Yamaha's Venova™, NS-5000, and WXC-50 acclaimed as "Winners" at German Design Award

Yamaha Corporation's Venova casual wind instrument, NS-5000 premium bookshelf speaker, and WXC-50 wireless streaming preamp were all announced in the "Winner" category at the internationally prestigious German Design Award 2019, awarded for excellence in products.

The Venova is a completely new type of acoustic wind instrument with an innovative branched-pipe structure and meandering shape that was developed to allow players to enjoy an authentic sound and rich expressiveness with ease. Getting started with Yamaha's Venova is easy, even for players with no previous wind instrument experience, and the instrument can be played with simple fingering resembling that of a recorder. At the same time, the Venova also satisfies more experienced wind instrument players by providing a full two-octave range and the expressiveness of a single-reed instrument, such as a saxophone. The ABS plastic body of the instrument is lightweight, excels in durability, and cleans with water. Due to its compact size, the Venova can be taken virtually anywhere, allowing players to enjoy music easily in a variety of settings ranging from the outdoors to casual music sessions.

・Awards: Good Design Award "Grand Prize" (2017), DFA Design for Asia Awards "Grand Award with Special Mention" (2018)

This flagship speaker system represents the fruition of Yamaha's proprietary speaker technology. Yamaha took up the challenge of technology and materials for this new concept, unconstrained by the limits of conventional speaker design, and developed it as a new standard to lead Hi-Fi speakers into the future. It achieves transparent, next-generation natural sound with reality and comfort, suppressing unwanted sound coloration and specific sound character.

・Awards: iF Design Award (2018), Good Design Award (2016)

This networked audio component supports network audio playback, wireless music playback using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth®, and Yamaha's unique MusicCast® which enables distribution, sharing, and linked playback of musical content among supported devices with a single application. Features a music enhancer that packs advanced sound quality technology into a compact body and appealingly reproduces compressed sound sources, as well as a volume-adaptive EQ capable of ensuring accurate sound balance even at low-volume playback. Now you can comfortably enjoy high-quality audio and musical content, including from high-resolution sound sources.

・Awards: None

* This award-winning WXC-50 is a preamplifier model (not equipped with built-in power amplifier), to be used in conjunction with your own audio amplifier; however, the WXA-50 ( a model equipped with built-in power amplifier) is also available for sale, which is ready to play just by connecting with your favorite speakers.