Напольная акустика — YG Acoustics XX 3 Live

The XX 3 Live is a complete active loudspeaker system from YG Acoustics, the company founded in 2002 with operations in Colorado and Cambridge, and it marks the twentieth anniversary of the brand. It came out of a multi-year research programme run jointly with Bel Canto, which supplies the amplification and digital electronics. The package is made up of two four-way floorstanding speakers with eight drivers each and a separate controller that handles sources, conversion and volume, so no external preamplifier, DAC or power amplifier is involved.

Key specs that matter

The driver complement per side is a 26 mm YG Lattice hybrid tweeter, two 15 cm aluminium cone midrange drivers, three 18.5 cm aluminium cone midbass units and two 28 cm aluminium cone bass drivers with high field strength motors, the mid and midbass units using neodymium magnets. Usable output runs from 18 Hz to 40 kHz. Every drive unit has its own 700 W amplifier, giving 5.6 kW per channel, with 0.0006 percent THD+N from 20 Hz to 20 kHz at half peak power, 137 dB unweighted SNR, 93 percent efficiency at peak power and an output impedance of 250 micro-ohm. A speaker stands 148 cm tall, 35 cm wide and 64 cm deep and weighs 170 kg unpacked, while the controller measures 94 x 400 x 316 mm and weighs 8.7 kg.

Engineering and use context

The four-way crossover works in the DSP domain rather than with passive parts. YG states that its filters were derived from multi-domain physics and acoustic models, optimised with supercomputer and cloud computing resources and then adjusted over thousands of hours of listening, with the goal of accurate phase, amplitude and impulse behaviour at any volume. Because each driver gets a dedicated amplifier channel, nothing passive sits in the path between an amplifier output and its voice coil. The controller accepts AES on XLR, S/PDIF on BNC, Toslink, USB and Ethernet, and it is Roon Ready. AES, S/PDIF and Toslink run at up to 24 bit and 192 kHz, Ethernet adds DSD64, and USB reaches 384 kHz with DSD64 and DSD128 over DoP.

Pairing

Analogue sources connect through two RCA line inputs with a 2.2 Vrms maximum and 10 kohm impedance. A built-in phono stage takes moving magnet cartridges of 2.5 to 5 mV into 47 kohm, or moving coil types of 0.25 to 0.5 mV with 50, 100, 500 or 1,000 ohm loading, and holds RIAA accuracy within 0.25 dB from 50 Hz to 15 kHz. Silver and black are the standard finishes.

Alternatives

The YG Acoustics XX is a passive floorstanding model from the Reference series for owners who prefer to choose their own amplification.