Article Preview - The Yamaha NS10 Story

What is it about the Yamaha NS10? If any piece of pro audio hardware deserves that over-used term "industry standard" it has to be the NS10. In a professional audio world continually seduced by the next big thing, where plug-ins can provide a near instantaneous GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) fix, where products live or die thanks to their quantity of bells and whistles, and where the number of contemporary nearfield monitors that could apparently do the job of an NS10 is almost beyond count... the venerable, tired old Yamaha is the one piece of kit that still appears in almost every photograph of a smiling engineer posed at his desk.

You don't have to hang around long in the SOS Forum for a thread to appear that features the Yamaha NS10. Even in threads that begin with some other monitor subject, the NS10 seems to possess a gravitational influence that inexorably results in discussion of its merits, or otherwise. Few subjects excite so much passionate opinion and, as is the way with passionate opinions, you don't find many in the middle ground: nobody says they "quite like" or "slightly dislike" the NS10; it's a definite case of love or hate, as evidenced by the SOS Forum quotes I've included in the 'Love 'Em Or Hate 'Em?' box. Within that context of polarised opinion, the NS10 generates a phenomenon that at first glance seems a little odd. You find those that, in professional terms can't live without it but often don't particularly enjoy listening to it, and, similarly, those that refuse to give it studio room but are often happy to admit that professionally it does a job.

So what's going on? Not only should the NS10 by rights be nothing but a small footnote in the history of recorded music, but also there is precious little consensus or understanding about why we respond to it in the way we do, and why it's still found in almost every studio. That's where this feature comes in — so if you've ever wondered why you're still using NS10s, even though you don't particularly enjoy the way they sound, and if you're prepared to forget some of what you thought you knew about monitors, read on...

Part of the NS10's problem is that the general understanding of how we respond to monitors is coloured by their apparent technical simplicity and by manufacturers, sometimes innocently and sometimes intentionally, encouraging this phenomenon. In reality, the psychoacoustics of the perception of music reproduced by loudspeakers, and how this relates to their technical performance and specification, is an immensely complex subject that doesn't take kindly to simplification by marketing departments. By the time it lands on a sales brochure, a frequency-response curve, for example, is typically meaningless in terms of providing any information that's useful to an end user — even if it was measured competently and had any technical value in the first place. But then, in some respects, it can suit a manufacturer of monitors if their customers don't know too much.

Misunderstanding also tends to breed misinformation, which is often disseminated by well-meaning amateurs: those whose knowledge of a subject is sketchy are always prey to the intuitively plausible but utterly wrong explanation for one phenomenon or another. The hi-fi sector is well known for enthusiastically buying into the plausible (and often the implausible) as opposed to the factually correct. But we serious audio practitioners shouldn't start feeling smug, because the pro sector is not by any means squeaky clean on that front, especially where monitors are concerned. Occam's Razor, the principle beloved of physicists, which says that the most likely correct explanation for any phenomenon is probably the simplest one, never seems to have reached the audio business!