It doesn’t surprise me that you don’t know this: most people on hi-fi forums don’t know any better. They’re just repeating what they’ve read on forums, which often double as sales platforms with salespeople masquerading as neutral experts.
There are two reasons why I believe NS-10s—or why I know Auratones—are still used:
- NS-10s and Auratones aren’t poorly measuring speakers: They have a very good transient response. This might be hard to grasp in a forum that misinterprets Toole’s work and claims the time domain doesn’t matter, but the fact is, transient response directly affects your ability to hear transients in sound. Transients in a mix determine whether something sounds pleasant and smooth or harsh and ugly. You only need to listen to one second of a mix to immediately tell if it sounds professional or amateurish—because of the quality of the transients.
This is especially important for amateurs and young producers (and should dominate discussions instead of unhelpful topics). They often lack mentorship or the budget to buy adequate mics and expensive preamps, or they’re simply trying to save money. Inexperienced mixers are often steered toward bass-heavy speakers that don’t have the best transient response.
- The excellent transient response also ties directly to the quality of stereo imaging. Less optimal monitors in suboptimal rooms tend to trick you into turning up a chorus or widener, making it sound better and better—while Auratones quickly reveal if the side channel is too loud or doesn’t sound good. Auratones also expose reverb quality like nothing else. On Auratones, I can hear the antiphase of the snare room in Billie Jean. Show me any speaker three times the price that can do that. A guitar panned to the side and fattened with a chorus? Auratones will call out if the chorus is overdone or doesn’t sound good long before other speakers do.
These key attributes of these “horrible speakers” connect to another critical factor, which is often dismissed as unimportant—or even the worst thing:
- The shy bass response of these speakers, though objectively not measuring well, is a godsend and incredibly helpful:
Sound quality lives in the midrange. Customers and hi-fi forums are obsessed with the extremes, which are the least important. But if you work in professional audio, the midrange is where the sound is defined. It may sound counterintuitive if you lack experience, but bass problems can be heard in the midrange. Harshness issues also occur in the midrange, not at the extremes.
With these speakers, you can tell if the bass sounds good or has problems. Every good mix sounds good on them, while flat speakers with strong bass reproduction make some mixes or keys sound better or worse, depending on which room modes are triggered. The louder the bass, the more room modes affect what you hear.
When the bass is shy, the overtones become relatively louder, and room modes have less impact on your judgment. Of course, other tools are used for further inspection, but you can
hear a problem—which is exactly what monitors should do.
Also very important:
- Most playback systems don’t have the best bass response (or they’re uneven due to room modes or overly long decay times). To make kicks and bass instruments sound full across all systems, these sounds need presence in the midrange, which requires subtle additional distortion. But on flat speakers with powerful bass, saturation in the low mids is very hard to detect. If you have a headache and someone hits your finger with a hammer, do you still feel the headache? Probably not. Similarly, if the kick or bass is powerful, you won’t notice a lack of saturation on a system that plays flat. But on these bass-shy speakers (with their excellent transient response), it’s much easier to hear.