Yamaha has been at the forefront of the professional audio industry for many decades. The corporation is committed to maintaining this position and, to achieve this, it has opened a brand new, $100m Innovation Center at its headquarters in Hamamatsu, Japan.
Designed to accelerate pan-Yamaha development of a wide range of audio-related products, the major project has brought together engineers who used to be located in different buildings inside and outside the Yamaha Corporation HQ.
Originally planned a number of years ago, it had to be postponed due to the 2011 earthquake. The project was reactivated in 2016 and is now complete after three years of intense work and construction.
The Innovation Center comprises three buildings. A new seven-story, 35,000㎡ engineering facility is complemented by refurbished manufacturing control and quality assurance departments. The new building hosts engineers, including those from Yamaha’s professional audio, Unified Communications, home audio and its musical instrument divisions.
By assembling them together in one location, Yamaha is aiming to making collaboration between engineers from different business units and disciplines more streamlined, to enhance development efficiency. Complementing this aim, the new contemporary and inspiring work environment will boost creativity, delivering superior innovations and benefits to customers.
This Innovation Center has a number of cutting-edge facilities to ensure that every Yamaha audio product delivers both the best sound and user experience possible. To ensure new products are evaluated both technically and subjectively, the engineering and testing rooms include:
– One of the largest anechoic chambers in Japan, measuring 9 m wide x 14 m deep x 13 m high.
– Speaker testing rooms with the highest quality acoustic insulation.
– A main recording studio (amongst several others) designed for engineers to bring in any audio I/O, mixing and processing equipment they choose.
Also available are vibration experiment rooms, ergonomic evaluation rooms, sensory rating rooms (for subjective product evaluation), and reverb chambers with adjustable 0.3 – 1.6 second reverb time.
The recording studio, session studio and experiment rooms are all linked with both analogue and Dante digital audio networks. The Dante network allows for running remote session in multiple rooms, making it possible to simultaneously record studio sessions in different monitoring environments.
More information on the Yamaha Website.
Text & photos: Yamaha.
