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This precision sander puts the lovely exterior finish on the Anat's panels. Yes, the machine does the grunt work, but factory manager Roger Wertz supervises the entire time with his hand on a deadman's switch.
Every time I passed the parts bin with this bad boy in it, I did a double take. Man, that's big!
The Anat Reference Professional incorporates a powered subwoofer. This is the amp module.
The woofer for the Anat Ref Pro and Studio II is also an exclusive YGA design. "From the voice coil to the surround and cone, the woofer is the ultimate expression of what can be produced for our enclosures and sub-amp technology."
BTW, Geva explained, "YGA speakers are not 'voiced.' They are created without any objective human bias."
???
"Oh, we verify the objective qualities by experience, but we don't voice them subjectively to sweeten them or change the input signal in any way. They simply give you what's on the recording—nothing more, nothing less."
Made by ScanSpeak, designed by Geva and ScanSpeak's engineers. "The motor, voice coil assembly, and membrane incorporate our most advanced technology." It is assembled in-house at YGA's factory.
Geva believes that measurements don't lie—well, he allows that they can fib, but that a competent engineer should be able to interpret them with great accuracy. He uses aluminum and ballistic allow instead of wood or MDF, he said, because they are the "most resonant free, deadest, stiffest, strongest, least diffractive, and most sonically desirable materials ever found."
He uses a computer optimization program he designed himself to create speakers that "have a ruler-flat frequency with near 0 degrees relative phase shift." Other speakers, he maintains, are optimized in either the…
I don't quite know what I expected, but YGA's "factory" was not what I expected. I put factory in quotes because that sounds all automated and industrial, whereas YG's speakers are essentially built by hand. The speakers are constructed of aircraft grade 6061 T651 aluminum and the baffles are milled out of ballistic-grade aluminum/titanium alloy. On the day I arrived, the factory was being prepped for the delivery of a huge CNC station and a ceiling-mounted crane system to move large sheets of stock from station to station. At the moment, large panels are turned into speaker-sized…
My phone rang and it was Dick Diamond, sales manager for YG Acoustics. "We'd like you to visit our factory and see what we're all about," Diamond said.
Hmmm. I'd visited YGA's rooms at CES and various HE shows. I'd heard their speakers, which were obviously very well made. But I'd also listened to Yoav Geva's sales pitch, which was, shall we say, heavy on the superlatives. In fact, Stephen Mejias even coined a neologism for the audio lexicon: to be "yoaved". But, after all, talking to loudspeaker designers and exploring the ways in which speakers are made is my job.
"Sure,…
It was just a few months ago that I was moaning and groaning about Sonic Youth's latest release being made available only on vinyl. I wrote:
I've collected every one of these burning masterpieces—on CD—going back to those college nights with Todd and Michelle, racing down River Road to catch the 168 or the 175 and finding our way to the Cooler on 14th, or Tonic on Norfolk, and later even watching thrilled and perplexed as Sonic Youth took the stage to make noise at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall.
And blah blah blah. At the time, I didn't have a…