Extending the vision of founder Yoshi Akiba and her partners, Kaz Kajimura and Hiroyuki Hori from 1973, the latest Yoshi's jazz venue has opened in San Francisco’s Fillmore Heritage Center with a custom sound installation.
The new venue promises ‘the best of local, national and international jazz artists’, turning to Bay Area sound systems company JK Sound and EAW’s Strategic Engineering Group for critical modifications to EAW’s AX396 installation speaker – prompting development of the AX-SY three-way, full-range model.
Michael Lacina, President of JK Sound, and Tom Schindler of acoustical consulting firm Charles Salter Associates, collaborated on the design and components used of the new system. It was determined that an LCR array design would provide the desired coverage, using three pairs of AX396 speakers and EAW’s UX8800 Digital Signal Processor. The AX396 pairs were to be set to offer an overall horizontal coverage of 120° for each of the left, centre and right speaker pairs. This was the goal of Tom Schindler’s design: to provide a true L-C-R listening experience for the entire audience. However, the team encountered a conflict of acoustic and aesthetic interests. ‘The design called for two AX396 90° x 60° cabinets side-by-side, with the vertical dispersion at 90° and the combined horizontal dispersion at 120°,’ Lacina explains. ‘Acoustically, one would want to arrange the boxes vertically side-by-side so that the high-mid components have minimal distance between them, but aesthetically, one would want the smallest vertical profile possible so that the speaker would loom less large over the performers’ heads.’
The solution was to strip out the low-frequency woofers from the AX396 altogether and hide these components in the proscenium directly above each LCR mid-high pair. Long-time JK systems engineer Brad Katz came up with the idea to install the side-by-side mid-high horns in one cabinet, thereby simplifying the complexity of the speaker installation. The design greatly reduced the vertical and horizontal profile of the speaker arrays, creating a sleek, compact and powerful system. Lacina presented the idea to both Kenton Forsythe, founder of EAW and its Senior VP of Engineering, and Joe Fustolo, EAW’s Director of the Strategic Engineering Group. They agreed it could be done, and that there was also an opportunity to minimize the distance between the acoustic centres of the adjoining mid-high components. Thus the AX-SY was born.
A final tweak to the design was a 30° angle at the top of the cabinet to get the speaker up as high above the stage as possible. To handle the lows, now that the woofers had been separated out, Forsythe, Fustolo and Lacina decided on the EAW SB625z Medium Format Subwoofer, a compact but powerful dual 15-inch, for the mid bass, which was to be placed above each pair of high-mids. Then between each of the LCR dual 15-inch mid bass cabs, there would be two dual-18 subwoofers, all hidden from view behind an acoustically transparent scrim in the proscenium.
‘The beauty of the design is that all of the big low frequency boxes are completely hidden behind the scrim, so the PA would look petite but sound huge and effortless,’ Lacina explains. Yoshi’s would also add other groundbreaking elements to its sound system, including the first installation of EAW’s MicroWedge, which turned out to be so successful (thanks to its small footprint, large output and high phase coherency) that Yoshi’s purchased a dozen more MW12s and MW15s for its Oakland venue. And the installation would also be the most extensive use at the time of EAW UX8800s, with a total of five units providing 40 channels of processing output. Thanks to the resourcefulness of EAW’s Strategic Engineering Group and the work of Lacina, Brad Katz, the JK Sound team, and Tom Schindler of Salter and associates, the newest Yoshi’s lives up to the goal set from the beginning – to be one of the best places in the world to listen to live jazz.
