Mods to Yamaha NS-10 Speakers????

[Mark A. Gulbrandsen]

I have a pair and they've always sounded a bit too honky in the midrange for me. After finishing up a nice small Mini Aleph I dragged them back out and hooked them up to the Mini. The high end is fairly passable,but that honk in the mids still makes me want to put em back in the basement storage room.

Has anyone out there ever done any mods....different drivers....modified the original drivers.....etc, to these speakers? I'd be very receptive to any suggestions to get rid of that annoying midrange honkiness. Or would these cabinets which seem pretty solid be the basis for re-use with other drivers?

Mark

[cowanrg]

if i remember them right, the cabinet is like a drum. if you could simply dampen the cabinet, im sure you would see a huge improvement.

[The Paulinator]

There could also be a Canadian goose stuck in the cabinet. Remove the largest driver and lead him out with a little trail of bread crumbs. Works every time for me.

[usekgb]

Originally posted by Mark A. Gulbrandsen
I have a pair and they've always sounded a bit too honky in the midrange for me. After finishing up a nice small Mini Aleph I dragged them back out and hooked them up to the Mini. The high end is fairly passable,but that honk in the mids still makes me want to put em back in the basement storage room.

Has anyone out there ever done any mods....different drivers....modified the original drivers.....etc, to these speakers? I'd be very receptive to any suggestions to get rid of that annoying midrange honkiness. Or would these cabinets which seem pretty solid be the basis for re-use with other drivers?

Mark

Hi Mark,

The Yamaha NS-10 was never a "good" sounding speaker. The reason so many studios use these is, the translate well to so many speakers in people's homes. If you can make a mix sound good on NS-10's, chances are they will sound good on pretty much anything. One thing a lot of people have done is, place a piece of tissue paper over the front of the tweeter. This mellows out the harsh "rip your head off" high frequencies that the original NS-10 tweeters had. Later, Yamaha came out with a new tweeter that was made to emulate this technique. The newer tweeters sound quite a bit better.

On a side note, I might be interested in buying your NS-10's for my studio if your are willing to part with them. I am the speaker reair tech at Performance Audio here in Salt Lake, and I am pretty good at tweaking studio monitors to get a little more performance out of them.

Cheers,
Zach Griffen
Speaker Repair/Sales
Performance Audio
2456 S. State St.
Salt Lake City, UT 84115
zach@performanceaudio.com
www.performanceaudio.com

[Mark A. Gulbrandsen]

Hi Zach,
I agree, they are pretty lousy speakers. The cabinets are pretty well made though. You probably don't know of me but I work at CLACO Equipment and on occasion with Greg who also builds speaker systems. I dojn't think he knows much of the NS-10's though being a sound reinforcement sort of a guy.
There is quite a bit of fibreglas material in them....fibreglas has never been a very good damping material IMHO.

Donno if I could get much out of em, or should I have you do some tweeks on them for me? $$$? I am more of an electronics person than speaker person. This particuluar pair are the later NS-10MC's. The Mini Aleph drives em nice and to fairly high levels so it would be nice to get at least some use out of them for a second system. Don't need to tone em down much, I think these later NS10 tweetrs are more toned down than the earlier ones. No real need for covering up the tweets here. The honk I'm hearing seems to be woofer related.

Mark Gulbrandsen
CLACO Equipment And Service
1212 South State St.
SLC, Ut

[usekgb]

I don't know you personally, but we do do work with CLACO from time to time. I'd love to hear your mini-Aleph sometime. I've never actually heard any of the Pass Labs stuff, but I do have a Zen V4 that is almost done. As far as the honking in your NS-10's, there's not a whole lot you can do. That's just how they sound. Maybe you could bring your Aleph by Performance one of these days. We've got some Tannoy Reveals on display that sound pretty good.

Keep in touch,
Zach

[Mark A. Gulbrandsen]

Zach,
I also have a pair of overbuilt, high biased Aleph 2's that I could bring by. The Mini isn't quite finished as of yet but is playing and sounds really good within its power range.

I've always liked most of the Tannoys alot! The 2's ought to make em do what ever they're capable of! I'd also be interested in hearing your Zen when its finished.

As for the Yamahas, I think they'd work better if the enclosures were properly ported. I'm just not equipped with the proper software to make any calculations on doing that.
Mark Gulbrandsen

[mb]

There's some good info at http://www.dillonacoustics.com/Louds...aha_XOYA1.htm, including a schematic of suggested XO mods .

[Guss]

correct link

[Mark A. Gulbrandsen]

Thanks for that link guys....Thats exactly the mod that I need to do!!
Mark