NS-1000 drivers vs modern drivers.

[phillfyspoon]

I have had a pair of Yamaha ns-1000 speakers for a couple of months and find them to be very accurate open and clear and very unforgiving of compressed or poor recordings but very pleasing with good recordings.

Now there is no doubt this is a brilliant speaker and is easy as good as commercial speakers costing upto a £1000 and maybe more im not sure having not heard any costing much past 1k.

But how good are the drivers compared to modern drivers from seas, scanspeak?

Before I picked up this speaker I was saving up for a diy design using the seas excel magnesium driver and a tweeter like the Hiquphon OWI.

So pretty high end drivers.

Now my amp is a denon 3805 av amp, not sure im gettting the best out of the speakers with this but im going to get a van alstine or something when i can afford it.

The yamahas sound is awesome but I have no comparison to the drivers mentioned. The 1000's have brilliant open and clear sound with brilliant fast transits, good soundstage, imaging is quite average, tonely very accurate with notes. Brutaly honest.

They sure sound good but having read people describe this as the best and worst speaker in the world im not sure what to think of them, all I know is they wipre the floor off my old monitor audio silvers and by quite a huge margin, although the monitor audio had better imaging and that abilty to disappear sometimes they are no match for the 1000's dazzaling transists and accurate portrayal of notes.

[Stuey]

Hi Phil,

I've never heard them, but David Price from Hi Fi World in your country has them and reckons they're great. His assessment of their sound is pretty much on a par with yours, in fact. They are his main, reference, speaker.

Cheers

Stuey

[phillfyspoon]

I read his views and they are spot on. The quality of the sound is amazing, the tinniest little details are open and clear and sometimes you can hear the poor mixing and wonder why didnt they have a pair of these babies lol

The most impressive thing about them is the dazzlingly fast transients and transparency, very impressive.

The only bad thing I have to say about them is you are allways aware that the sound is coming from the speakers, the sound is not boxy just that it does not extend far beyond the edges.

The imaging is not pinpoint and is more like a wide wall of sound, I think this is the nature of a dome midrange, unlike some high end bookshelfs which can have the 3d disapearing effect, allthough the soundstage is very good sometimes it is so deep I have to listen carefully to make sure the sound is not coming from outside the window behind the speakers.

No speaker is perfect and this has it's downsides as mentioned but makes up fr it with the abilty to dazzle with transparency, speed and detail and hard striking transients unlike any speaker I have heard, which to be honest is most commercail speakers under 1.5k.

Although Im still very interested in wether they can compete with the high end drivers of today used in diy designs.

[pieter t]

Hi Phil,

I own these babies and they will never leave the house.
It's what you want to hear.
When you want to listen "into" the performance / recording, these speakers are unbeatable up to this day. Quite an achievement for a "vintage" speaker.
Most of the quality comes from the pure beryllium domes. Some weeks ago there was a thread here on beryllium. Yamaha used pure beryllium in contrast to nowadays speaker brands like Usher who mislead us by claiming that they use beryllium units. In fact these units are made of some foil with a very very low beryllium content.
Another thread here is on tweaking the crossover.
The speakers can sound a bit hard. I think it is caused by the shape of the enclosure. The sharp edges give some diffraction effects.
Years ago I mounted chipboard sheets to mimic a really big baffle, comparable to wall flush mounting. That improved imaging a lot! NS1000's (not the M) and NS2000's will be better in this regard because they have rounded edges (these were domestic versions).

Pieter

[Shaun]

Originally posted by phillfyspoon
Although Im still very interested in wether they can compete with the high end drivers of today used in diy designs.

Actually, you have pretty much summed up the differences. There's not much more to add, except that the bass rolls off relatively early for the size speaker that it is. Zaph measured a Yamaha beryllium tweet here http://www.zaphaudio.com/blog.html . Although it is not the same model as those used in the NS1000's, his comments do agree with my own subjective assessment of the NS1000 tweet. My pair had blown tweeters, and I had used as substitutes the "Meiloon" tweeters from ApexJr http://www.apexjr.com/speakerstuff.html (Shielded Soft Dome Tweeter $14.95 a pair). When I finally replaced them with the correct new tweeters, the change was... unremarkable...

I wish that Zaph had tested the mids, though. These, I believe, are special.

Originally posted by pieter t
Years ago I mounted chipboard sheets to mimic a really big baffle, comparable to wall flush mounting. That improved imaging a lot! NS1000's (not the M) and NS2000's will be better in this regard because they have rounded edges (these were domestic versions).

It is my opinion that the layout as done on the NS2000's should yield a much better result wrt imaging and sound stage. This is potentially the best opportunity for improving the NS1000. Even better would be bevelled edges.

[phillfyspoon]

I read alot saying the midrange stands out above the other 2. For the money I paid I can not complain, they are impressive.

I would have to pay out alot to be even more impressed me thinks.

Still quite shocked the tweet can be beat with such cheap drivers.

[dnewma04]

I had NS-1000X speakers for about 1 year. They were not exceptional enough to consider them "keepers". In my subjective opinion, they weren't competitive with the best I've heard in the DIY speaker realm. If I ran across the mids again, I'd like to try to do a build around them with much higher quality woofers and better tweeters. I suspect good things would happen.

[Shaun]

Originally posted by dnewma04
I had NS-1000X speakers for about 1 year. They were not exceptional enough to consider them "keepers". In my subjective opinion, they weren't competitive with the best I've heard in the DIY speaker realm. If I ran across the mids again, I'd like to try to do a build around them with much higher quality woofers and better tweeters. I suspect good things would happen.

Geesh, Dave! I could say almost exactly the same! ...'cept I had the NS1000M's...

[pieter t]

dnewma, Shaun,

OK, come up then with suggestions for woofer and tweeter.
NS1000M is a studio monitor, not designed to be a hifi speaker.
Bass is somewhat restricted but with proper placement (they can be put against a wall without sounding boomy) much can be done. Besides the woofer integrates well with the midrange dome (crossover is 500 Hz). It is not easy to replace the woofer and getting better results with little effort. The same with the tweeter. There might be better ones around now but again integration with the midrange is seamless and it might prove to be difficult to do better.

Pieter

[catapult]

The tweeter is crossed at 6K which is pretty high by today's standards. It's no big surprise that swapping tweeters doesn't make all that much difference.

I've got an old set of NS590 which have a similar woofer and tweeter but a paper mid. I've always wondered how the sound of the two compares but I've never had a chance to get them in the same room.