The Yamaha NS10 Story – How a Hi-Fi Speaker Conquered the Studio World (2008)

https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story

by snthd • 9 years ago

81 96 9 years ago

baldfat10• 9 years ago

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. We trace its history, and investigate why a monitor whose sound has been described as "horrible" became an industry standard.

I see people use this all the time as their main speaker? I usually ask why and if they say because it is a standard I stop talking music production. If they say they use them because they use it to hear the sound distorted then I am 100% in the conversation. These are used to hear what the "real world" crappy speaker system would sound like. Problem is EVERY speaker made the last 20 years is better than these speakers. The main response to why they use a NS-10 is "If it sounds good on NS10s then it'll sound good on anything."

I HATE HATE HATE the NS10 speaker. It was used because it was such a BAD speaker. In front of me I have Genelec speakers. They sound so good and clear. NS 10 sound like a brown paper bag with foam is covering the speaker and all low end and high end sounds were scooped out and I have my hands covering my ears!

acconrad• 9 years ago

"If it sounds good on NS10s then it'll sound good on anything."

Spot on. I dabble in electronic music production and this is precisely why it's such a "good" speaker, because you want your music to sound good on all systems, and the NS10 is going to simulate what your music sounds like on stock Apple earbuds. If it can sound good on those, you can bet they will sound even better on virtually anything else.

mastazi2• 9 years ago

But parent is making a point that technology has moved on and your Apple Earbuds made in 2017 sound way better than the NS10s, and I think after all these years that might be the case

batmansmk• 9 years ago

I like mixing and mastering on my pair of NX-N500 and some Beyerdynamic DT 990 for the bass and mastering. Very revealing. How does the NS-10 compare to the modern incarnation like the NX?

SwellJoe8• 9 years ago

The NX series is a spiritual sequel to the NS10. It was designed with a similar philosophy to the NS10, though most reviews I've read indicate they are less harsh and more accurate due to modern manufacturing improvements. I'd guess the NX series is just a better NS10. I have a high level of confidence in Yamaha's mid-range pro and prosumer audio gear, though I've never used that specific speaker.

abtinf• 9 years ago

Is there a speaker equivalent of Sony pro headphones like the MDR-7506? Something that produces high quality, accurate, flat response at a relatively inexpensive price point?

dharma1• 9 years ago

Active speakers for studio use?

https://www.thomann.de/gb/topseller_GF_studio_monitors.html

Take your pick - so much choice for good speakers these days. Your room will be a larger factor in the sound than any difference between two decent pairs of speakers (of same size).

secabeen2• 9 years ago

Do you have an amplifier, or do you need internally-amped speakers?

lflux• 9 years ago

I have a pair of Genelec 8020's which fits the bill pretty well.

dsr_• 9 years ago

To an extent, JBL LSR305. $300/pair, self-amplified, takes XLR and TRS inputs.

SwellJoe8• 9 years ago

Yes. There are at least a dozen (just as there are at least a dozen high-quality headphone options). The worst of the mid-range products today is probably better than the best of the mid-range products in 1990, as long as you limit it to respected brands. And, the differences between the best and the worst is pretty small.

I paid $1200 for my home studio monitoring setup back in 1995. It was a set of Tannoy System 600 speakers (about $700) and a Hafler amplifier (about $500). I still own and use the speakers today, but if I were doing any real work, I'd go pick up something new in the $500-$1000 range, and it would be better than my setup from two decades ago.

My point is that there's been a revolution in the quality:price ratio for audio equipment. It's not built as reliably as it used to be, but the quality of sound you can get at a mid-range price, even in transducers like speakers and microphones (which don't follow the same innovation rules as digital tech), is astonishing.

You can safely search any major online music retailer, select your price range, sort by rating, and buy the top-rated thing in your price range, and you'll almost certainly be happy with the result. The product will sound really good for the price (no matter what that price is, though there's a law of rapidly diminishing returns on the high end).

jdietrich3• 9 years ago

The MDR-7506 isn't especially accurate, but it is a very practical tool for use on location. For mixing, you'd be far better off with a pair of open-back headphones like the AKG K701 or the Sennheiser HD 650.

Speakers are inherently more expensive to manufacture, so they lag well behind headphones in terms of price-to-performance. The other crucial factor is the acoustic quality of your listening room, which in most cases is a far more significant factor than the quality of your monitors. Rather than buying expensive monitors, you're usually better off buying inexpensive nearfield monitors like the Presonus Eris and spending the rest of your budget on bass traps and diffusers.

seanp2k22• 9 years ago

It’s more about understanding how the monitors room translate to different systems and being able to mix to that. Headphones mostly eliminate the room factor. Many recording artists use Beyerdynamic DT770s, Senn HD280s, or ATH-M40x . None are particularly expensive as headphones go.

For monitors, lots of Genelec, Tannoy, Mackie, JBL, and Adam stuff is out there. Focal Twin6 BEs are particularly nice. None are really cheap (they’re all >$500 / one) and go up from there. Meyer HD-1s are apparently amazing, but they’re ~$9k for a pair. Their newer, cheaper Amie is $3500 each. Their new flagship Bluehorn stuff is $xx,xxx per channel. Lots of home studios use KRK Rokits because they’re cheap ($150/channel on up).

andybak• 9 years ago

The article both covers your point and goes beyond it. Did you read it before posting?

baldfat10• 9 years ago

I read and even quoted text? I don't get where I didn't read the article when I have few quotes from different parts?

4ad• 9 years ago

roblem is EVERY speaker made the last 20 years is better than these speakers.

I disagree heres.

"Real" speakers might be better, but most people listen to music on crappy laptop speakers or crappy bluetooth 1-inch mono speakers. The quality of the average sound reproduction device has been getting worse the last 20 years.

KozmoNau75• 9 years ago

On the other hand, there are some seriously impressive bluetooth speakers out there now.

I just picked up an Audio Pro Addon T3 on sale the other day. It's obviously no match for my room corrected studio monitor setup with dual 12" subs in regards to sub bass, detail and overall SPL, but I'm absolutely astounded at how much sound (and bass!) they've managed to cram into a speaker that's smaller than a sixpack and plays for ~30 hours on battery.

They're probably doing a ton of DSP and probably some missing fundamental bass trickery, but it does sound really convincing.

I wouldn't buy any bluetooth speaker much smaller than this one, though. You can only cheat physics so far.

SwellJoe8• 9 years ago

"I see people use this all the time as their main speaker?"

What are you talking about? Nobody uses the NS10 as their main speaker today. It's been a decade since they were in common use and nearly two decades since they were even manufactured.

timc35• 9 years ago

There still are... I have seen a couple of studios recently on Gearslutz that only have NS10

Nokinside• 9 years ago

70% of studios I have been in have Genelec's. Rest seem to be Neumann or Quested.

I don't know much about professional audio, why these are good speakers?

sp821543• 9 years ago

A legendary engineer educated me about NS10s. With a great amp and a sub, they sound fantastic - especially when listening at low volume. As in... lower than the volume of a normal conversation.

DiabloD33• 9 years ago

A lot of studios also have Adam as well.

baldfat10• 9 years ago

Genelec are amazing speakers. They are the definition of reference. They are clean and they can be loud. They started out about the same time as the NS10 (1978) by the early 1980s they were the definition of the reference speaker. https://www.genelec.com/genelec-story-0

Once you use them you are kind of stuck. Your ear gets use to them and you mix to them. You can go to several different studios and you can mix easily. The idea is that the sound that comes out of the speakers goes directly to your ears and not reflexive sound. I have 1030a and they are small but I can mix in bad acoustic rooms and still have a great reference. You can plug any speaker of theirs into any of their sub woofers and have the same reference sound. So the use of Genelec has been growing and have become the standard. Sadly they aren't cheap but they are worth it. Mine are almost 20 years old and they still are great.

PascLeRasc4• 9 years ago

Genelec's are the high-end of personal listening for music enjoyment, but they're far from flat. Studios probably have them as a reference for what some critics and fans will be listening on.

timc35• 9 years ago

70% of studios I have been in haven't had Genelec (europe).

Though they seem to be big in broadcast studios and post-production places or those where people haven't auditioned a large number of monitors.

jdietrich3• 9 years ago

It was used because it was such a BAD speaker.

You clearly haven't read the article. The NS10 is an exceptionally good speaker in certain respects that are not immediately obvious and that convey vital information about a mix. It has superlative time-domain performance due to the sealed box design and the extremely stiff and well-damped woofer. This time-domain accuracy reveals immense amounts of detail that are lost on a conventional reflex-ported nearfield monitor. Crucial decisions about phase and balance in the bass and midrange frequencies are far easier on an NS10 than almost any other monitor. They're not pleasant to listen to, but they produce good mixes, which is entirely the point of studio monitors.

A speaker with similar performance and a similar role is the Auratone 5C, or the more modern Avantone MixCube. In hi-fi terms they are absolutely atrocious, but few other speakers are so revealing of mixing errors.

It is only relatively recently that full-range nearfield monitors have managed to approach the time-domain performance of the NS10 - the Neumann KH310, the Unity Audio Boulder and the Barefoot Sound Micromain achieve that feat, but at vastly greater cost than the faithful old NS10.

If you do not understand why the NS10 is such an iconic and useful piece of equipment, you fundamentally do not understand mixing.

baldfat10• 9 years ago

You clearly haven't read the article. The NS10 is an exceptionally good speaker in certain respects that are not immediately obvious and that convey vital information about a mix.

How so? They were "GOOD?" Where did I miss that?

At the conclusion:

"And the practical? Well, it's certainly true that the NS10s have a mid-heavy balance and little bass extension. This is especially so if they are not mounted close to a suitable boundary — such as a big desk or a rear wall — to provide low mid-range reinforcement. They're also just as revealing of any shortcomings in the monitoring chain as they are of the mix, and they don't take very kindly to being driven loud. While Newells and Holland showed they have very low levels of distortion, they do suffer from thermal compression, which will not only cause wide-band dynamic attenuation in response to high levels of drive, but will upset the characteristics of the crossover filters as the voice-coil resistance of the drivers increases. As temperature rises, the bass/mid low-pass filter frequency will increase significantly (and the tweeter high-pass filter frequency will reduce), and begin to give prominence to the resonances at the top end of the bass/mid driver's response. When NS10s are driven too hard by a poor amplifier, fed by a sub-standard monitor output, and mounted without any boundary reinforcement, you might well find that they sound horrible to the point of being unusable."

ALSO???? If you do not understand why the NS10 is such an iconic and useful piece of equipment, you fundamentally do not understand mixing.

Okay your super off putting. I owned my own studio and small record label with successful bands. I don't know how in the world anything you just said is fundamental to mixing? NS10 are a bad sounding mixer that is a displeasure to listen to. Not one modern near field attempts to be a NS10. Some people think that it is a bonus but NO ONE is saying these were a technical work of greatness. This articles point was that it is odd that they were successful and that they are Hate or Love. They list out some interesting points but nothing is saying they are "Too Good." Quote me some text.

PascLeRasc4• 9 years ago

I HATE my friend's vintage Porsche. It doesn't even have Bluetooth like my Yaris! And the exhaust sound is so obnoxious. Who even needs to drive fast on the way to Olive Garden? Every car made in the past 10 years is better than that old Porsche.

rorykoehler3• 9 years ago

Genelecs are notoriously hard to mix on. They take a long time to learn. Probably the hardest speaker to work with out of the box. I know someone who earns 6-7 figures annually mixing some of the biggest acts around. The only speakers on his console are NS10s. The reason being is that they are the best tool for the job. They have a flat and clear response which is what you want when mixing. On the other hand I have heard enough mixes coming out of Genelec equipped studios that sounded amazing in the studio and like garbage anywhere else. I've also heard great mixes on Genelecs but only from engineers who have used them in the same room for a few years.

baldfat10• 9 years ago

The reason being is that they are the best tool for the job.... They have a flat and clear response which is what you want when mixing.

Did you not read how these things are not flat and not clear in any range besides the mids in the article and totally depended on volume, environment and positioning?

NS10 are the Vim vs EMACS arguement but it is more Vim vs ed.

I've also heard great mixes on Genelecs but only from engineers who have used them in the same room for a few years.

Rooms don't matter on Genelec and yes you will notice that the majority of high end studios mostly use Genelec due to the fact that rooms matter much less with them and the skill can transfer anywhere. That was my whole point on why Genelec are the most popular near field monitors in high end studios.

matthoiland• 9 years ago

They are a perfect blend of terrible sounding, but consistently terrible sounding. Any set, in any studio would sound the same.

stephengillie• 9 years ago

In the Business World, this homogeneity is often referred to as "Quality".

SwellJoe8• 9 years ago

I went to college for audio engineering in the 90s, during the undisputed reign of the NS10. Literally, every studio I worked in had a pair. I've done quite a bit of recording, mixing and mastering on NS10s.

Don't believe the hype; they weren't terrible speakers. They weren't good speakers, but they weren't terrible, either.

The context that gets lost, I think, in a conversation today is that you could easily find worse speakers in the same price range, from similarly respected brands, back then. NS10 was a reliably consistent speaker available in every market at a price that was good for the time. The consumer and prosumer audio revolution was just starting to ramp up, so getting clearly better quality had a very high price back then.

Even at the time, every experienced engineer acknowledged that the NS10 had some flaws; they were a bit tiring to listen to for long hours. There were harsh especially in the upper mid-range, and brittle in the high end. But, you could hear everything in the mix pretty accurately, and you could estimate what it would sound like on the average home or car stereo system, once you'd spent some time mixing on them.

It's also worth mentioning that NS10 isn't the only cargo-culted speaker (and this article briefly mentions Aurotones, which also were in several of the studios I worked in, to provide a "car stereo" simulation) or product. The audio industry is all about cargo cults. Specific compressors, microphones, reverbs, preamps, and these days plugins, have "can do no wrong" products that everyone covets; often despite some obvious flaws.

When you have an industry that rides the line between science and art so closely, and that has extremely unpredictable trends, you'll find an almost religious zeal around the tools. NS10s were king because they were used on some famous records and showed up in some famous studios at the right time.

Sometimes the cargo cult gets attached to something that is really, demonstrably, good (Neve preamp channels or even the entire console in which they live, Neumann microphones, etc.), but at any given time there are probably several comparably good products that don't get the industry nod because they don't have the right connections at the right time, or the records they appear on have the poor luck to go unnoticed by the listening public due to shifts in taste, etc.

The cargo cult had its uses. It allowed people in a low-information, high-expense, industry to make reasonable choices just by talking to other engineers. You wouldn't kill your studio by choosing NS10s back in 1990. But, these days, the cargo cult is silly, and counter-productive. We have an embarrassment of riches in terms of high-quality low-cost equipment, test tools are available on a tiny budget so you can literally know exactly what you've got with some time and knowledge about how to use the tools. There are high-quality reviews of every product going back decades on the web so you can choose between new and used with confidence.

Nobody buys a product like an NS10 for the exact reasons people bought the NS10 in the 80s (cost+proven+available+good enough+cargo cult approved), anymore. And, there are few products exactly like the NS10, anymore. The mid-range, where the NS10 lived, is dominated by very high quality products today from a dozen different manufacturers (including Yamaha, who have produced a very good series of "sequels" to the NS10). The low-end has plenty of stinkers, still, but they're cheap as hell.

It's a different world, though the audio engineering cargo cult lives on.

Florin_Andrei• 9 years ago

they were a bit tiring to listen to for long hours. There were harsh especially in the upper mid-range, and brittle in the high end. But, you could hear everything in the mix pretty accurately

The exact same would apply to Grado headphones. Pretty terrible to use long-term, but act like magnifiers for flaws in the mixing process.

I had an interesting experience using my Grados to play Ratchet & Clank on the Playstation. They made it easy to distinguish small details in the tornado of sounds during the big battles, enabling me to literally "play by ear", but in a good way.

But yes, tiring.

I like the planar magnetic cans a lot more.

mark-r• 9 years ago

I'm listening to Grado SR80's right now. I bought them after I fell in love with the SR60's, which I now keep at work. I've never found them tiring, but I probably don't listen for more than an hour at a time.

AceyMan2• 9 years ago

For folks who like this kind of stuff but aren't audiophiles, may I suggest the history of the LS3/5a loudspeaker as a fun read. The LS3/5a was chosen as the reference small monitor by the BBC then the design was licensed out to various OEMs over the course of its time as the standard. Modern high-end clones are still available.

I'm a big fan of ATC loudspeakers (a UK firm, btw), which are quite popular in studios and performance halls¹. Example: The Walt Disney Concert Hall — that wavy, stainless Frank Gehry building here in LA — is outfitted with custom ATC cabinets as the house PA (last I know of, at least).

ATC's powered monitors are freakishly overbuilt and can play to stupendous SPLs. I've got dreams of someday having my own set of the active SCM20, which are the perfect size for small living spaces, but they make powered units as big as 150 litres per cabinet². Whoa.

My last set of high-end speakers is their SCM11, about the same size. Key house feature: they design(make?) their own bass/mid drivers which are rugged af, and feature monster magnets for their size.

Back to TFA; I've never heard the NS-10, but I have always heard they kind of suck. And the reasoning never held water IMHO; it stands to reason that you'd end up EQing the mix to make it sound good on the NS-10, but that would in turn make the mix all out of whack on proper equipment.

It's like trying to design the next Corvette with the prototypes running on 175/70R13 tires; how you could tune the system under test (here: the music being mastered/mixed) with such a floppy foundation is beyond me.

-- ¹—http://atcloudspeakers.co.uk/studios-soundstages ²—http://atcloudspeakers.co.uk/professional/loudspeakers/scm11...

bluedino• 9 years ago

Actually, the base model Corvette does come with some very mediocre tires. I’ve heard that’s done because owners will end up replacing them with the cheapest option at their local tire dealer, and this way there’s not much of a performance downgrade.

seanp2k22• 9 years ago

Huh? Pilot Super Sports (standard on MY2014 Vettes) are some of the best street tires that you can buy. They’re basically the standard for high-performance street cars. The Ferrari 458 comes with them. They’re stock on the BMW M3, M5, and M6. You can get optional Sport Cup 2s on some Corvette models, but they wear out a lot faster.

Src: http://www.chevrolet.com/performance/corvette-stingray-sport...

“”” Standard Brembo® brakes provide ample stopping power at a variety of speeds. Standard 19" front and 20" wheels come wrapped in Michelin® Pilot® Super Sport ZP summer-only tires† for incredible grip and precision control. “””

The C5s had not-the-best tires, but they were still developed for the car: https://www.thoughtco.com/best-replacement-tires-for-c6-corv...

lukeh• 9 years ago

ATCs are great: they make you work hard (indeed, many classic records don't sound that crash hot on them). If it sounds good on them, though, it'll often translate really well.

AceyMan2• 9 years ago

I've caught up a bit on the thread and admit that excellence in the time domain is highly correlated to what audio-wonks call 'inner detail'. And if it sounds lively at low volumes, that helps even more.

Case in point: folks love Low there design speakers (full range single driver cone) for excellence in both those aspects, plus they are super efficient which allows pairing with exotic low-power triode valve amps — also known for fantastic detail. However, Lowthers are usually 1/4 wave transmission line enclosures, IIRC, and IME studio requirements are best suited to acoustic suspension designs.

Long story short, it sounds like the NS-10 is better than I have always been told.

timc35• 9 years ago

ATC are still my all-time favourite speaker/monitor brand from the many that I have heard.

Just brilliant.

KozmoNau75• 9 years ago

NS10s aren't quite as bad as their reputation, but they are rather "forward-sounding", a noticeable mid/high peak in response. In turn, this is very handy for picking out distortion and noise in recordings, they tend to beat you over the head if you have too much sibilance going on.

I wouldn't want to use them as my only speakers for listening to music, but I can definitely see how they come in handy as a reference tool. Same reason as why many studios have Avantone ("Horrortone") MixCubes and various other less-than-HiFi loudspeakers in addition to their nice monitors, and why they check their mixes on car stereos, bluetooth speakers and clock radios. They want it to sound good on the gear normal people use, not just high-end studio monitors.

sundvor4• 9 years ago

Interesting; made me think of the ATH-M50x headphones - they're just about everywhere! The reviews are a fair bit more favourable than for the NS10s though.

fb033• 9 years ago

They're fun to listen to music to, but still colour the sound a lot. Not "Beats" level coloring, but still pretty apparent.

sundvor4• 9 years ago

I agree with this. Whilst I did get my wife the ATH-50xs, I find the colour not to my liking after an initial period of listening. Bass response is great if you're into that though.

I personally use the ATH-MSR7NC (music) and ATH-ADG1x (music/gaming/comms) at home, and the ATH-ANC9 at work. The ANC9s are great for the work environment, and far easier on the ears in terms of avoiding tinnitus whilst blocking distracting noise than the 50s.

DiabloD33• 9 years ago

They're also horrifically bad sounding and have essentially become meme status. They're also studio monitors, they're not meant for home users, they're not meant to sound good. Sadly, they're not even good as studio monitors, but hey, when you've reached meme status, you don't HAVE to be good.

sundvor4• 9 years ago

I only really discovered their popularity (meme, really?) after I bought them for my wife; I was primarily searching for a set of decent cans at a low price point. The ATH-M50x certainly did fulfill those criteria.

fb033• 9 years ago

I have a pair of HS8's. They have provided me with a good and cheap starting set of listening gear for my amateur music endeavours. I know there is a lot of better gear out there but for starting out, Yamaha gear is usually pretty on point.

I wish I could test a pair of NS10's against the HS8's.

KozmoNau75• 9 years ago

It doesn't really matter which product segment you're looking at, it's really hard to go wrong with Yamaha.

They may not be the outright best value for money when it comes to features and buzzwords, and they certainly don't have the cachet of more boutique brands, but they always deliver a solid good quality product.

As an example from a completely different segment, I used to ride a Yamaha XT660X motorcycle. If you read reviews and bike forums, sports bike riders would decry it for being too slow, dual-sport riders would decry it for not being a BMW GS-series, and supermoto riders would decry it for being too heavy.

None of that mattered, because I found it to be the most enjoyable bike I've ever ridden. Just enough power to get into trouble, great handling to get you out of trouble again, extremely comfortable and not so light that every gust of wind would blow you around. It may not be the best at anything, but it absolutely excels as an all-round bike for ordinary people like me, and during the time I had it, it was completely flawless, no issues at all (some people would find that boring, I guess).

fb033• 9 years ago

You are absolutely right about Yamaha, man! Dang, even their Flutes are great.

My HS8's are interfaced via a Yamaha AG06 sound card btw. balanced outputs perfect for the monitors, stable as fuck and also I can get pretty decent latency with it (about 2-3ms @ 44100hz on a 9 year old core i7!!)

newman314• 9 years ago

I’ve got an old (mid 90s vintage) pair of Acoustic Research speakers. Not being an audiophile or having very good hearing, how do they rate these days?

ninjakeyboard2• 9 years ago

I have two creative passions in life - code and producing music. First, I'm surprised to see this on hackernews.

The love/hate of the speaker are really irrelevant factors for the product produced by an audio engineer. There are a couple things that really matter in terms of their 'efficiency': 1) the flat frequency response; and 2) Knowing the qualities of the monitor. If you have a decently treated room and you are somewhat accustomed to working with the NS10s, any engineer worth their salt could produce decent sounds on them.

The article is old so it foregoes the fact that Yamaha have actually tried to profit from the legacy of the NS10 - they produce new more expensive variants with similar design in the crowded studio monitor market. They fit into the space with the typical 5, 6 and 8 inch woofer-standard market with the HS7s for example. https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-hs7-hs8s

The end result is more important than the gear. These will do alright even if they aren't as "pleasing" as something like the Adam series'.

smegel• 9 years ago

I'm amazed that for almost every "special interest" post here on HN there are at least a couple of people who know exactly what it's about.

ninjakeyboard2• 9 years ago

hey cheers. here is my music too :) https://soundcloud.com/decklyn

rorykoehler3• 9 years ago

Just got the HS7's. Really solid speaker for the price. Not quite in the realm of Adams or Genelec but perfect for mixing tracks that will sound good anywhere.

wazoox• 9 years ago

I remember when it was good practice to mix "for" the NS-10, then check on a single Auratone 5C for radio and mono downmix compatibility :)

timc35• 9 years ago

Same here with code and producing music...

Yes knowing the speakers and the room is a very important aspect. Everyone I have worked with that uses NS10s is because they say they are very forward in the lower mids, not that they are good speakers, but I believe that they just get used to them.

The NS1000, which I used, on the other hand - amazing.

Personally, I can find better monitors that are even more revealing.

pasta• 9 years ago

It's funny: when I read monitors I thought about display monitors.

And the same applies there: you can buy monitors that can be calibrated but surrounding light makes each monitor and each setup different.

So graphic designers do the same: they know the display monitor in the room. And each end user will see the designed colors a little different, but it doesn't matter.

borne0• 9 years ago

How do Radio Shack Realistic Minimus 7's compare to these?

http://tapeop.com/reviews/gear/14/minimus-7-speakers/

shmageggy• 9 years ago

I worked in a studio that had both, and the Minimus did much the same job as the NS10s, namely spot checking mixes. I found the Minimus even more unpleasant to listen to (even more bandwidth limited), but I wasn't listening to them for pleasure or for extended periods of time. I just wanted to zoom in on the midrange to make sure that crucial area was actually as in balance as I thought it was, and they served that purpose well enough.

danbmil99• 9 years ago

As a working sound engineer in the 80s, I depended on the NS 10 to give me a sense of the room, as a standard reference or metric. I would play something like Steely Dan's Babylon sisters, which I knew intimately, and how it sounded on the NS10 would tell me something about the accoustics of the studio I was in.

It probably could have been any other speaker of the time, what was critical was the fact that it was in every single studio without fail. It was a constant variable in an equation where every other variable was in flux.

foobarge• 9 years ago

Which source did you use for Babylon Sisters?

georgeecollins• 9 years ago

When I used to develop console games (old ones) I would always demo the game to the team on a bad TV in a well lit room. Our artists would want great monitors and dim light. The points was.. this is how our audience will experience our product.

KozmoNau75• 9 years ago

A lot of games still seem to expect high-quality TVs in darkened rooms. In a normally lit room, you basically lose all detail in the dark parts of the image.

Games used to let you tweak everything (Half-Life was particularly good about it), but today we're lucky to get a brightness/gamma slider.

squarefoot• 9 years ago

When I first saw the NS10 it was in the mid-late 80s when small studio monitors usually meant a pair of nearfield Auratone cubes, so they were something new at least to me. Not a professional in the field here, but I knew some people and recall that nearly all of them said about the NS10 that they're from OK to bad, but they're the standard and you must keep them in the control room because any engineer coming from $BIG_STUDIO would want them for being a de facto reference.

I'm very happy with my pair of small KRK Rokit at home, how would you compare the two?

puranjay2• 9 years ago

I've recently started producing music after a lifetime of playing guitar.

As I've been building out my home studio, I've been constantly surprised by how old most popular studio equipment is.

For instance, one of the most popular microphones - Shure SM58 - was originally launched in 1966 and has remained unchanged since. It is still the industry standard, especially for touring

The pro audio industry is strange in that it doesn't seem to embrace change. You could pick up a producer from the 1980s and drop him into a modern studio, and he'd still end up using a lot of the same equipment

timrichard• 9 years ago

Hmm, not sure about that.

So many places have switched over to mixing and recording "in the box".

I think the 80's producer would be familiar with any outboard gear, as you say, but be completely flummoxed that the computer is King, and that so much is virtualised into DAW plugins. He/she would also be baffled by the idea of "unlimited audio tracks", for starters... I remember starting with a DOS-based sequencer called Voyetra in the 80's.

puranjay2• 9 years ago

I meant that the recording equipment itself would be familiar to any producer from the 80s.

I last played around with recording software back in 2004 or 05. I think it was Cubase. I don't remember it being a particularly pleasant experience.

Moving from that to Ableton has been a revelation. Modern software synths like Serum are absolutely mind blowing in what they can do.

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