Unbeknownst to me, Yamaha, a firm who I thought made great motorcycles and my mother’s piano, is also making a very nice, Skype certified, medium/large conference room audio solution. Comes OOBE ready to be a speakerphone for the SfB client. The nice folks at Yamaha let me play with one for a few days.
Here is what the Yamaha marketing mavens have to say:
“Ideal for medium and large spaces, this intuitive communications system features separate microphone and speaker units for flexibility during audio, web, and video conferencing. Designed to support 2 external speakers and 5 daisy-chained microphones, it’s the perfect scalable solution for accommodating larger meeting rooms and additional participants. Adaptive echo cancellation and human voice activity detection (HVAD) minimize background noise, facilitating natural, stress-free conversation during every call.”
If you poke around their website, Yamaha also has the obligatory case studies.
Ya…. well, OK, it’s good for them to say it, quite another for us lowly consumer types to actually realize it. Let’s break open the box and see what is what.
The Box
Out of the box, you get a main unit, wires/cables to match, and an external microphone. There is also a small pamphlet of instructions which I did not read until afterwards. Does anyone read those things first?
Build
One of the first things I noticed was the build quality. We got good stuff here. Solid. Construction on par with what I expected from a musical instrument manufacture (based on mommy’s piano). And that theme carried through acoustically also.
Controls are easy to see and use. The connections are clear and sturdy – no cheap shortcuts here.
Audio
Quality sonic delivery – at least according to the Tsoorad Test Lab Standard Ear Device. Great volume as the timbre of the delivery carries the audio track farther than some rinky-dink speaker system does. Or at least it sure seems that way to me. At any rate, audio quality in this unit is now my measuring stick.
Skype
The YVC-1000MS is essentially treated as a speaker phone device. This is the comparison between the two versions, with the right side being the SfB certified. I connected to it with USB and BT. Both modalities were treated as you would expect SfB to treat them. Seamless.
Yamaha provides a zippy tear sheet.
You can get your very own YVC-1000MS right here.
Conclusion
A great piece of kit. I am not sure that this is a center-mass market thing. But, for a mid-to-high-end conference room need, and in a place that does not need/want/use video (there is a ton of that BTW), this is where I will look first. There might be other solutions out there, but this one clearly sounds the best, is seamless with a variety of platforms, and has the build quality to outlast the competition.
YMMV
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