Yamaha NS-10M Studio (Pair) (Usado)
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 started life as a bookshelf speaker destined for the domestic environment. It was poorly received but eventually became a valuable tool with which to mix rock recordings. The speaker has a characteristic white-coloured mid–bass drive unit.
Technically, it is known as a speaker that easily reveals poor quality in recordings. Recording engineers sought to dull its treble response by hanging tissue paper in front of it, resulting in what became known as the “tissue paper effect” – a type of comb filtering. 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 NS-10 is an 8-ohm two-way loudspeaker with a 10.4-litre sealed cabinet measuring 382 × 215 × 199 millimetres (15.0 × 8.5 × 7.8 in) and weighing 6 kilograms (13.2 lb). Its 2.5 cm (0.98 in) particle-board cabinet has a wood veneer skin with seven black finishing layers. The domestic version of the speaker was vertically oriented, and came factory fitted with a grille.
Its two drivers are a 180 mm paper woofer and a 35 mm soft-domed tweeter. The woofer’s diaphragm, weighing 3.7 g, is manufactured from a flat sheet of pressed pulp paper. Unconventionally, it is formed into conical shape not through moulding or pressure, but by curling and then gluing the two ends together. Against the black finish of the cabinet, the white bass/mid driver cone is a distinctive and iconic feature of the product.
The network is second-order passive, crossing over at 2 kHz. The frequency range is quoted from 60 Hz to 20 kHz, and rated power handling is 25–50 W. The early version of the speaker has press-down type input terminals; later models had screw terminals.