Cinema DSP Tri-Field

Even the best surround technology doesn't take into account one very important factor affecting the sound you hear. That's the fact that your cozy living room has nothing in common, acoustically speaking, with cavernous theaters and concert halls, or any other locations where real movie or musical performances take place. Yamaha's musical heritage includes extensive research into the way sound behaves in venues such as these. And we've developed some very sophisticated techniques for reproducing that behavior in your home, using proprietary microchips designed and fabricated in our own facilities. We call this DSP. And it's short for Digital Sound Field Processing. It can make a few home speakers reproduce the seamless curtain of sound created by multiple-speaker arrays in your local theater. It can recreate the ambiance of a stadium, a concert hall or an intimate club. And when combined with Dolby Digital and Dolby Surround Pro Logic, it can even expand the apparent dimensions of your room--letting you experience the spaciousness of a large theater, while hearing every sound coming from exactly where the director intended. Tri-Field Processing: A unique combination of Dolby Digital and Digital Sound Field Processing. Dolby Digital technology has changed the way we listen to movie sound tracks. It debuted in movie theaters in 1992 with the release of Batman Returns and has found its way into many homes since then. Dolby Digital offers several features that separate it from Dolby Pro-Logic:

1. Full frequency response in all channels (3 Hz - 20kHz)
2. Independent, discrete surround channels
3. A separate track for bass only, called a Low Frequency Effects channel.

These features combine to create the same excitement and realism found in a good movie theater. Except for one thing. Although the frequency response, dynamic range, and channel separation are exceptional, the sound field produced is not the same sound field you would experience in a good theater--mostly because your living room is not the same size as a movie theater. So Yamaha developed Tri-Field Cinema DSP which has two fundamental goals:

• Preserve the localization and directionality of the sound track as it was created by the movie sound designer,
• Increase the acoustic size of a home theater to the size of a movie theater.

As the name suggests, Tri-Field means three sound fields. There is a presence sound field in the front of the theater, and two independent sound fields in the rear of the theater, one for left rear, another for right rear. The composite of these three sound fields serves to bring all of the realism, excitement and sense of space to the home theater. Tri-Field Processing is a good example of how good "sound field software" can be as important as the microprocessor itself. Tri-Field Processing is extremely accurate in localization and directionality of the sound field, while making the listener feel like they are in a much larger space than a home theater. In a movie theater, the large space serves to enhance the realism and draw the viewer into the film. After all, the result of a good home theater is you feel like a part of the action on the screen, not a viewer just looking at a screen. Digital Controls for Tri-Field Cinema DSP Tri-Field processing is based on Dolby Digital decoding, which offers several digital adjustments to customize the decoding for various system configurations and listening conditions.