3D sound: Yamaha will also support Auro-3D in the future

In addition to the upper class of the Sound United brands Denon and Marantz, selected models from the Aventage series from Yamaha will also support the Auro-3D 3D sound format in addition to Dolby Atmos and DTS: X. The manufacturer announced this in a press release on its Japanese homepage.

Available in Japan from August

Specifically, these are the models RX-A8A and RX-A6A, which should be able to play Auro-3D with up to 11.1 and 9.1 channels, respectively. The models should be available in Japan from August 31st. The support of Auro-3D is unlikely to be of interest to anyone at the moment because of native material in this format (too little appears for this, or too little has been published so far). It is all the more interesting, however, that Yamaha is now also offering the AuroMatik as a so-called “upmixer”, which adds the height channels to material with one level (e.g. 5.1 soundtracks) – in addition to its own AI technology, which also has an upmix function includes. In this respect, there should be interesting comparisons. The support of AuroMatik is a radical departure from Yamaha’s previous policy: As a proven specialist in digital signal processing (DSP), the manufacturer’s spokesmen had always emphasized in the past that there would be no need to integrate the format or the upmixer.

Yamaha had already presented its devices for the year that had just started behind closed doors in January 2020 at the CES in Las Vegas. The official announcements about the new models should then actually follow in mid-2020. But then Corona first threw these plans upside down, later the bug in the HDMI chips, which are also found in Yamaha models. In the meantime there had been rumors that Yamaha would support Auro-3D in the future. (nij)