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For anyone who is not into music production, these are the most ubiquitous audio monitors on the planet, for two basic reasons:

a) They are not very expensive

b) Given how popular they are, there's no other pair of monitors any given user is more likely to have used before... Meaning they are a "familiar reproduction baseline" for musicians, producers and engineers who are often working outside of their own studios and have to make critical decisions on the spot.

In recent decades, as audio monitoring fidelity dramatically improved, NS10s also became increasingly useful as secondary monitoring devices. "My mix sounds great on these hi-fi speakers — let me see if it also translates well to my ("crappier") NS10s!"

Finally, for anyone looking to get serious about audio monitoring for an arguably reasonable price (compared to other pro options), I highly recommend monitors by HEDD, a Berlin-based company founded by physicist Heinz Klaus (formerly R&D lead at ADAM, another solid audio monitor manufacturer whose products I also used for years). Here's Sound on Sound's review of the pair I currently own: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/hedd-type-20

The time/frequency response graph ("waterfall") is incredibly good on the NS10; in layman's terms, it stops sounding as soon as the input stops, right across the frequency spectrum. Some much more expensive monitors are terrible at this by comparison and it makes a big difference to the perceived "accuracy" of the speaker. Partly this is inherent to the sealed box design but there's also something about the paper woofer in the NS10 that's inherently good. It also has really low harmonic distortion. Rather bright, though...

The problem with this theory is that in any listening environment, except for something like an anechoic chamber, the decay time will be dominated by the room. So if this is the explanation, some pieces of the explanation are missing.

The air in a sealed box acts as a resistance to the woofer. It will stop earlier than in a ported design, after being moved by the amp.

This is not correct. How a woofer stops depends on its damping factor. The damping factor depends on the design of the driver and enclosure. You can find sealed speakers with poor damping and ported speakers with excellent damping.

TIL, Thank you!

yes, but for the same room, you can still improve group delay / 'latency' by getting a better loudspeaker.

There's also a widespread urban-myth style idea that they are "crappy" and inferior. In fact they have very good audio properties as monitors given their specifications and price range. They're not used because "if it sounds good on this crappy set it will sound good elsewhere". They're used because they're actually revealing and good monitors. The SoS article touches on that.

> In fact they have very good audio properties as monitors given their specifications

They're "good" for mixing engineers because they enable them to make better decisions about their mixes. That does not mean they are "good" for listening to music.

> They're used because they're actually revealing and good monitors.

I'll point out that if you're actually trying to enjoy your music, "revealing" isn't a good quality. You want flattering speakers, or at the very least flat ones.

There's also different models of the NS-10. The original NS-10m was a much worse speaker than any other iteration after it. That's the one that earned notoriety. The other models aren't nearly as offputting.

They are popular and "crappy" in the same way as Sony MDR-7506 headphones are, i.e not pleasant to listen to, but get the job done

I had a friend who did post-production psychoacoustics for many big-name acts and labels. He had incredible ears, and could call frequencies by hearing them. His studio was a gear-nerds wet-dream, and had all sorts of high end stuff. He also had NS10s, because they "provide the baseline". It was kinda funny, all these high end monitors, and on the some wall, 6 NS10s.

NS10s are known to sound like crap. They have very poor low bass frequency representation and mids and highs don't sound great on them either. As mentioned elsewhere, their transient response is exceptional -- due to hvaing no ports. This makes mid frequencies in the 1k-4k range super clear and identify any mix issues you have in that range.

The other reason NS10s are used is because if your track sounds good on them, the track will sound good on anything -- the worst walkman, crappiest radio, cheapest car stereo...

They're for getting a good mix, not a good sound.

If there is one thing the article disproves, it's the myth that the NS10s sound "like crap".

I'm an AES member and have a good few dozen other audio engineers as friends and we universally agree that the NS10 sounds like shit. It's literally a feature.

Its whole purpose is to put a microscope to a specific range of frequencies.

Listening to music with it is not something you would ever do for fun. Anything bass-heavy or just mixed loud in general (most music since the 90s) will be incredibly fatiguing to the point of painful on them.

Shoutout for another offshoot of ADAM: Eve(!) Audio. I had the pleasure to work on their SC307 monitors in a well treated room, and they are so good. Solid, clear, and accurate, the best speakers I've used.

I understand the they use internal DSP to handle the crossover and do high resolution frequency correction.

These are not for the same purpose as NS10s, which are like the "if it sounds good on these, it'll sound good anywhere" monitors. They are more like a microscope for hearing all the details of your mix in hi-res.

I know NS-10 boxes from my first studio experiences in the 80s. You somehow internalize the frequency response and you know that there are NS-10 in every studio, even semi-professionell ones. That makes it easy to compare the sound of your mix in several different studios.

Nowadays there are many monitors available with a much better frequency response for less money, e.g. KRK or Behringer. But still many studios have NS-10 just for compatibility.

JBL also has the LSR line of monitor speakers that are quite inexpensive for their bang-for-buck ratio.

> "My mix sounds great on these hi-fi speakers — let me see if it also translates well to my ("crappier") NS10s!"

The NS10 have an excellent transient response according to some paper I read. Probably the one linked in the article.

I just had to look up the price (in the review): £2998 per pair including VAT, or roughly $3667. Wow! I'm glad I'm not into music hardware. :)

As a friend who produced award-winning albums used to say, "I hope my kid gets into drugs — music studios are too dangerous!"

lol those are 2300 each! audio gear is nuts. there’s no way they’re 10 times better than my adam t5vs

I own pair of original NS10s with upgraded tweeters. I bought them for $25 from my university with blown out tweeters and replaced the tweeters for $75. They're in mint condition: I still have the front grills. These speakers are from the early 1980s and yet are still rather valuable. For a long time I did not realize they were so sought after nor understood why: they were just the monitors with crappy bass response that I used for my synths.

From the postings here, it seems that a lot of music production people don't understand either.

The NS10 has poor frequency response, not particlarly flat and with a big drop off in the bass. They sound pretty bad. Many people have long seen their ubiquity in studios and assumed that they're used either (1) because people are familiar with them or (2) because if you can get it to sound good on an NS10, it'll sound good on any crummy customer speaker (which is a myth that needs to die).

There's some truth to #1 but that's not the main reason. Instead NS10s are very good at one thing exactly: debugging. Unlike your typical monitor, these are unported speakers with an unusual driver and stiff paper cone woofers rather than the soft plastic used nowadays. As a result, while their frequency response is crummy, these speakers have rather unusually good time domain response, transients, and group delay. This article is pointing this out: if your mix has problems in this respect, these speakers will make it rather obvious, whereas your high-end wonderful-bass monitors will cover it up.

NS10s are the gdb of the speaker world. Of couse for my own uses, I'd be happier with a better sounding speaker.

What is group delay? Couldn't understand wikipedia.

Related:

The Yamaha NS10 Story – How a Hi-Fi Speaker Conquered the Studio World (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15412686 - Oct 2017 (96 comments)

Rokits are the new NS10s. Go to a studio and you might see Rokits there, alongside a nicer set of nearfield monitors. Bedroom musicians have Rokits, bedroom producers become successful and rent studio time, and the Rokits are familiar.

Familiarity is important. If I know what NS10s sound like, I know how to use them to find problems in my mixes. Same with Rokits.

There may be some of this special sauce that makes NS10s particularly appropriate for monitoring, but the familiarity is a big deal.

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.

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.

Rokits have had lots of quality issues, they seem to fail fairly often after a few years. They also refresh or adjust the product line fairly often (?)

I can't see them taking that NS10 place (20+ years in production).

I’m saving up to buy another pair of Yamaha monitor speakers. The Yamaha HS8. From what I’ve been reading online the HS8 seem like a good fit for me.

https://usa.yamaha.com/products/proaudio/speakers/hs_series/...

I got a set of HS80Ms (precursor to the HS8) a bit over 10 years ago and I love them. Saw lots of commentary about "bright" sound but I've found them awesome.

I run my beloved HS8 since ~8 or so Years and would buy them again. The only downside is the rear Air outlet, which forces some distance to Walls.

I love when articles about stuff from music or vfx/animation show up here. Anyone who's ever recorded in a studio knows these things, and the weird relationship producers and engineers have with them. I always meant to pick up a set but never did.

Great monitors, functionally replaced by the perhaps even better HS series.

aren't they ported though, and thus completely different to the NS10s and none of the features that made them such a useful tool? i've never actually heard any of the HS series though.

Why did you phrase that as a question? The frequency response of the HS series was made to be the same as the NS10s.

Frequency response is easy to measure but it’s only a small part of the picture. If we only cared about frequency response, we would be able to EQ out the differences between speakers. For the record, we can’t do that. Different speakers have different performance off-axis, different time domain response, and that’s not considering minor effects like distortion. The off-axis response is important because people don’t sit exactly in the “sweet spot” on-axis, and because the off-axis response is heard indirectly after it reflects off surfaces in the room.

There’s a lot of science here and on-axis frequency response is only one thing people measure when designing speaker systems.

I phrased it as a question because I didn't know the answer and didn't have time to Google it straight away, but I recalled that they were ported from a review I read several years ago. I had the impression they were of a completely different character to the NS10. As I say, I've never heard them myself, so happy to be corrected!

But their time-domain response is radically different, and that's what mattered.

Sauce?

The new Yamahas are ported and come with soft plastic cones. Their time domain response will be very different from NS10s, no matter how white Yamaha makes the cones look. [They also sound much better].

The article...

Read the article, didn't say that. Sounds made up to me.

Every time there's a music studio shown on TV I point out the mandatory Yamaha NS-10s and Herman Miller Aeron chair and say "Look, there's my speakers and chair!"

DT990 pro headphones all the way for my audio productions. Unfortunately a lack of sound-proofing possibilities has meant that monitors aren't really an option I can personally consider. Love the headphones though.. fellow audio professionals are often surprised when they hear what I've been able to mix on them.

>Unfortunately a lack of sound-proofing possibilities has meant that monitors aren't really an option I can personally consider.

It's not very difficult or extremely costly to decently sound-proof a room - but do you need a dedicated room. You're not supposed to be mixing loud anyway, which also helps.

Soundproofing an apartment is a pain in the ass. Are you thinking about acoustic treatment instead? Decent acoustic treatment can be done by putting absorbers, bass traps, diffusers in the room. Soundproofing is much more involved.

A room, not a whole apartment. From what I read it costs around $3000 to $5000 to have it done professionally in the US (and one can do it himself). You then add acoustic treatment (with commercial or home made items) which is considerably cheaper.

I assume though that you're not expecting Abbey Road level soundproofing, just home-studio level, enough to not annoy the neighbords when monitoring/mixing at a reasonable volume at 2am.

Yes, a room in an apartment. It’s a pain in the ass. Yes, it’s a pain in the ass to soundproof a room to the point you’re not disturbing the upstairs or downstairs neighbors.

There are so many ways that your building will transmit sound from one apartment or room to another.

I've read about the NS10 a number of times over the years and I have got the impression that they were popular because they were the most averagely least-bad monitors for many years, leading to an exceptionally versatile monitor (swiss army knife), that was least likely to contribute to a flawed production.

This is the exact point in the market I try to look out for when I'm buying any kind of product - not just studio gear. I've heard someone referring to some kinds of products as the 'AK-47 option' - as in reliable, ubiquitous, mendable, versatile and (relatively) inexpensive. I think the other classic examples were telecasters, SM57s and the Toyota Hilux if memory serves.

Anyway, really cool to see a write up like this on an iconic but often unsung-hero of a piece of gear.

Meh. My NS10's were dead out of the box. I have a very specific reason for disliking Yamaha studio monitors.

It truly illustrates how superstitious are musicians.