Natural Born Winners

The very first loudspeakers designed and built by Yamaha back in the 1950s were for use in the company’s range of electronic organs, which it named ‘Electone’ and promoted as having a sound the same as that of the conventional organs they replaced — in other words, a ‘natural sound.’ And this ‘natural sound’ slogan has continued to this day in the model numbers of all Yamaha loudspeakers — NS.

The most famous of Yamaha’s speaker designs over the years was undoubtedly the NS-1000, introduced in 1974. It was the first loudspeaker in the world to use beryllium diaphragms, and was available both as a professional studio monitor (NS-1000M) and a home speaker, where it was also the first loudspeaker to have a gloss black cabinet finish. Yamaha’s current flagship domestic speaker, the NS-5000, shares much of the DNA of the original NS-1000, retaining the three-way three-driver bass-reflex configuration in a cabinet of almost the same physical dimensions, and in a similar finish.

But among audio professionals the most famous Yamaha speaker was the NS-10 and its ‘M’ variants, so popular with recording engineers that at one point it could be fairly said that almost every single recording studio in the world owned at least one pair. The Yamaha NS-10M was a two-way two-driver infinite-baffle design that used a 180mm