Photo courtesy of Sebastien Chorney

September 18th, 2010 – The NS10, NS10, NS10; to a beginner it must seem that audio engineers have an infatuation with it. Indeed, the signature white cone on black cabinet is so recognizable, people who aren’t audio geeks might think all studio speakers look like that.

Earlier this week, I linked a Gizmodo article on the Yammies through Twitter (btw, add me here!). Later I figured that I might go a step further and provide a succinct review of the venerable speakers.

In what seems forever ago, I worked in a small studio where the producer swore by NS-10s. You know the oft repeated stories about how some engineers experimented with how many sheets of tissue paper (along with what brand, and ply count) were best for monitoring? Yeah, he was one of those guys.

Truthfully though, you really do need to use tissue paper over the tweeter. The speakers have such a pronounced mid-range that the tweeter pierces your ears like hot needles. I’m absolutely serious: the NS10′s are incredibly unpleasant to listen to. Not only that, the low-end is pretty weak (maybe something to do with the completely sealed design, although I’m not an acoustics expert).

That being said, some of my best mixes used the NS10. The mid-range for many engineers is the most difficult frequency range to deal with because almost every instrument has frequencies present there. Because the NS10 accentuates this range, it makes it easy to hear what is masking, clashing, and otherwise muddying up your mix. The bottom line is that the speakers are terrible for enjoying music but great for checking your mix against (you would probably want other monitors as mains, preferably something with bass).

Recently Jon over at AudioGeekZine had me over to his studio to chill out and make some noise, and he has a set of HS50M’s which are supposed to be the spiritual successor to the NS10′s. Unlike the NS10′s though, the HS50M’s possess an active design (the fancy way of saying that you don’t need a separate amp to drive them) which helps reduce the variability the amp brings to the sound. As Jon pointed out, and to which I agreed, the HS50M sounds completely different.

While I have read reviews that the HS50M can somewhat emulate the mid-range push of the NS10, it does so in a way that sounds completely different. The big difference is that the HS50M is a much better designed speaker and therefore sounds a lot better. Does this make it better to mix with? I’m not sure.

The HS50M sounds pretty good, but with a lot of my music requiring bass awareness, a proper set up would require the optional sub woofer. That brings the price up considerably, and puts it in the sights of a lot of competitors. The HS80M has a lot more bass given its 8 inch woofer (and costs less than the HS50M with the subwoofer), but I’ve read that they are not as tight sounding.

The NS10 is a great speaker for checking your mix, but you probably wouldn’t want one as your main set of monitors. That being said, I’d love to have a set again.