But then, in some respects, it can suit a manufacturer of monitors if their customers don't know too much. 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. ![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. ![]() 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. Within that context of polarised opinion, the NS10 generates a phenomenon that at first glance seems a little odd. ![]() 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. 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. You don't have to hang around long in the SOS Forum for a thread to appear that features the Yamaha NS10. 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. 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. 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. We trace its history, and investigate why a monitor whose sound has been described as "horrible" became an industry standard. Love or hate the Yamaha NS10, this unassuming little speaker has found a place in the studios of many of the world's top producers.
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