The Yamaha NS10 Story – How a Hi-Fi Speaker Conquered the Studio World (2008)
soundonsound.com
soundonsound.com
The love/hate of the speaker are really irrelevant factors for the product produced by an audio engineer. There are a couple things that really matter in terms of their 'efficiency': 1) the flat frequency response; and 2) Knowing the qualities of the monitor. If you have a decently treated room and you are somewhat accustomed to working with the NS10s, any engineer worth their salt could produce decent sounds on them.
The article is old so it foregoes the fact that Yamaha have actually tried to profit from the legacy of the NS10 - they produce new more expensive variants with similar design in the crowded studio monitor market. They fit into the space with the typical 5, 6 and 8 inch woofer-standard market with the HS7s for example. https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-hs7-hs8s
The end result is more important than the gear. These will do alright even if they aren't as "pleasing" as something like the Adam series'.
Yes knowing the speakers and the room is a very important aspect. Everyone I have worked with that uses NS10s is because they say they are very forward in the lower mids, not that they are good speakers, but I believe that they just get used to them.
The NS1000, which I used, on the other hand - amazing.
Personally, I can find better monitors that are even more revealing.
And the same applies there: you can buy monitors that can be calibrated but surrounding light makes each monitor and each setup different.
So graphic designers do the same: they know the display monitor in the room. And each end user will see the designed colors a little different, but it doesn't matter.
It probably could have been any other speaker of the time, what was critical was the fact that it was in every single studio without fail. It was a constant variable in an equation where every other variable was in flux.
I'm a big fan of ATC loudspeakers (a UK firm, btw), which are quite popular in studios and performance halls¹. Example: The Walt Disney Concert Hall — that wavy, stainless Frank Gehry building here in LA — is outfitted with custom ATC cabinets as the house PA (last I know of, at least).
ATC's powered monitors are freakishly overbuilt and can play to stupendous SPLs. I've got dreams of someday having my own set of the active SCM20, which are the perfect size for small living spaces, but they make powered units as big as 150 litres per cabinet². Whoa.
My last set of high-end speakers is their SCM11, about the same size. Key house feature: they design(make?) their own bass/mid drivers which are rugged af, and feature monster magnets for their size.
Back to TFA; I've never heard the NS-10, but I have always heard they kind of suck. And the reasoning never held water IMHO; it stands to reason that you'd end up EQing the mix to make it sound good on the NS-10, but that would in turn make the mix all out of whack on proper equipment.
It's like trying to design the next Corvette with the prototypes running on 175/70R13 tires; how you could tune the system under test (here: the music being mastered/mixed) with such a floppy foundation is beyond me.
-- ¹—http://atcloudspeakers.co.uk/studios-soundstages ²—http://atcloudspeakers.co.uk/professional/loudspeakers/scm11...
Src: http://www.chevrolet.com/performance/corvette-stingray-sport...
“”” Standard Brembo® brakes provide ample stopping power at a variety of speeds. Standard 19" front and 20" wheels come wrapped in Michelin® Pilot® Super Sport ZP summer-only tires† for incredible grip and precision control. “””
The C5s had not-the-best tires, but they were still developed for the car: https://www.thoughtco.com/best-replacement-tires-for-c6-corv...
Case in point: folks love Low there design speakers (full range single driver cone) for excellence in both those aspects, plus they are super efficient which allows pairing with exotic low-power triode valve amps — also known for fantastic detail. However, Lowthers are usually 1/4 wave transmission line enclosures, IIRC, and IME studio requirements are best suited to acoustic suspension designs.
Long story short, it sounds like the NS-10 is better than I have always been told.
Just brilliant.
I wouldn't want to use them as my only speakers for listening to music, but I can definitely see how they come in handy as a reference tool. Same reason as why many studios have Avantone ("Horrortone") MixCubes and various other less-than-HiFi loudspeakers in addition to their nice monitors, and why they check their mixes on car stereos, bluetooth speakers and clock radios. They want it to sound good on the gear normal people use, not just high-end studio monitors.
Games used to let you tweak everything (Half-Life was particularly good about it), but today we're lucky to get a brightness/gamma slider.
I see people use this all the time as their main speaker? I usually ask why and if they say because it is a standard I stop talking music production. If they say they use them because they use it to hear the sound distorted then I am 100% in the conversation. These are used to hear what the "real world" crappy speaker system would sound like. Problem is EVERY speaker made the last 20 years is better than these speakers. The main response to why they use a NS-10 is "If it sounds good on NS10s then it'll sound good on anything."
I HATE HATE HATE the NS10 speaker. It was used because it was such a BAD speaker. In front of me I have Genelec speakers. They sound so good and clear. NS 10 sound like a brown paper bag with foam is covering the speaker and all low end and high end sounds were scooped out and I have my hands covering my ears!
Spot on. I dabble in electronic music production and this is precisely why it's such a "good" speaker, because you want your music to sound good on all systems, and the NS10 is going to simulate what your music sounds like on stock Apple earbuds. If it can sound good on those, you can bet they will sound even better on virtually anything else.
True, but we are not comparing for the purpose of finding the "best value for money", we are trying to find an answer to the question: do the NS10s reflect the situation of today's average listener? My argument is that they suck so much that they are now below average... So I think they're not the right monitor choice in 2017
Ahahahaha no.
You can't convince me they're worse than cell phone, tablet, and laptop speakers, which is how an awful lot of music is being consumed.
What the manufacturer means doesn't matter, the real-life use does, and there they are often the primary sound source (if only by the virtue of being the only option available when one doesn't have their headphones handy, or, even more often, wants to share sound with someone).
>I have heard some phones from HTC that sounded MUCH better than NS10.
Maaaaybe. Now try something that's not a flagship, but what 98% of the people have.
My brothers studio, where music for UK film and TV music was made, had NS10's as near fields. They sounded atrocious, I mean really bad. Leaving aside their electromechanical benefits, which are pretty well covered in the article, the accepted notion was that if you could make sounds sound ok with them with all their colourisation, then you'd get a fair result on televisions, radios and so on. In fact thinking about it, if you wanted music to sound good on Beats, then they'd still make a good reference choice.
Their listenability was pretty well irrelevant.
https://www.thomann.de/gb/topseller_GF_studio_monitors.html
Take your pick - so much choice for good speakers these days. Your room will be a larger factor in the sound than any difference between two decent pairs of speakers (of same size).
I actually still like the sound of my Paradigms, but something came loose in one of them during a move so now it crackles on low base notes.
I paid $1200 for my home studio monitoring setup back in 1995. It was a set of Tannoy System 600 speakers (about $700) and a Hafler amplifier (about $500). I still own and use the speakers today, but if I were doing any real work, I'd go pick up something new in the $500-$1000 range, and it would be better than my setup from two decades ago.
My point is that there's been a revolution in the quality:price ratio for audio equipment. It's not built as reliably as it used to be, but the quality of sound you can get at a mid-range price, even in transducers like speakers and microphones (which don't follow the same innovation rules as digital tech), is astonishing.
You can safely search any major online music retailer, select your price range, sort by rating, and buy the top-rated thing in your price range, and you'll almost certainly be happy with the result. The product will sound really good for the price (no matter what that price is, though there's a law of rapidly diminishing returns on the high end).
Speakers are inherently more expensive to manufacture, so they lag well behind headphones in terms of price-to-performance. The other crucial factor is the acoustic quality of your listening room, which in most cases is a far more significant factor than the quality of your monitors. Rather than buying expensive monitors, you're usually better off buying inexpensive nearfield monitors like the Presonus Eris and spending the rest of your budget on bass traps and diffusers.
For monitors, lots of Genelec, Tannoy, Mackie, JBL, and Adam stuff is out there. Focal Twin6 BEs are particularly nice. None are really cheap (they’re all >$500 / one) and go up from there. Meyer HD-1s are apparently amazing, but they’re ~$9k for a pair. Their newer, cheaper Amie is $3500 each. Their new flagship Bluehorn stuff is $xx,xxx per channel. Lots of home studios use KRK Rokits because they’re cheap ($150/channel on up).
I disagree heres.
"Real" speakers might be better, but most people listen to music on crappy laptop speakers or crappy bluetooth 1-inch mono speakers. The quality of the average sound reproduction device has been getting worse the last 20 years.
I just picked up an Audio Pro Addon T3 on sale the other day. It's obviously no match for my room corrected studio monitor setup with dual 12" subs in regards to sub bass, detail and overall SPL, but I'm absolutely astounded at how much sound (and bass!) they've managed to cram into a speaker that's smaller than a sixpack and plays for ~30 hours on battery.
They're probably doing a ton of DSP and probably some missing fundamental bass trickery, but it does sound really convincing.
I wouldn't buy any bluetooth speaker much smaller than this one, though. You can only cheat physics so far.
What are you talking about? Nobody uses the NS10 as their main speaker today. It's been a decade since they were in common use and nearly two decades since they were even manufactured.
These speakers still have a small cult following based on the strength of the brand during their reign, but it makes little sense to pay "vintage" equipment prices for them when you can buy better new speakers for a similar or lower price. Speakers don't get better with age.
Regardless of the continuing existence of these speakers in active roles I am wildly skeptical that the person I'm responding to sees them "all the time". Unless they keep going to the same old studio that hasn't been upgraded since 1989 and having the same conversation with the owner every time. That'd be weird.
My "all the time" is going from the late 1980s to 2007. Though I still see people with only NS10. There was a studio in my city 2 blocks away. NS10 were on the wall and was the primary ears for the mixing.
It's pretty rare to find NS10s in active studios today, in my experience (which is much more limited than in the past, but even when I was working professionally in the field two decades ago, the NS10 was on its way out among the thought leaders in the industry).
They were a reliable workhorse that had a good run and helped make a lot of great records, but they aren't really relevant today. I worked on them a lot in the 90s, and I don't think they sounded like a brown paper bag, but I can see how one would prefer a more modern design (I've never owned or wanted to own a pair). But, they had their positive aspects.
I don't know much about professional audio, why these are good speakers?
NS10s sound a little harsh in the mid-range and brittle on the high end. But, you can discern all the frequency ranges (except the low end, where they roll off and need to be filled in with subs) with great precision (for the era).
The reason for their good reputation among many was their accuracy and pervasiveness. The reason for the poor reputation was their fatiguing harshness, making them less comfortable for long mixing sessions. Both can be true; we can recognize the good and the bad.
They sound REVEALING. That's not the same as 'good' or 'accurate'. I'm not contradicting you: you can discern all the frequency ranges, and all the tones, and the things you did on other speakers that people complained about in your mix and you went 'but, but, I did a really good mix!' and then you listen on the NS10s and the complaints you got are suddenly right there staring you in the face, so you can't miss 'em.
That's largely because of the exceptional time-domain performance as the article correctly reports. These are not the only speakers that can do that, but they're really good at it. That plus the harsh mid-emphasis and brain-fryingly bright tweeters means the things are ruthlessly revealing. Accurate would be more sympathetic to good mixes and let you slide, but NS10s are merciless and you must get things exactly right: in mixes, in getting sounds, in auditioning things like plugins.
That said, I think there's a temptation to exaggerate. A phrase like "brain-fryingly bright tweeters" means something completely different to someone who isn't an audio engineer than it does to someone who's worked in studios or dealt with pro gear. NS10s, while harsh by studio monitor standards, are likely indistinguishable from other mid-range speakers of the era to the average listener. The difference is small, and only really becomes an issue with extended critical listening...8 hours sitting dead center in front of these speakers does feel brain-frying. But, a casual listen wouldn't reveal that. They'd sound like punchy, bright, tight, speakers. Which is what most studio monitors sound like to untrained listeners.
Which is why I'm kinda shaking my head at the comments here saying that NS10s sound "terrible"! It's just not true. They sound like what they set out to make them sound like. And, most importantly, the resulting recordings that came out of more than a decade of market dominance speaks for itself.
They aren't terrible speakers. They were a pretty good quality professional tool used by many professionals for many years to excellent results.
Once you use them you are kind of stuck. Your ear gets use to them and you mix to them. You can go to several different studios and you can mix easily. The idea is that the sound that comes out of the speakers goes directly to your ears and not reflexive sound. I have 1030a and they are small but I can mix in bad acoustic rooms and still have a great reference. You can plug any speaker of theirs into any of their sub woofers and have the same reference sound. So the use of Genelec has been growing and have become the standard. Sadly they aren't cheap but they are worth it. Mine are almost 20 years old and they still are great.
There are ATC, PMC, Amphion, BareFoot, Unity Audio, and many others that all sounds more revealing and better.
Though they seem to be big in broadcast studios and post-production places or those where people haven't auditioned a large number of monitors.
You clearly haven't read the article. The NS10 is an exceptionally good speaker in certain respects that are not immediately obvious and that convey vital information about a mix. It has superlative time-domain performance due to the sealed box design and the extremely stiff and well-damped woofer. This time-domain accuracy reveals immense amounts of detail that are lost on a conventional reflex-ported nearfield monitor. Crucial decisions about phase and balance in the bass and midrange frequencies are far easier on an NS10 than almost any other monitor. They're not pleasant to listen to, but they produce good mixes, which is entirely the point of studio monitors.
A speaker with similar performance and a similar role is the Auratone 5C, or the more modern Avantone MixCube. In hi-fi terms they are absolutely atrocious, but few other speakers are so revealing of mixing errors.
It is only relatively recently that full-range nearfield monitors have managed to approach the time-domain performance of the NS10 - the Neumann KH310, the Unity Audio Boulder and the Barefoot Sound Micromain achieve that feat, but at vastly greater cost than the faithful old NS10.
If you do not understand why the NS10 is such an iconic and useful piece of equipment, you fundamentally do not understand mixing.
How so? They were "GOOD?" Where did I miss that?
At the conclusion:
"And the practical? Well, it's certainly true that the NS10s have a mid-heavy balance and little bass extension. This is especially so if they are not mounted close to a suitable boundary — such as a big desk or a rear wall — to provide low mid-range reinforcement. They're also just as revealing of any shortcomings in the monitoring chain as they are of the mix, and they don't take very kindly to being driven loud. While Newells and Holland showed they have very low levels of distortion, they do suffer from thermal compression, which will not only cause wide-band dynamic attenuation in response to high levels of drive, but will upset the characteristics of the crossover filters as the voice-coil resistance of the drivers increases. As temperature rises, the bass/mid low-pass filter frequency will increase significantly (and the tweeter high-pass filter frequency will reduce), and begin to give prominence to the resonances at the top end of the bass/mid driver's response. When NS10s are driven too hard by a poor amplifier, fed by a sub-standard monitor output, and mounted without any boundary reinforcement, you might well find that they sound horrible to the point of being unusable."
ALSO???? If you do not understand why the NS10 is such an iconic and useful piece of equipment, you fundamentally do not understand mixing.
Okay your super off putting. I owned my own studio and small record label with successful bands. I don't know how in the world anything you just said is fundamental to mixing? NS10 are a bad sounding mixer that is a displeasure to listen to. Not one modern near field attempts to be a NS10. Some people think that it is a bonus but NO ONE is saying these were a technical work of greatness. This articles point was that it is odd that they were successful and that they are Hate or Love. They list out some interesting points but nothing is saying they are "Too Good." Quote me some text.
Even if you owned your own studio, aren't there lots of people with that same resume line who were terrible at mixing?
You may be 100% correct, but it was not communicated in a style that would let someone to that conclusion.
"Thanks to its time-domain accuracy and mid-heavy balance, the NS10 is an extremely revealing speaker that takes no prisoners. In other words, if the recording is poor, the NS10 will tell you in no uncertain terms. You have to work harder to make things sound good on the NS10 not because it sounds bad but because recorded music, even today, is often a poor approximation of the real thing, and the NS10 reveals it. I found a familiar comment on the SOS Forum that reads: "If it sounds good on NS10s then it'll sound good on anything." Again, that's not because the NS10 is inherently poor, but because it is effective at revealing the fundamental compromises inherent in recorded music. If you've worked hard on NS10s at a mix and overcome those compromises, or perhaps cleverly disguised them, the mix will translate well to other systems because it is a good mix. Put another way, the NS10 better enables you to get to the nub of a mix by more accurately reproducing its fundamental time-domain information — and it is this which can make the task of mixing seem more challenging."
To my mind, that is a very strong justification for the NS10. The NS10 is not without flaws, but it remains a perfectly viable professional tool that can be used to produce excellent mixes. Although it has been superseded by many modern high-end monitors, it retains some distinct advantages over the inexpensive ported monitors that are used in the vast majority of small studios.
What it is saying is that the NS10 = What people were listening to. That is no longer the case.
Did you not read how these things are not flat and not clear in any range besides the mids in the article and totally depended on volume, environment and positioning?
NS10 are the Vim vs EMACS arguement but it is more Vim vs ed.
> I've also heard great mixes on Genelecs but only from engineers who have used them in the same room for a few years.
Rooms don't matter on Genelec and yes you will notice that the majority of high end studios mostly use Genelec due to the fact that rooms matter much less with them and the skill can transfer anywhere. That was my whole point on why Genelec are the most popular near field monitors in high end studios.
Don't believe the hype; they weren't terrible speakers. They weren't good speakers, but they weren't terrible, either.
The context that gets lost, I think, in a conversation today is that you could easily find worse speakers in the same price range, from similarly respected brands, back then. NS10 was a reliably consistent speaker available in every market at a price that was good for the time. The consumer and prosumer audio revolution was just starting to ramp up, so getting clearly better quality had a very high price back then.
Even at the time, every experienced engineer acknowledged that the NS10 had some flaws; they were a bit tiring to listen to for long hours. There were harsh especially in the upper mid-range, and brittle in the high end. But, you could hear everything in the mix pretty accurately, and you could estimate what it would sound like on the average home or car stereo system, once you'd spent some time mixing on them.
It's also worth mentioning that NS10 isn't the only cargo-culted speaker (and this article briefly mentions Aurotones, which also were in several of the studios I worked in, to provide a "car stereo" simulation) or product. The audio industry is all about cargo cults. Specific compressors, microphones, reverbs, preamps, and these days plugins, have "can do no wrong" products that everyone covets; often despite some obvious flaws.
When you have an industry that rides the line between science and art so closely, and that has extremely unpredictable trends, you'll find an almost religious zeal around the tools. NS10s were king because they were used on some famous records and showed up in some famous studios at the right time.
Sometimes the cargo cult gets attached to something that is really, demonstrably, good (Neve preamp channels or even the entire console in which they live, Neumann microphones, etc.), but at any given time there are probably several comparably good products that don't get the industry nod because they don't have the right connections at the right time, or the records they appear on have the poor luck to go unnoticed by the listening public due to shifts in taste, etc.
The cargo cult had its uses. It allowed people in a low-information, high-expense, industry to make reasonable choices just by talking to other engineers. You wouldn't kill your studio by choosing NS10s back in 1990. But, these days, the cargo cult is silly, and counter-productive. We have an embarrassment of riches in terms of high-quality low-cost equipment, test tools are available on a tiny budget so you can literally know exactly what you've got with some time and knowledge about how to use the tools. There are high-quality reviews of every product going back decades on the web so you can choose between new and used with confidence.
Nobody buys a product like an NS10 for the exact reasons people bought the NS10 in the 80s (cost+proven+available+good enough+cargo cult approved), anymore. And, there are few products exactly like the NS10, anymore. The mid-range, where the NS10 lived, is dominated by very high quality products today from a dozen different manufacturers (including Yamaha, who have produced a very good series of "sequels" to the NS10). The low-end has plenty of stinkers, still, but they're cheap as hell.
It's a different world, though the audio engineering cargo cult lives on.
The exact same would apply to Grado headphones. Pretty terrible to use long-term, but act like magnifiers for flaws in the mixing process.
I had an interesting experience using my Grados to play Ratchet & Clank on the Playstation. They made it easy to distinguish small details in the tornado of sounds during the big battles, enabling me to literally "play by ear", but in a good way.
But yes, tiring.
I like the planar magnetic cans a lot more.
As I've been building out my home studio, I've been constantly surprised by how old most popular studio equipment is.
For instance, one of the most popular microphones - Shure SM58 - was originally launched in 1966 and has remained unchanged since. It is still the industry standard, especially for touring
The pro audio industry is strange in that it doesn't seem to embrace change. You could pick up a producer from the 1980s and drop him into a modern studio, and he'd still end up using a lot of the same equipment
So many places have switched over to mixing and recording "in the box".
I think the 80's producer would be familiar with any outboard gear, as you say, but be completely flummoxed that the computer is King, and that so much is virtualised into DAW plugins. He/she would also be baffled by the idea of "unlimited audio tracks", for starters... I remember starting with a DOS-based sequencer called Voyetra in the 80's.
I last played around with recording software back in 2004 or 05. I think it was Cubase. I don't remember it being a particularly pleasant experience.
Moving from that to Ableton has been a revelation. Modern software synths like Serum are absolutely mind blowing in what they can do.
I'm very happy with my pair of small KRK Rokit at home, how would you compare the two?
I personally use the ATH-MSR7NC (music) and ATH-ADG1x (music/gaming/comms) at home, and the ATH-ANC9 at work. The ANC9s are great for the work environment, and far easier on the ears in terms of avoiding tinnitus whilst blocking distracting noise than the 50s.
But for the $150-200 range, MSR7s are a much better pair of headphones, and usually go for about $175.
I wish I could test a pair of NS10's against the HS8's.
They may not be the outright best value for money when it comes to features and buzzwords, and they certainly don't have the cachet of more boutique brands, but they always deliver a solid good quality product.
As an example from a completely different segment, I used to ride a Yamaha XT660X motorcycle. If you read reviews and bike forums, sports bike riders would decry it for being too slow, dual-sport riders would decry it for not being a BMW GS-series, and supermoto riders would decry it for being too heavy.
None of that mattered, because I found it to be the most enjoyable bike I've ever ridden. Just enough power to get into trouble, great handling to get you out of trouble again, extremely comfortable and not so light that every gust of wind would blow you around. It may not be the best at anything, but it absolutely excels as an all-round bike for ordinary people like me, and during the time I had it, it was completely flawless, no issues at all (some people would find that boring, I guess).
My HS8's are interfaced via a Yamaha AG06 sound card btw. balanced outputs perfect for the monitors, stable as fuck and also I can get pretty decent latency with it (about 2-3ms @ 44100hz on a 9 year old core i7!!)
o/
The little USB mixer? I love those things, I just wish I could get one with more stereo inputs, a single RCA stereo in and one aux in (with no volume adjustment) isn't really enough. Though I guess an external RCA switch could take care of that.