Our Aims

At YG we all love music and we all listen to music as often as we can. It’s great if that musical experience can be a live performance: nothing beats the thrill of hearing music created in front of you, and sharing that with the others in the audience.

However, like most people, recorded music makes up the majority of our listening. The audio system is not a laboratory tool. Its role is to recreate magic for human ears: to deliver every nuance and detail of the recording, but at the same time to make listening a joyful, utterly involving experience.

A good system should let you listen for many hours without fatigue. It should allow the finest recordings to weave their spell, but—as far as it can without sacrificing fidelity—it should be forgiving of recordings with flaws.

Our aim is the highest fidelity and musical involvement, delivered in real-life listening rooms. The interesting thing is that the better the loudspeaker design, the less sensitive it is to room placement.

For us, a system which needs a purpose-built, heavily-treated room to perform is a failure. Just as much of a failure are loudspeakers which demand inch perfect placement before they sing, or deliver a tiny sweet spot only inches wide.

Of course, there will be an ideal listening position, and a final sliver of performance from the optimal speaker setup. Place any of our speakers perfectly in carefully-designed and acoustically-treated room and you will understand why they have enjoyed so many accolades. However, we also aim to deliver very close to that ultimate performance from any listening position in any room, with as much placement flexibility as possible.

This has driven many of the fundamental design decisions in YG loudspeakers—our complex, sealed cabinets, our Lattice tweeter and other proprietary drivers, our finely tuned crossovers.

Science & Engineering: The Driver in the Background

With so much detailed science and engineering behind our products, why do we give so little space to this in our marketing?

Because they are means to an end. We are hugely proud of the understanding and modeling capabilities we have built, but they are just tools to let us build speakers which do magical things when you hear them.

We are quietly confident that our measurement and modeling capabilities are at the forefront of the high-end audio industry. Science, computational modeling and high-precision engineering suffuse every aspect of our products. So much so that we fear we would bore our audience if we went into every detail.

Our mantra of design-build-listen-measure-model extends from the outline physical design of the loudspeaker down to the tiniest of elements. From our revolutionary Lattice tweeter, to our ground-breaking crossover designs; from our drive units and crossover components through to even the lacquer on our Peaks cabinets. Every single aspect has been investigated, measured, modeled an optimized.

So why don’t we lead our marketing with all this? Because it’s not important. What’s important is how the speakers sound to people: in real systems, in real rooms. That’s what we want to talk about. How they make us feel, how they give us goose-bumps when we listen, and how close they bring us to the heart and soul of the music we love.

Multi-Domain Simulation

Since 2020 YG has benefitted from industry-leading computational modeling to support technology development. This includes multi-domain models and large-scale parallel computing.

Multi-domain models simply means modeling several different “domains” in parallel. Historically, computational models would only look at one domain: an electromagnetic model would look at the electrical and magnetic aspects; a finite element model would look at how the solid parts of an object behave; or a fluid dynamic model would look at how gasses and liquids move.

Many of the recent advances in science and engineering have been possible because these can be linked: a single simulation or optimisation which links together many of these areas. For example, how the body of a rocket reacts to stresses and vibration while you also model the flow of the air past it and the process of the fuel burning in the engine.

Today at YG, the same approach allows us to model every aspect of a loudspeaker system. Each part of the loudspeaker is modeled in detail: inside each driver, the cone, surround, suspension, the complex interaction of the magnet and voice-coil; each part of the cabinet and the enclosed air volume; even the veneer and lacquer.

Outside the loudspeaker, over 200 current and historical amplifier models have been measured and modeled in detail to simulate how they can drive the speaker. Then the whole system is modeled in many positions across a wide range of simulated listening rooms, looking not only at the sweet spot but at a variety of listening positions.

YG Drive Units

Every drive unit in a YG loudspeaker is proprietary and specific to YG. You will not find these industry-leading drivers in any other brand’s products.

Our BilletCore cones start life as massive slabs of aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. Over 99% of the material is machined away and recycled, leaving a finished cone only 0.2 mm (0.008”) thick and weighing under 30g (1oz). The resulting cone retains the original structure and strength of the raw billet, without any of the strain introduced by bending or stamping into shape. They provide unrivaled bandwidth, exceptionally low distortion and the fastest transient response.

Listening, BilletCore drivers are effortless and accurate, with incredible detail and no sense of harshness: whether listening at concert levels or to the most intimate, quiet passages. Pace and timing are unmatched, with exemplary transients.

Our Lattice tweeters use an airframe machined in-house from a specially-selected aluminum alloy. Starting from an 80g billet, we produce a final Lattice airframe weighing less than 0.03g (0.001oz), finished to a precision finer than 0.001mm. Its shape is the result of millions of CPU hours of computational optimization, providing industry-leading impulse response, bandwidth and accuracy. It also broadens the angular emission pattern of the tweeter at high frequencies, providing a very large sweet spot.

The sound of the Lattice tweeter is unparalleled. Effortless realism, holographic imaging and incredible detail retrieval over a huge sweet spot; all while remaining entirely un-fatiguing.

Crossovers

YG's crossover designs are one of the most critical factors in delivering our superb sound quality. Benefitting from our iterative cycle of listening, measuring and modeling, the circuits and components are truly innovative, with topologies and approaches which deliver performance that was previously considered impossible for dynamic loudspeakers.

By optimizing the amplitude, phase and phase slope, the drive units are phase coherent over a huge range—for an octave or more around the crossover point. Across this wide range frequency, each driver is moving in exact synchronization with its neighboring drive unit. To your ear it seems like there is just a single source of sound.

It is difficult to overstate what a revolution this is. To our knowledge, no-one else has been able to achieve this level of coherence. The degree of scientific and engineering knowledge, the precision of measurement and the cost of running the simulations required place it outside the typical capabilities of manufacturers in our industry.

The effects? In measurements: vanishingly low distortion across the crossover frequency range, excellent transient response, superb linearity. By acting as coherent sources, the drive units come close to the ideal “point source” of acoustic energy.

When listening: that strange sense of realism and immediacy which the best full range drivers and electrostatics have, but without the drawbacks. A magic feeling that gives you goose-bumps, with exceptional pace and timing, and a natural sound which is never tiring. Bass with exceptional depth and power, delivered with warmth but superb speed and slam.

The impact is just as noticeable at high volume levels as when listening quietly, with breathtaking moments of musical intimacy when the tiniest of sounds are reproduced perfectly. Importantly, all this is delivered throughout a huge listening area, not just a tiny sweet spot. The speakers are flexible in room placement and sound great no matter where you are.