Like it or not, you have been listening to stereo your entire life. It’s not your fault, because there hasn’t been an alternative. Until now.
The Y4 is the brainchild of Charlie van Dongen, and his legacy will be a revolution in sound: absolute clarity, immersion, and accuracy with a tonne of imagination, innovation and engineering.
There is simply no better sound quality available anywhere in the world.
Patented features:
Feature 1.
SST “sweet spot” technology.
The way sound waves are projected from normal speakers, only the person sitting in the centre of the room hears the clarity and balance of all the sounds (the sweet spot). Sitters to the left and right of the room will hear more of some sounds and less of others depending on their position to the speakers. The Y4 creates a stable, holographic audio image so large that every person in the room is in the “Sweet Spot”.
Feature 2.
Encoder/decoder.
An encoder/decoder with the ability to receive music, movie, game, or any other audio from any audio source, including PC, TV, media player, phone, or anything else with audio output. Most sound files are recorded in stereo, bunching up all the instruments, voices and sound effects together into two tracks which go to the left and right speakers. Because of this method of recording, you don’t hear many of the less dominant sounds and voices as they are overpowered by the more dominant sounds.
The Y4 separates these multiple sounds into individual tracks and delivers them to the speakers resembling the direction they were originally recorded from, creating the experience of true surround sound, even if the audio was recorded in stereo. Listening to your favourite songs or movies on the Y4 will give you a similarly immersive experience as listening to them live; every instrument, every vocal, every percussion, every footstep, every car chase and every gun shot will have you ducking for cover or dancing to your moves.
Feature 3.
Electrostatic speakers.
Creator Charlie Van Dongen was obsessed with faults and imperfections in the delivery of music. Charlie says that the distribution of sound from regular speakers in their housing creates reverberation and other types of sound distortions which then corrupt the audio you are listening to.
For 80 years the concept of the electrostatic speaker that has no magnets, coils and heavy cones was a distant dream of the audiophile but somehow never achievable due to difficulties in manufacture, high cost, low output and huge size. The Y4 team have worked on this problem since 1995 and have created a bookshelf sized, lightweight, low cost, ultra low distortion, high output, semi “see through”, 5 mm thick electrostatic speaker. A feature of the technology is virtually zero box resonance and coloration. The Y4 speakers distribute sound in such a way that you can put your ear up next to the speakers at full volume and the sound is no louder than it is in the middle or the furthest point of the room.
Electrostatic speakers deliver a clean sound along with very low noise transference through walls, making them perfect for city and apartment living. The most immersive, richest, quality sound available in the world today. A technological breakthrough of sheer genius.