Yamaha Ns - 10 Studio Monitors - The Standard Among Song Mixers
Near-field studio monitors, as opposed to consumer speakers, are designed to present a reliable and unflattering playback of music. They should also reveal the inherent problems of an audio recording and assist the recording engineer in creating a predictable translation to a diverse world of audio systems. Dominating the last three decades atop meter bridges of mixing consoles, in recording studios around the world, are the Yamaha NS-10 near-field monitors. While consumer speakers are designed to make sound as desirable as possible the NS-10's are generally considered to sound unflattering, even "horrible" to many critics. All the more interesting that they rose to such prominence in the recording industry during their 23 years of production. The Yamaha NS-10 are still an industry standard and a tool that, despite it's faults, gets the job done. NS-10 production was halted in 2001 but no replacement has been found... until now!
Originally developed as a hi-fidelity consumer "bookshelf" speaker in 1978, the NS-10 was immediately panned by the audiophile community and basically rejected for it's harsh sound. But a few notable audio engineers embraced the NS-10's brash sound as a useful tool to double check mixes before they were released to their real-world applications. The "harshness" was useful to the sound engineer in portraying problems in recordings that would be even more obvious outside of the controlled environment of the studio. There were good acoustic reasons for this, which I will get into later. But the nasty-sounding little hi-fi speakers quickly became standard pillars of the music industry.
Near-field monitors came into use exactly for the purpose of emulating home and car audio systems. This being said, it is plausibly more important to have a predictable monitor rather than a frequency neutral one. Modern engineers are more likely to work in a variety of studios as well, so having a portable pair of reliable monitors is important in keeping one's bearings. The NS-10's benefitted from good timing and useful characteristics to become the accepted lie detector in sound mixing. Once this standard had been agreed upon by many prominent engineers the rest of the industry followed suit and the characteristic white woofer cones of the NS-10 could be seen atop nearly every studio that called itself professional.
There are more monitors today than can be counted and many strive for "flat" frequency response to ensure that the full spectrum of sound is being portrayed accurately. The NS-10's frequency response is far from flat, with a spiky midrange and a lack luster low end. However the NS-10 was very efficient with a very quick transient response and it handled distortion amazingly well due, in large part, to it's uniquely constructed woofer cone. So it could be said that the NS-10 possessed some positive attributes that helped music mixers as much, if not greater than, the touted flat frequency response, making it the stand-out studio monitor that it is.
This Yamaha Ns-10 was discontinued in 2001 because of the inability to obtain the wood pulp used in constructing the familiar white woofer cone, and the audio industry's workhorse speaker was phased out of production. But the torch has been passed on! White Lines Audio, a speaker company based in Chicago, Illinois, found a way to reproduce the reliable translation of the Ns-10 without the obvious upper midrange problems. The White Lines Audio Model K studio monitor was designed and built as a drop-in replacement for the Ns-10. A protection circuit was also added to protect the tweeter from damaging transient signals. A pleasant upgrade as blown tweeters are always an annoying and costly problem with the Ns-10's. Yamaha has never able to reproduce the Ns-10's sound but White Lines Audio has succeeded, creating in the Model K studio monitor a new standard among song mixers. - 23812
Originally developed as a hi-fidelity consumer "bookshelf" speaker in 1978, the NS-10 was immediately panned by the audiophile community and basically rejected for it's harsh sound. But a few notable audio engineers embraced the NS-10's brash sound as a useful tool to double check mixes before they were released to their real-world applications. The "harshness" was useful to the sound engineer in portraying problems in recordings that would be even more obvious outside of the controlled environment of the studio. There were good acoustic reasons for this, which I will get into later. But the nasty-sounding little hi-fi speakers quickly became standard pillars of the music industry.
Near-field monitors came into use exactly for the purpose of emulating home and car audio systems. This being said, it is plausibly more important to have a predictable monitor rather than a frequency neutral one. Modern engineers are more likely to work in a variety of studios as well, so having a portable pair of reliable monitors is important in keeping one's bearings. The NS-10's benefitted from good timing and useful characteristics to become the accepted lie detector in sound mixing. Once this standard had been agreed upon by many prominent engineers the rest of the industry followed suit and the characteristic white woofer cones of the NS-10 could be seen atop nearly every studio that called itself professional.
There are more monitors today than can be counted and many strive for "flat" frequency response to ensure that the full spectrum of sound is being portrayed accurately. The NS-10's frequency response is far from flat, with a spiky midrange and a lack luster low end. However the NS-10 was very efficient with a very quick transient response and it handled distortion amazingly well due, in large part, to it's uniquely constructed woofer cone. So it could be said that the NS-10 possessed some positive attributes that helped music mixers as much, if not greater than, the touted flat frequency response, making it the stand-out studio monitor that it is.
This Yamaha Ns-10 was discontinued in 2001 because of the inability to obtain the wood pulp used in constructing the familiar white woofer cone, and the audio industry's workhorse speaker was phased out of production. But the torch has been passed on! White Lines Audio, a speaker company based in Chicago, Illinois, found a way to reproduce the reliable translation of the Ns-10 without the obvious upper midrange problems. The White Lines Audio Model K studio monitor was designed and built as a drop-in replacement for the Ns-10. A protection circuit was also added to protect the tweeter from damaging transient signals. A pleasant upgrade as blown tweeters are always an annoying and costly problem with the Ns-10's. Yamaha has never able to reproduce the Ns-10's sound but White Lines Audio has succeeded, creating in the Model K studio monitor a new standard among song mixers. - 23812
About the Author:
Eddie Gizzardo is a longtime user of the Yamaha Ns-10 studio monitor. He now chooses White Lines Audio monitors for his mixing and mastering speakers.
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