The foundation to any good home theater experience is a dedicated surround sound system. But simply placing speakers around your theater room and hooking them up to an A/V receiver is only the start of the process. To take your experience from good to great, it’s important to make sure that sound from your speakers has been optimized to deliver the best quality for your room and the content you’re listening to. Just about any A/V receiver sold in the last decade will have a variety of digital signal processing (DSP) modes that can change particular audio parameters depending on what you’re watching. You’ll see them categorized with simple descriptions like “Cinema” or “Sports,” as well as technical modes like “Dolby Atmos” or “DTS Surround.” These set up your receiver play your music or movies with certain audio characteristics, from the start of the audio stream until it ends.
The Yamaha Surround:AI system takes this process a step further, utilizing artificial intelligence to make quicker, smarter decisions about audio optimization. From the moment you press play, Surround:AI is analyzing the audio stream, doing this five times per second. The system is constantly making adjustments, taking into account contextual clues like what type of audio is playing. By differentiating between vocals, background music, or raucous sound effects, the system can decide—on the fly—what sort of audio enhancements to apply. The processing is constantly changing, making sure that every second of your audio is being processed by dynamically, instead of with a single predetermined mode. It’s difficult to explain in writing—and impossible to demonstrate. To fully understand it, and in-person experience is crucial. So this weekend, our friends from Yamaha are stopping by our audio department to give demonstrations of the Surround:AI system in action. It’s the perfect chance to hear exactly what you’ve been missing, and to find out how you can add it to your current home theater system.
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