Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

> 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.

You know caps-locking your words doesn't make them more meaningful, right?

I was trying to understand where the remark of me not understanding what I read. The article was not about them being "good" technically besides that if they sound good on a NS10 they will sound good on anything?

Mate, I gotta say your responses make me dismiss your comment. You misinterpret "good in certain respects", to shout "GOOD?" to an empty room. Caps with a lot of punctuation is a red flag for me, seems very CNN.com political. Finally, you criticize the core argument ("why does the NS10 have such a reputation") without giving me, an ignorant third party, any evidence.

Even if you owned your own studio, aren't there lots of people with that same resume line who were terrible at mixing?

You may be 100% correct, but it was not communicated in a style that would let someone to that conclusion.

This paragraph precedes your quote:

"Thanks to its time-domain accuracy and mid-heavy balance, the NS10 is an extremely revealing speaker that takes no prisoners. In other words, if the recording is poor, the NS10 will tell you in no uncertain terms. You have to work harder to make things sound good on the NS10 not because it sounds bad but because recorded music, even today, is often a poor approximation of the real thing, and the NS10 reveals it. I found a familiar comment on the SOS Forum that reads: "If it sounds good on NS10s then it'll sound good on anything." Again, that's not because the NS10 is inherently poor, but because it is effective at revealing the fundamental compromises inherent in recorded music. If you've worked hard on NS10s at a mix and overcome those compromises, or perhaps cleverly disguised them, the mix will translate well to other systems because it is a good mix. Put another way, the NS10 better enables you to get to the nub of a mix by more accurately reproducing its fundamental time-domain information — and it is this which can make the task of mixing seem more challenging."

To my mind, that is a very strong justification for the NS10. The NS10 is not without flaws, but it remains a perfectly viable professional tool that can be used to produce excellent mixes. Although it has been superseded by many modern high-end monitors, it retains some distinct advantages over the inexpensive ported monitors that are used in the vast majority of small studios.

But that isn't saying that they were clear. It was because they were skewed in a way that would show ONE place that was also unique to older audio technology. That is not the issue with 20 year old speakers or the way people listen to music.

What it is saying is that the NS10 = What people were listening to. That is no longer the case.

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