Yamaha Explains Speakers To Me Like I'm Five Years Old

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]These are $9,000 a pair.

[00:00:02]>> Oh.

[00:00:02]>> And these are $5,000 a pair. So, these are, you know, they're pretty serious uh instrumental >> instruments. Yeah. While that may sound like a lot, I just got back from a hi-fi audio show with systems ranging in the millions of dollars to ones that are just hundreds of bucks. If you really want to nerd out on what goes on inside of a speaker on a 5-year-old level, this is the video for you. Yamaha took me on a tour of what goes into their speaker engineering. Welcome to the video, Phil.

[00:00:29]And I see you have a display here for us.

[00:00:30]>> I'm glad you came back cuz we talked about amps and amps have to be hooked to something and typically it's speakers.

[00:00:36]So, [laughter] >> there's kind of two main things for home audio or two types. This happens to be what's called a three-way. Now, it's got four speakers in it, but these two speakers are doing the same frequencies.

[00:00:48]So, these are the woofers. Sometimes you'll see a bigger woofer by itself, but we use two woofers right here. So, they're doing the same thing. So, it actually doubles the surface area. So, we get more bass response by having two of them. Here's your standard three-way, >> right?

[00:01:03]>> This our NS5000s. And then the woofer takes care of all your your bottom end.

[00:01:07]>> Then you have the mid-range. Now, the mid-range typically does vocals, uh, mid-range sounds. So, your voice falls right into this one right here. A male voice kind of falls a mainly into this, but a little bit of this gets blended in there. Tweeter up here is all the high frequencies.

[00:01:23]>> Notice it's tiny. It's the tiniest one.

[00:01:25]Yeah, because this one, you know, goes up to 20,000 hertz. Well, that means this thing changes direction when we're creating a sound 40,000 times a second.

[00:01:35]So, it has to be a very small mass.

[00:01:37]>> It It can't be big. We can't make this go 40,000 times a second. It's just too much weight and it take an infinite amount of power to make that happen.

[00:01:44]There's either a sealed enclosure or a ported enclosure and these happen to be of the ported style that is uh precisely calculated for diameter length for mass for tuning. It's kind of like an organ, a pipe organ. By making the pipe shorter, the pitch goes up. By making the diameter smaller, the pitch goes up.

[00:02:05]It's the same type of uh calculations that we use to do uh speaker enclosures.

[00:02:10]So, we make sure the inside of the cabinet resonates at the frequency we want. I mean, it looks kind of simple inside once you open it up. Like, there's a lot of space in there.

[00:02:18]>> Yeah. And [laughter] there's a lot of math going on in here. So, there's um >> I love math.

[00:02:26]>> Yeah. We have laser analysis devices.

[00:02:29]So, they're very expensive devices. And we use it for musical instruments. We use it for our amplifier design. So, we can find resonances and vibrations. So, like this big panel right here, if we just made a rectangle box right here, the woofers are going to be pumping.

[00:02:44]They're going to put and the these panels are going to flex. We don't want to do that because we want to keep cuz then it's not accurate. It's not pure.

[00:02:51]So, we want to brace it. But you don't just throw a bunch of bracing in there cuz you'll throw it in the wrong spot and it'll vibrate in a different place.

[00:02:57]So, >> yeah, you want the sound to come out of here and not through here. This is just to keep it steady.

[00:03:03]>> Yeah, this is pretty solid. It even has holes cut in the side. Looks like particle board, I'm guessing, for the material.

[00:03:08]>> Yeah, MDF. MDF, medium density for the board. These weird little plastic.

[00:03:12]>> I was wondering what the heck those things are. Looks kind of like a little wine glass or something you could drink out of.

[00:03:17]>> Yeah. If we didn't have this here, then that tweeter is going to be exposed in the same air space as this woofer. So, when the woofer kicks, it's going to be trying to punch the tweeter dome out and give us distortion up there. A lot of manufacturers, they put a resonator on there, a tube to isolate the back of the tweeter from the rest of the cabinet.

[00:03:35]The problem is as the frequency goes up at some frequency, that tube is going to start to resonate. Well, when the pressure starts building up on the top up here and it's low down here, we added this second tube right here. And then if you keep going up in frequency, eventually this is going to start to resonate. This third chamber right there to vent this one right here. So these three tubes all cancel each other's.

[00:03:58]>> It's essentially a giant pressure relief system.

[00:04:01]>> Yep. to allow this to do its job >> to allow this to not even know there's anything going on behind it. But I mean, this is done for our musical instrument people. This is the kind of stuff that they calculate when they're making trumpets and flugal horns and all that stuff.

[00:04:14]>> And then this Oh, and here we have, you know, a little bigger one for the mid-range.

[00:04:17]>> This is something only Yamaha pretty much has.

[00:04:18]>> Oh, yeah. No, this our this is our technology, our patent.

[00:04:21]>> Okay. Um, >> only in Yamaha.

[00:04:23]>> This funny looking thing.

[00:04:24]>> Oh, a J.

[00:04:25]>> This J.

[00:04:27]It's the same thing inside this cabinet.

[00:04:29]And it's really easy to figure out mathematically where this cabinet is going to start to resonate.

[00:04:34]>> And when the cabinet resonates, then it puts back pressure on the woofer, >> right?

[00:04:38]>> And so the woofer can't move freely like we're, you know, we send in a signal and we expect it to do something. So this fits inside. There's actually two of them fit inside the cabinet here. And that actually drop a little bit farther down here.

[00:04:49]>> So what happens when this starts to resonate? There's a high pressure builds up up here and a low pressure down there. And then 180 degrees later in the sine wave, it'll be low pressure up there and high pressure down here. And so that's influencing the woofer.

[00:05:04]Traditionally, and what we've even done for the last 50 years is you uh put batting material inside the >> When you say batting material, >> uh it's like a It looks like fiberglass.

[00:05:13]>> Uhhuh. Okay. Or like cotton or something.

[00:05:16]>> Yeah. And it can be cotton and wool.

[00:05:17]There's different there's different types depending on what it is. The problem with that is it slows down the air flow on the inside. So it makes the the transient not quite There's some compromises.

[00:05:27]>> And then we invented this.

[00:05:29]>> Yeah. So it's not like we pulled all the batting material out. This is the way it is.

[00:05:32]>> This is how it looks. If you were to open up your own Yamaha, this is how it would be. Why not just have like these guys like sitting on their own without a big box around them? I don't know. Is that a weird question?

[00:05:41]>> This speaker right here, if we bring it out in free air, hang it from a string right here, put a signal on it, there's going to be a signal where this thing is going to resonate because this has uh the rubber surround out here. And then it has a spider, this uh kind of gold thing down inside there.

[00:05:56]>> Yeah, I see the little goldie thingy.

[00:05:58]>> And then there's a mass right here. So this moves back and forth at some frequency. That thing is going to resonate and it's just going it's just going to start flapping like crazy.

[00:06:08]>> So we put it in a cabinet.

[00:06:10]>> And if this tries to resonate, the cabinet has equal pressure on it and won't let that happen. If we haven't free air, there's nothing to keep it.

[00:06:18]>> Okay? So it's interdependent on each other to make sure it does it correctly.

[00:06:22]the size of the cabinet, the dimension of the cabinet, all affect what's really what's going on in there.

[00:06:26]>> Regulating pressure in a very specific way.

[00:06:29]>> NS-2000s, these are our flagships. And the NS800s, um, these are $9,000 a pair.

[00:06:36]>> Oh.

[00:06:36]>> And these are $5,000 a pair. So, these are, you know, they're pretty serious uh instrumental instruments.

[00:06:42]>> Yeah.

[00:06:43]>> This is basically the goal of this speaker is to disappear. And that's why there's so much work on regulating the pressure to cancel out things to allow just sound to come out as if nothing was it was coming from its real source or something. So, >> exactly. Sounds simple, but >> yeah. And then he started explaining it and I'm like my brain starts hurting.