Yamaha CP10
A model number that shows up in more studio rack photos than anyone can quite pin down — and the archive is still hunting for the paperwork.
Overview
Here is a page the archive would rather not publish yet, and is publishing anyway, because the record needs to be honest about what it does and does not know. The Yamaha CP10 is a designation that turns up repeatedly in professional audio documentation from the late 1980s and early 1990s — but almost always in passing, as a piece of outboard gear already in the rack, never as the subject of the article itself. No authoritative source has yet surfaced that names the CP10 as a Yamaha product with a spec sheet, a price, or a production run. Until one does, collectors should treat the CP10 as a documented *mention* rather than a documented *instrument*.
The confusion is worth spelling out, because it is the whole story of this entry. The string "CP10" appears in period print attached to at least two entirely different manufacturers. In a November 1993 issue of Studio Sound, a theatrical sound designer working the Old Vic installation refers to "Meyer CP10s" as his preferred equalisers — programmable units he praises for their attention to phase response on adjacent bands, and which he says he owns seventy of. A 1988 issue's equipment lists name "Meyer Sound CP10" equalisers alongside Klark-Teknik and Yamaha outboard. A 2005 Mix tour-credit listing for Mercy Me puts a "Meyer Sound CP10" in the outboard rack next to a Yamaha PM1D console. None of this is a Yamaha keyboard. It is a Meyer Sound equaliser, and the recurring appearance of that model number is almost certainly the source of the "Yamaha CP10" ghost in the catalogue.
There is a second false trail. A January 1977 Studio Sound report from an audio exhibition describes a Dolby cinema processor, the CP50, as "an offshoot of the CP100" — a magnetic/optical film-sound unit, not a synthesizer and not a Yamaha. A Mix (June 1988, p.72) piece on a live sound reinforcement mix references "CP 10 EQs" feeding separate subwoofer groups. A September 1988 High Fidelity test report compares a Lexicon CP-1 against "the Yamaha combination" of a DSP-3000 sound field processor — a genuine Yamaha product, but a DSP processor, and not a CP10. The CP prefix, in other words, was in the water in this era, attached to cinema processors, equalisers, and surround processors alike.
What the archive can state with confidence is narrow: the CP10 name circulated in professional audio contexts during the late 1980s and 1990s, and the bulk of the citable mentions point to a Meyer Sound equaliser rather than a Yamaha instrument. Anyone who has seen a "Yamaha CP10" listed for sale — and they do get listed — should look hard at what is actually in the photograph before bidding. The likeliest outcomes are a mislabelled Meyer equaliser, a mislabelled Yamaha CP-series stage piano of a different number, or a seller repeating a model string they found in a forum thread.
For the collector, this is a page to bookmark and revisit rather than act on. The honest position is that no verified specifications, production dates, original pricing, or documented failures exist in the archive's sources for a Yamaha CP10. The archive does not publish specs it cannot source, and it will not dress up a model-number collision as a product history. If documentation surfaces — a service manual, an owner's card, a dealer sheet, a magazine review that actually names the thing — this entry gets rewritten from the ground up. Until then, the CP10 stands as a cautionary entry: a reminder that in vintage audio, a model number is not a product, and a mention is not a specification.
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