Yamaha NS-10
The Yamaha NS-10 is a loudspeaker that became a standard nearfield studio monitor in the music industry among rock and pop recording engineers.
The NS-10 has been used to monitor a large number of successful recordings by numerous artists, leading Gizmodo to refer to it as "the most important loudspeaker you never heard of".
The engineer, likely to have been Greg Ladanyi, monitored a recording session through the speaker in a Japanese studio and brought a pair back on his return to the US.
[5] Early use of the NS-10 among engineers include Bob Clearmountain, Rhett Davies, and Bill Scheniman in the US, and Nigel Jopson in the UK.
[6][5] Whilst it can reveal any shortcomings in the recording mix as well as the monitoring chain,[5] it may lead to listener fatigue with prolonged use in the domestic setting.
The sound of the NS-10 is heavily boosted in the upper midrange, and like other sealed-box speakers of similar size its bass extension is limited.
[6][11] Gizmodo likened the NS-10 to music editors who reveal the weaknesses of recordings, so that engineers would be forced to either make necessary compensation in the mix or otherwise rework them.
The researchers held that the extremely fast decay time of the speaker in the low frequencies ensures that the bass instruments (guitar and drums) are correctly balanced in the mix.
Improvements included a new tweeter and crossover to address the problem in the treble, better connection terminals, and a sturdier cabinet that no longer accommodates grilles.
Designed for home cinema, it has bass response down to 43 Hz, nominal impedance of 6 ohm and maximum power handling rated at 180 W.[8] A miniature version named Natural Sound Surround Speaker NS10MM was launched in 1997 or 1998.
Hodas derided the tissue practice as "aberrant behaviour", saying that engineers usually fear comb filtering and its associated cancellation effects.
[13] Newell et al. noted that had the speakers' grilles been used in studios, where they are routinely removed, they would have had the same effect on the treble output as the improvised tissue paper filter.
[14] Throughout the 1980s, engineers and producers worked widely with the speaker to monitor "[almost] any album you love from the 80s or 90s" – from Born in the U.S.A. (Bruce Springsteen), Avalon (Roxy Music) Let's Dance (David Bowie), to Big Bam Boom (Hall and Oates).
As the NS-10 has been out of production for many years, in late 2018 Avantone with Chris Lord-Alge (world famous mix engineer and proponent of the NS-10) released the CLA-10.
Although they were careful not to mention it in any of the company's materials, many have speculated that the CLA-10 is an NS-10 clone, to fill the market gap left by Yamaha when they stopped production of the original NS-10.
