Yamaha NS10 speakers

The Yamaha #NS10 is a monitor that divides opinion and is often misunderstood.

Even someone who has limited experience with recording studios could probably recognise these distinctive speakers with their white woofers and black boxes, so commonplace are these speakers in studios the world over.

Despite their popularity, many detractors describe them as a poor quality speaker and are only good for checking how mixes will sound played back over consumer systems.

In reality the key to its success lies in its comparative accuracy in one area of speaker measurement, the time domain.

In a perfect world the ideal speaker would only generate sound when being driven by a signal and would immediately stop vibrating once that signal has stopped.

In the real world no speaker can manage that perfectly due to the limitations of self-resonance and inertia of the physical mass causing some frequencies to play out longer than others. As you can imagine this has a huge effect on the overall sound of a speaker.

It has been said that in the manufacturing of speakers, time-domain performance is often compromised in the pursuit of a better frequency response, which in the category of budget small nearfield monitors, is the most often used method to evaluate speaker performance and the first thing to grab a consumer’s attention.

The NS10 is very mid-frequency focused and has virtually nothing going on below 80hz so in this capacity the NS10 doesn’t have a lot going for it, hence its bad reputation among certain critics.

In 2001 (coincidentally, the year in which Yamaha discontinued the NS10) Philip Newell, Julias Newell, and Dr Keith Holland presented a research paper to the Institute of Acoustics with measurements of 38 different nearfield monitors, measuring frequency response, harmonic distortion and time-domain response.

At the end of the exercise it's no exaggeration to say that in the areas of time domain and distortion one monitor stood out: The NS10.

This is probably down to its closed box design.