Yamaha SPX-9011
A rack processor that never got the glossy review treatment. It just kept turning up in the gear lists of studios and touring rigs that could afford anything they wanted.
Overview
The Yamaha SPX-9011 survives in the paperwork rather than the spotlight. There is no factory spec sheet, no original list price and no production run in the record. What's left is a paper trail of studio inventories, rental sheets and facility upgrade notices from the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The clearest picture comes from studio listings of the era, where the SPX-9011 keeps appearing in the same sentence as Lexicon's PCM series. Hip Pocket in New York, describing its new Studio D, listed a Yamaha SPX-9011 among its effects gear. The same list included a Lexicon PCM70, an H300, and a Rev7. Real to Reel Recording Studio in Stockbridge, Georgia, named an SPX-9011 in its 16-to-24-track upgrade, next to a Lexicon PCM 60 and PCM 70. Engineers weren't reaching for it as a budget stand-in. They were racking it as a peer.
It did live work too. A touring rig documented in Recording-Engineer (June 1991, p.51) carried a Yamaha SPX-9011 in its house signal processing chain, listed alongside a pair of Yamaha REV-7 reverbs. The REV-7s presumably handled the obvious reverb duties, with the SPX-9011 covering whatever else the show needed. The same rig ran a Yamaha SPX-90II for delay, so the SPX-9011 wasn't filling the cheap seat in that rack either.
Studios that didn't own one could rent it. Underground Sound's pro audio rental listing advertised a reverb rack that bundled two AMS RMX16s, an AMS DMX-15, two Lexicon 480-Ls, a Lexicon PCM70, a T.C. Electronic unit, and two Yamaha SPX-9011s, at $225 a day for the whole rack. The same listing offered a Mitsubishi X-850 at $500 per day.
The documentation gives no spec sheet. There's no frequency response figure, no converter resolution, no dimensions, no weight, no original list price, and no production run in the surviving record. Anyone buying one today should judge a unit on its working condition rather than against a factory spec.
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