Yamaha’s NS‑10 speaker has a reputation for its midrange focus — but while its frequency response may be mimicked using EQ, there was way more to this speaker’s popularity with engineers.
I was just watching an online tutorial by iZotope, and they discussed NS‑10s and Auratone cubes being used to focus on the midrange. The question occurred to me whether the same effect could be achieved with simply simultaneously high‑pass and low‑pass filtering the signal at the appropriate frequencies. Is there more to it?
SOS Forum post
SOS Technical Editor Hugh Robjohns replies: The benefits of sealed‑cabinet speakers go a long way beyond just emphasising the midrange. In particular, the ‘time‑domain’ response (effectively, how quickly the speaker starts and stops making a sound) is important. If you’d like to know more about that, I’d recommend checking out Phil Ward’s excellent explanation in SOS September 2008 of what made the NS‑10 so popular: https://sosm.ag/the-ns10-story. In the case of the Auratone, as well as being a sealed‑cabinet design, it’s also a single‑driver speaker, which means there are no crossover filters involved and the sound emerges from a single point.
These factors are all due to the physical characteristics of these speakers, and they can’t really be replicated accurately on a different type of speaker. You can find lots more about the different considerations in speaker design in another of Phil’s articles from SOS June 2019, called Innovation In Loudspeaker Technology: https://sosm.ag/innovation-studio-loudspeaker-technology
Of course, it could be that all you want to do is to focus just on the midrange — for example, you may want to check what your mix could sound like on smaller‑speaker playback systems — and filtering out the lows (and possibly the highs) will do that.