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How to Design Audio Systems with Yamaha Commercial Audio

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My years of designing audio systems with Yamaha Commercial Audio products have provided me with a simple method to scope, program, and deploy systems. Here I will show you some of the procedures I employ when helping my customers deliver meaningful and professional solutions with Yamaha CIS.

So let us jump into it with the very first question we need to ask ourselves!

How loud does it need to be = How many speakers = How many channels of Amplification?

Small rooms, big rooms, halls, churches, shopping centers, pubs, and clubs all require appropriate sound reinforcement systems for their appropriate loudness. So how do we work it out?

I use CISSCA to help calculate room size and speaker coverage. CISSCA gives you a pretty good idea of how many speakers in a space are required for best sound vs loudness vs cost.

Once you know how many speakers you need.. Match them to an amp.

Consider the impedance LOW-Z (4ohm/8ohm) vs HIGH-Z (100/70V)

  • LOW-Z = Low impedance systems used in HiFi, loudspeakers, and line arrays. (The general rule of thumb is max 1-2 speakers per channel with most of these speakers commonly at an 8ohm load.
    • 8ohm load on amp = 1 speaker
    • 4ohm load on amp = 2x speakers wired in parallel (+to+) (-to-)
  • HIGH-Z = Long speaker runs with multiple speakers looping in and out of each other in parallel (+to+) (-to-).
    • For shopping centers, restaurants, and generally for background music.
    • Needs speakers equipped with a 100V/70V transformer built in.
    • Speakers will come with optional volume TAPs (30W / 15W / 7.5W taps for example)
    • Say an Amp has 120W of available peak output
    • Give the Amp some headroom of about 25% to preserve clipping
      • (120W x 25% = 30W) (120W – 30W = 90W)
    • So 90W is our limit, which means we can add up speakers in the run until we get to 90W before we start to squash our headroom & clip the amplifier. Clipping = bad!
      • 30W TAP = 3x speakers per channel (90W/30W = 3)
      • 15W TAP = 6x speakers per channel (90W/15W = 6)
      • 6.5W TAP = 12x speakers per channel (90W/7.5W = 12)

Single Room LOW-Z Examples

Say CISSCA spits out the need for two speakers in a coffee shop, cause it is only 2x speakers, lets run it in 8ohm so all you would need is the little MA2030a with 2x channels of 30W LOW-Z. Add a DCP1V4S for easy user volume control.

Say the room needs to be loud, a boardroom or training room. We can mix and match surface mounts and in-ceiling for volume and coverage. Use an MTX3 with XMV4280 & add a nicer-looking digital controller in the MCP1 that integrates with the MTX3 processor.

Now let us step into some examples with multiple zones of audio.

Multi-Zone Audio and Complete Venue Sound

As we step into multi-zone venues we’ll repeat the CISSCA process for each room. I always use MTX/MRX processors for the mixing/matrixing and tend to use a mixture of XMV & PC-D series amplifiers with YDIF & Dante. I often also use interface expanders like the Exi8 and Exo8 to increase input channels or outputs into large legacy power amps like the analog PX series. For control, when using the MTX/MRX processors you have access to the free Provisionaire Control Application for PC or iPad so you can create custom control GUIs.

Let’s do an 8x Zone Example in 4x easy steps

  • Step 1. First I need to know how many rooms and how many speakers in each room.
  • Step 2. I need to know how many Inputs and sources
  • Step 3. Document all the inputs, zones, and outputs. I created an MTX/MRX IO Guide to do this…(see below)
  • Step 4. Program the audio system & assign the control parameters.

Here is an excerpt of an example venue that has 16x Inputs and 8x Zones of audio.

I have an MTX5-D for 8x inputs and an Exi8 for an additional 8x inputs, totalling 16x inputs. You can see I am wiring my zones 1x Zone to 1x Output in 100V with the XMV8280 Amplifier. See below signal chain.

That’s great BUT say if we needed more power in those bar zones and function room zones. Say the client wants some loudspeakers in each of those function rooms and bars in conjunction with the in-ceiling speakers. We need more outputs. The MTX5-D has 16x channels of output processing, some we will send via YDIF to the XMV8280, and some we will send via Dante to a PC412-D amplifier.

You can see our bar and function rooms zones need two outputs per zone now. 1x going down a YDIF to our XMV Amplifiers and 1x going down Dante to our PC412-D amplifier. This is where a lot of people get confused between zones and outputs. Think of zones as rooms, and those rooms may need multiple outputs. We assign separate outputs to each type of speaker so we can speaker process EQ the ceiling speakers separately to the CZR15 loudspeakers for example.

Now it’s time to Program the system and controllers

To turn our system design into reality we program our inputs, zones and outputs with the MTX/MRX Editor.

Then once our system is programmed and all audio is flowing and sounding great, we Ctrl+click & drag from MTX/MRX Editor the buttons and sliders we need to control into the ProVisionaire Control software.

The MCP1 and DCP controllers are all programmed inside the MTX/MRX Software.

Tried and Tested

This method has been a great way to map out the hardware required to fulfil a system’s output needs. The MTX/MRX Processors all have the same physical IO but differ in their processing power. See below,

  • MTX3 / MTX5-D / MRX7-D physical inputs
    • 8x MIC/LINE INPUTS (euro block)
    • 2x Stereo RCA Inputs (RCA)
    • 8x LINE OUTPUTS (euro block)
    • 16x GPI / 8 GPO
    • YDIF / DANTE / DCP/ ETHERNET PORTS
    • SD Card Input
    • Scheduler

The processing differences

  • MTX3
    • 8x Zones
    • 8x Outputs
  • MTX5-D
    • 16x Zones
    • 16x Outputs
  • MRX7-D
    • 64x Zones
    • 64x Outputs

If you are interested in learning more, I do training sessions and am available to take your call to assist with any system design questions. Visit http://www.avad.com.au for more information.

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