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The Yamaha Ns-10 - Old Faithful Rediscovered
Why aren’t all speakers studio monitors if studio monitors are built to be more accurate than speakers? This is the question that occurs to people new to music recording and song mixing. The basic answer to this question is that consumer speakers are designed to make sound as desirable as possible, which is fine if you want to listen to music that has already been mixed. However, if you depend on speakers to serve as your audio reference equipment while mixing, you will be hard put to find sonic problems that need solving. Listening to the pure frequency response of music is critical in capturing proper equalization and balance and eliminating interference from a track. The Yamaha Ns-10 provide a reference that is “no-frills” and uncolored in their reproduction and to this date are still the nearfield studio standards.
Yamaha Ns-10 were basically developed as an affordable bookshelf speaker but possessed the right characteristics to double-check mixes in real world applications. The monitors imitate car and home speakers to give a good idea of how the mix will translate in the world outside of the studio. The Ns-10’s also tend to eliminate the environment as a variable which helped them to become a standard in sound recording and mixing. There are many other nearfield monitors available, but for consistency, many mixers choose to go with the Yamaha Ns-10.
For professional song mixers, it is arguably more important to have a predictable monitor rather than a neutral one. The Ns-10’s are far from “flat” in their frequency response. They have a pronounced mid-range and an unflattering bass response that almost every studio engineer is familiar with. These “inaccuracies” serve to create a telling sounding board that is beneficial to mix translation. Because engineers usually work in multiple studios this is important for keeping one’s bearings. An engineer’s job becomes that much more difficult with the myriad of recording methods used with diverse studio monitors. A predictable monitor, like the Ns-10, is good litmus test.
Yamaha Ns-10’s are called nearfield monitors because eliminate the room as a variable in the sound while mixing. Placing the monitors three to four feet from your ears with no boundaries between you and the audio achieves minimal room distortion. Recordings you make in a room can be altered by reflections from walls and floor coverings. The more direct the sound is, as opposed to reflected sound, the better it is for good song mixing. With nearfield monitors, the biggest variances in sound come with different models. This is why standardization of monitoring is so effective.
The inability of obtaining the wood pulp used in constructing the woofer cone in the Yamaha Ns-10 ended it’s production in. There have been many innovations in speaker design since then, but no one, not even Yamaha has been able to duplicate the “old reliability” Of the Ns-10... until now! White Lines Audio, a speaker company based in Chicago, Illinois, found a way to reproduce the reliable translation of the Ns-10 without the obvious upper midrange problems of the prototype. The White Lines Audio Model K Studio Monitor was designed and built as a drop-in replacement for the Ns-10. A protection circuit was also added to protect the tweeter from damaging transient signals, because blown tweeters were always an annoying and costly problem with the Ns-10’s. White Lines Audio has created, in the Model K Studio Monitor, a new standard among song mixers.
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