Hacker News Reader

Comment by SeanLuke | Hacker News Reader

I do not think this is at all true. I'd say that a far larger group bedroom musicians have modern Yamaha monitors than KRK Rokits etc.; and in an amazing number of studios NS10s still predominate.

There is a special sauce that makes NS10s effective as debugging monitors: their extremely fast time response to transients. Most monitors, including the Rokits and current Yamahas, have optimized for other things.

View on HN

The new Yamaha monitors are reasonably popular but there are way more Rokit monitors out there.

I’ve heard the transient response argument before but I don’t see evidence that it makes the NS10 more useful. People love to look at graphs and jump on whatever makes a particular, popular product unique and use it as an explanation for its popularity. However, the transient response you actually hear will have contributions from room reflections. Any analysis of transient response that considers the speaker itself, but not the whole acoustic system, and doesn’t touch on the sensitivity of the human ear to transient response, is incomplete.

The benefits of having a speaker with tighter transients is audible in any room, though more so in treated rooms. The ability to properly perceive transients and handle them appropriately is majorly enhanced by a speaker with proper transient response across the whole frequency spectrum. When handling sounds it's imperative that the audio engineer is able to manage these parts of a sound source. The NS10 definitely contributes to making this task easier to handle, as can be attested to by most (all?) audio engineers who have used these speakers. Dismissing analysis of transient response as a wrongfully isolated metric sounds ignorant of the audio engineering process to me.

Now, does this benefit outweigh the negatives of this speaker? Maybe it once did, but today I definitely wouldn't accept the way this speakers characteristics make it a mid forward screaming demon that shatters your ears before a full working day is over.

I think you may be responding to something I didn’t write. I’m asking for some kind of evidence or reasoning that speaker transient response has the kind of importance people ascribe to it, or plausibly could have this kind of importance.

Add 10ms group delay at 50 Hz to a mix. You can very easily degrade transient response and evaluate the audible difference.

If you want reasoning of the importance, it should be obvious and it's also spelled out in the article

>> Group delay is not some imaginary construct that helps acousticians feel important, it's real — and it means, for the reflex-loaded NS10 option, that a bass-guitar fundamental at 60Hz will arrive at the listening position around 9ms after the second harmonic at 120Hz. Put another way, and expressed as a distance, the low fundamentals of the bass guitar (and parts of the drum kit) will sound as if they are nearly four metres behind the rest of the band (you can insert your own bass player gag here). Low-frequency group delay doesn't only influence mix decisions: it also varies widely between speakers and, unlike low frequency level, which can be adjusted via EQ, once its influence on tracking or mix decision has been 'printed' to the mix, it can't be undone.

I can see how you would read it as such, but I'm mostly saying: Transients are a huge part of how we perceive sound. A speaker with properly timed transient response allows the speaker to reproduce sound more accurately. The importance of this attribute naturally follows.

The unique characteristics of certain sounds will be lost when the speaker is unable to translate its wavelengths properly in the analogue space within the required period.

It’s not a question of whether you can hear transient response differences, because the answer to that question is obviously yes.

The question is whether the differences between the transient response in the NS10 and the transient response in other speakers is a good explanation of why people like the NS10s, and I can think of some ways that we could figure this out experimentally.

I suspect the transient response is only a small part of a much larger picture which includes: the NS10s are popular and people are used to them, the NS10s have a midrange emphasis that helps people hear problems in the midrange, the NS10s are sealed which affects how you should place them relative to the wall behind them, etc.

Right! I feel you have been heavily implying it isn't a trait worth considering, which it obviously is. Transients do matter, and any mixer worth his salt will recognise when the speaker is fighting against them in this regard.

I personally think the tight transient response coupled with the mid forward character is what makes it a solid tool worth considering. Remove either trait and the speaker would lose its usefulness. My suspicion would be that the transient handling plays an important part of why people like working with these speakers.

As to why they are popular: I'm totally on board with calling it hype reaching critical mass. The NS10s sounds terrible, but they are pretty consistent between rooms given their sealed nature. If you can count on it being everywhere it is worth learning as a tool. The speaker also being revealing of transients and a critical band of frequencies is the icing on the cake here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com