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.

Lattice Tweeters

In 2016, YG introduced its revolutionary BilletDome tweeter: a soft dome supported by a stiff, light airframe machined in-house from aluminum billet. This provided exceptional performance, combining the high frequency extension of a beryllium dome but with the realism and smoothness of a fabric dome.
YG's new Lattice tweeter builds on this, substantially improving on the industry-leading performance of the BilletDome.

The new Lattice airframe is machined in-house from a specially-selected aluminum alloy which combines extreme lightness with an exceptionally high impulse transmission speed. Starting from an 80g billet of this special alloy, carefully heat-treated prior to machining, we produce a final Lattice airframe weighing less than 0.03g (0.001oz), finished to a precision finer than 0.001mm. This airframe is attached to the fabric dome and the voice-coil.

The Lattice airframe shape is the result of millions of CPU hours of computational optimization. It damps the break-up modes of the fabric and also acts to transmit impulses from the voice-coil much more efficiently into the overall structure.

In measurement, it improves impulse response, extends the frequency response and reduces distortion. The shape of the Lattice widens the angular emission pattern of the tweeter at high frequencies, providing a very large sweet spot.

More importantly, in listening, it increases detail retrieval, realism and imaging; all while remaining un-fatiguing.

Driver Cones

Our driver cones are unique, outperforming every other cone material and design that we have tested.

In 2012, YG Acoustics revolutionized driver design with our BilletCore cone. Each begins life as a massive slab of heat-treated, aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. Over 99% of the material is meticulously machined away and recycled, leaving a finished cone just 0.2 mm (0.008”) thick and weighing under 30 g (1 oz). With a shape optimized through extensive simulation and measurement, BilletCore drivers provide unrivaled bandwidth, exceptionally low distortion, and the fastest transient response.

Research and development are core to our culture, so while BilletCore has undergone a series of refinements over the years, we never stopped searching for what might come next. We were driven by two parallel goals: to push performance yet further, and to improve the sustainability of our production processes.

The challenge was immense. For years, nothing could match the performance and consistency of BilletCore. Our R&D team explored countless options: carbon fiber composites, sandwich diaphragms (using various core materials like honeycombs, AIREX, and ROHACELL foam), magnesium, titanium, thin-ply carbon and diamond. Manufacturing techniques included every conventional way of making a cone, as well as 3D printing, Automated Fiber Placement and spin forming. Nothing even came close.

The breakthrough came in 2023, drawing on new aluminum alloys, advances in techniques such as roboforming, and new electrochemical surface treatments. For the first time, we saw a path that could deliver BilletCore’s exceptional performance without extensive subtractive machining.

This began an intensive two-year period of prototyping and production proving, with each generation of cone honed through simulation, testing, and critical listening.

We call the new cones FormCore. They are formed from a sheet of a special aluminum alloy, with fine control over both thickness and built-in stresses. A critical final step places an exceptionally hard, 0.05 mm (0.001") layer on both the front and back of the cone.

FormCore matches the legendary performance of BilletCore. It delivers the same effortless realism, explosive dynamics, and intimate detail, whether you are enjoying concert volumes or savoring the quietest moments. Pace and timing remain unmatched, with transients rendered to perfection.

FormCore achieves this using significantly less material and energy, and it unlocks exciting possibilities for future driver innovations. While FormCore drivers are more expensive to produce than BilletCore, our commitment to this superior technology is absolute. We aim to move all our cone driver production to FormCore during 2025.

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.