Yamaha is better known for its musical instruments, machinery, motorcycles, outboard motors and electronic audio components than it is for its hi-fi loudspeakers, but the Japanese company has actually been building loudspeakers for longer than it has been building many of these other components. You see, Yamaha’s first electronic organ, the Electone D-1, released in 1959, featured the company’s own ‘Natural Sound’ loudspeakers.
These speakers were subsequently developed into high-end hi-fi speakers bearing the NS-20 and NS-30 model names, released eight years after the electric organ and often claimed to be Yamaha’s first ‘Natural Sound’ speakers. Both were three-way designs, with the NS-30 using a bass driver that measured 890 x 630mm (!) and the NS-20 using one that measured 680 x 500mm (also !). The very large and odd-shaped diaphragms of both speakers were, rather uniquely, made from Styrofoam. The model numbers took their initial letters from the ‘Natural Sound’ slogan and, as you can see from the model reviewed here, the company’s speakers still do. In fact, Yamaha has used these two letters to name all of its hi-fi loudspeakers since 1967 (except for one).
In the 50-odd years Yamaha has been building hi-fi speakers, it’s scored more than its fair share of ‘world-first’ innovations, many of which have since been adopted by other loudspeaker manufacturers. One of the first and most significant was the company’s use of Beryllium to manufacture the midrange dome used in the NS-1000 and NS-1000M models released in 1974. Beryllium had been proposed as an ideal cone/dome material for many years because itsdeposition method that was being used to manufacture integrated circuits to instead create loudspeaker diaphragms that were 99.99% pure Beryllium. Consequently, its NS-1000 and NS-1000M speakers could benefit from having midrange drivers and tweeters with Beryllium domes.
