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Video: Setting up DSP in your Yamaha PX Series amplifier

Harness the digital processing power of your Yamaha pro audio amp

Yamaha PX Series amplifiers are flexible, powerful pro audio amplifiers that let you dial in the right sound for your application through digital signal processing. Our pro audio expert shows you how to harness the power of that digital processing in this video.

Read video transcript

Hello, I'm Rob from Crutchfield pro and commercial audio teams, and today we're gonna be taking a look at the DSP for the Yamaha PX series amplifiers, and there's a lot to get to as far as configuration so we're just going to kind of dive right into the front panel, and I'll show you around that so we can get you set up.

So this is the screen that you're going to see when you fire up your Yamaha PX series amp for the first time. You're going to see you've got your volume controls with the knobs on the outsides for channel A and channel B, but what we're most interested in are the menu back buttons in our scroll wheel, and selector buttons here in the center of the panel. We're going to use our control wheel to indicate what settings we need to edit up here. We can jump in and go ahead and set crossover points for both our high-pass and low-pass filters, which allows us to get a bandpass selector. We can squash it down, get our high pass low pass and move it around, leave our high pass completely off, and make it a low-pass filter only, or vice versa.

The limits of these filters is really pretty impressive. We can actually choose what slope and how steep that slope is, very handy for for making sure that you're sending exactly the right frequency bands to the right speakers. And then our frequency range is incredibly impressive. Yamaha has given us everything from 20 Hertz all the way up to 20,000 Hertz at the high end, with some really nice 1/3 octave separations as we go through, so you can get Super-duper specific on just how to tune your system.

And those cross-server settings are available in both the basic and the advanced menus. You just don't have to the basic menus, you don't have to go through all of the route input routing, and all like all those settings it keeps it real nice. And it also includes the D contour, which is one of Yamaha's processing features, as well as the polarity, so we can actually flip the phase on the on the output. But what we're really here to talk about today is when we actually hit the little wrench icon in the center, and we can get into some of the actual like quick configurations. This particular configuration view will show you exactly how the inputs and outputs are wired, so A goes to A so a input goes to a output B to B be input to be output. These are set for full range speakers.

You can see off to the side over here what the curve of the crossovers is kind of set to. It's a really broad bandpass configuration, and if we hit this again we can get into the edit mode, and we can go and select some different basic wizard-style presets. So this is for two full range speakers plugged up to the A and B. This would be for two subwoofers, for A and B, or if we wanted to do a subwoofer on the a cross it over with our low pass only and then on the B output have a full-range speaker that we've crossover with a high-pass filter in order to give us sort of A in one box be able to run a full system subs and mains.

So for now we're just going to select the full range, keep it in its basic configuration. And what's really slick is Yamaha included presets for different Yamaha speaker types. The very first one is a generic speaker type, so that's if you're not using a Yamaha speaker, but if we dig into this we've got all kinds of stuff. Like for instance, the CBR. That's the Club model speakers. If we selected that, we get the option to dig in here and select exactly which CBR speaker we're using, the CBR 10, 12, or 15. We sell those through the pro audio department here at Crutchfield, and in the commercial applications we actually go all the way down to the bottom and you you've got the VXC, VXS, and the VS series, all of which are commercial installation grade speakers which we use for all kinds of applications. So it's incredibly handy to be able to dig in here, grab our VXS series speaker, select whether it's the five or the eight, and it's going to go ahead and preset a lot of our crossover and basic EQ.

Instead of having generic full range speakers we actually have the VXS eight as the presets. It copies it over so both A and B are copied together, right, so incredibly handy to be able to get in just for the wizard. Now if we need more functionality than that, instead of hitting the little wrench icon and going into this view and we can hit the back to go back to the front we can hit the menu and this opens up a whole new bunch of commands. We've got the configuration wizard, which is just what we were going through with just the wrench on that front panel, or we can get into tuning the system, and this gets us back into our D contour, our high and low-pass filters, our polarity.

We can get into loading presets, which we don't have any presets currently saved on the amp, but this amp does some pretty neat stuff. Once you do a full configuration you can save it out and have that for instant recalls. This is incredibly handy for people who are doing mobile application where you may not be using the exact same amp for the exact same purpose every time. You deploy it so having those presets ready to rock, load it up super quick. You can also save those presets out through the USB port on the front and use that to pass those settings back and forth between your whole or all of your amp racks for all your front-of-house, your subs, your monitor rig, etc. The utility has given us all kinds of stuff like being able to set the panel to lock you can set it for security.

You can actually increase and decrease the lighting on the front panel, and in here you can reinitialize. Well, it says initialize but in reality that's just going to give you the instructions to do that. I'm going to go through that real quick before I dig into the advanced settings, just for a moment. So to reinitialize we turn the amp off. We're going to hold down A and then while we turn the amp back on. So to get us back to this front panel here, what we're going to do is turn the amp off, clear it, hold A while we power the amp up, and it'll ask us if we want to reinitialize just the configuration and the tuning, or do we want to re-initialize the entire unit. I'm going to go ahead and clear the entire unit. Completed, good to go.

Now we're back to square one where we started the video. We've got our basic crossovers, we got our full range instead of the XS 8 pre-loaded, and we're back to being able to dig in here. Now that's just the basic walkthrough, and I know I talked about a whole lot of stuff in a very short amount of time but it's because I'm really excited to show the Advanced Settings tab.

The Advanced Settings tab, once we select it, it doesn't look like we changed a whole lot until we actually get into the configuration wizard or the tuning setup, so the configuration wizard is going to be able to give us how our actual amp is going to react to the inputs and outputs, like where the routing is going and how the amp sees that information. It's going to ask if we want to edit the existing configuration or load a brand-new configuration. For now we're just going to edit the existing configuration. Now instead of just having full sub now we've got by amping, we can do bridged in full range bridged or subwoofer bridge configurations, definitely handy for people who are trying to get the most power.

Let's go back to that, and then it's gonna ask us how do we want the inputs routed, dual parallel or some depending on how we select in here dual means stereo mode, and it's reflected here off to the side on the front panel. A goes to a B goes to B stereo channel. If we go to parallel, we get the a channel going to both A and B that's like an input Y mode. We're not using the input B in this configuration, or we can go to some tamaño which is incredibly handy if you've got a stereo source and you're trying to distribute it to speakers that are not going to be in a stereo configuration. You want to have all left and right channel information going to all of your speakers. Incredibly handy for commercial installation so for now, we're going to select the dual input. So we're going to keep it in the stereo configuration, so we're not doing anything particularly fancy then we get our input sensitivity, and when you're going through the Advanced Options you're going to want to make sure that you know a little bit about all this stuff if you're not comfortable with getting it to you know, input sensitivity decibels and how whether it's a line input or mic input or if we're we're trying to increase our gain structure here.

If you're not comfortable with gain structure, just use the basic setup. For those who are particularly interested, if we're running something directly in here off of a mixer we can keep it in in our 4 dB. If we're coming in and we're not getting the signal that we're anticipated, to get out the output that we want we can increase that gain setting on that input to make sure that we're still getting our full proper output off the amplifier. We're going to keep that in 4 DB mode and then we're into our speaker presets again. Keep it generic, this is going to be an 8 ohm or a 4 ohm speaker, let's keep it in a generic 8 ohm speaker. Do we want to copy those settings from or apply those settings to the B channel? So everything we've done so far is just A. If we want to set B channel up independently, we can do that and just give no, or we can say yes and copy that now. It's a much more in-depth configuration that we've set up, and that's just on how the inputs and the outputs interact once we apply that, and we execute that, now we can go back in here and still get into our tuning.

Our tuning is going to include all of our delay settings, so if you've got speakers that are off of the stage, say you're in a worship hall and you've got speakers at the front of the room and some speakers halfway down the room, and you don't want to muddy the sound, if you're running an amp like this you can set one set of those speakers to be slightly delayed so it time aligns the whole thing, so it keeps the room sounding nice and tight. We can set high pass, low fill, low pass filters. We can set our polarity just like we can in our basic mode, but we also get all kinds of EQ. There's a six band EQ in here that we can turn on and really get tight with, we can set the limiter and actually limit the power coming off of this thing to protect our speakers.

On the back end, the nice thing is if you set a speaker preset at any stage in this when we're doing our configuration wizard, a lot of these settings will already be set up for you to limit the power, to make sure that those Yamaha speakers are getting exactly the right power that they want. In the generic setting it's off, and we can dig in here and really like tighten the system up. You can get as granular as you'd like with it.

So that is a pretty quick and dirty overview of the DSP that's available inside the Yamaha PX series amplifiers. They can keep it as basic as you want, where you can really dig into it and get really tight with it, and of course if you ever have any questions about any of this stuff you can always give us a call here at Crutchfield. My name is Rob, thanks for watching.

  • Joel from Tagbilaran City

    Posted on 9/16/2022

    Hi! Good day:-) May I ask if these PX series amplifiers has 70V/100V setting for VSX speakers high impedance mode so that it will be easy for me to tap multiple speakers in parallel for our church sound system? If there is, can you please help me how to set the amp to the specific function? If not, is there other model of yamaha amps suitable for what we need? I want to be sure before I decide to purchase. Thank you so much! Your help will be much appreciated.

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