinema DSP is designed to efface the boundary between "cinema" and "home cinema" in the part of surround sound. Because speaker systems in cinema, packed by modern digital formats, really surrounds an audience on all sides and cinema hall is ten times bigger a living-room. That's why a producer's idea isn't always brought to an owner of home cinema to full degree. DSP generates sound fields, creating the effect of a continuous sound space. There are three such fields for 5.1 format: frontal (frontal and central channels), left (left front and rear) and right (front and rear) - Tri-Field Cinema DSR. At the availability of rear channel a back field - Quad-Field Cinema DSR is added in Dolby Digital 6.1.
In 1986 Yamaha finished serious acoustic researches of the famous cinema and concert halls of the world with a help of quadruple measuring microphone. Now these priceless data became available to every owner of DSP-AX2, in a memory bank of which 49 configurations of Surround field and 14 ones of Stereo are saved. The device also has Silent Cinema functions, i.e. "cinema in headphones" and Virtual Cinema DSP (a simulation of surround sound at "cut" set of speaker systems). The processor automatically choses an active input and corresponding algorithm of signal processing and can be "trained" in macro-commands and be controlled with a remote control with LCD-display.
Uncommon constructive approach should be noted too: low-current nodes are enclosed in a dull screen, mounted on oil-filled absorbers. Due to this, a close neighborhood of six amplification blocks of 160 W each and also two ones of 40 W with low-current nodes, including six-channel discrete digital volume control, doesn't threaten by interference, and internal space of the device is rationally filled with massive power transformers and radiators of amplifiers' output cascades of, by the way, "antiresonant" type. A real High End!
