As one of the world’s leading manufacturers of musical instruments, Yamaha has carried the tradition of pursuing the highest sound quality possible to its audio products. Combine that with exponential growth in headphone listening, Yamaha has announced its latest flagship wireless headphones, the Yamaha YH-L700A.
To provide users with the best headphone listening experience, the YH-L700A incorporates the following innovations:
3D Soundfield
Years ago, Yamaha developed surround sound processing for headphones that have been a feature on many of its Home Theater Receivers, referred to as Silent Cinema. This provided listeners access to a surround sound listening experience without speakers on any pair of headphones.
Building on that foundation, Yamaha has incorporated an even more immersive 3D sound listening experience in the YH-L700A by pulling the sound from inside your head to a spatial environment which is more like listening to speakers set up in the room.
In addition, you can fine-tune your listening environment by choosing one of 7 modes: Cinema, Drama, Music Video, Concert Hall, Outdoor Live, Audio Room, Background Music.
Head Tracking
When listening to most headphones, when you move your head, the sound stays in your head and follows you. However, to better complement 3D soundfield listening, Yamaha’s head-tracking technology maintains the correct direction of the sound when you turn your head. For example, when watching a movie, the sound channel location will remain the same in relation to the screen as you reach over to grab your drink or snack.
Listening Optimizer
Yamaha’s Listening Optimizer feature makes automatic continuous adjustments to compensate for any changes in wearing conditions, such as earcup fit.
Advanced Active Noise Cancellation (ANC)
The headphones analyze and make adjustments to minimize unwanted background noise, but without diminishing the sound quality of the content you want to listen to.
Ambient Sound
Yamaha has incorporated built-in microphones to monitor ambient sound so that you are still aware of your surroundings in case you need to communicate or react to something outside your listening environment.
TIP: ANC or Ambient Sound don’t work at the same time, but you can choose between them when needed.
Listening Care
Often headphone listening can be frustrating because the output across all frequencies isn’t balanced so listeners will keep turning the volume up and down with a piece of content. What happens is that although you can hear the softer frequencies better, the already loud frequencies become louder and can damage your hearing.
Yamaha’s Listening Care feature compensates for this problem by delivering quality sound across a wide frequency range and volume setting. This means you can set the volume once and hear an entire song or movie and not have to fiddle with the volume control.
Core Specifications
To support the above features the YH-L700A also incorporates:
- Comfortable over-ear design housing dynamic 40mm drivers.
- Bluetooth 5 AptX Adaptive wireless reception.
- Wired 3.5 mm connection option (cable included) for playback of Hi-Res audio files from compatible devices.
- Siri/Google Assistant support and phone call use when paired with compatible iOS and Android smartphones.
- Convenient physical controls accessible on the earcups
- Up to 34 hours of battery life based on use conditions.
Price & Availability
The Yamaha YH-L700A is available now for pre-order, $499.95 at Amazon. It will start shipping August 31, 2021.
To dig deeper into features/specs and purchasing options, check out the official product page and user guide (pdf).
