History of Speaker

Released in 1967, the NS-20 and NS-30 were Yamaha’s historic first Natural Sound speakers. Both featured an irregular three-way configuration based on the JA-6002 (an 89x63cm diaphragm used in the NS-30) and JA-5002 (the 68x50cm version used in the NS-20) units originally developed by Yamaha for the Electone and improved for HiFi audio use. Each was configured the same way apart from the size of the unit and cabinet. The cabinet sizes were determined based on the large dimensions of the NS-30’s JA-6002 unit and the NS-20’s JA-5002 unit, their single-unit measurements of 1030mm high x 740mm wide x 315mm deep and 860mm high x 620mm wide x 310mm deep being standard for the large studio monitors of the time. To put it simply, the NS-30 had a baffle size comparable to the JBL4343 and the NS-20 had a baffle size comparable to the Diatone 2S-305. With a unique Styrofoam diaphragm, this unit bore the name Natural Sound Speaker (NS Speaker) and was the origin of the "natural sound" slogan Yamaha has continued to use ever since.

The front of the NS speaker mounted fully on the rear side of the cabinet (the back of the unit) was also substantially open state, full range driven, and by mounting the two-way consisting of a 30cm (NS-30) or 20cm (NS-20) "squawker" and 5cm tweeter on the front side it had the configuration of a sound field type speaker, actively taking advantage of the effects of reflected sound. For that reason, to borrow a phrase from the documentation of the day, like an upright piano it was recommended that the NS speaker be placed away from the wall behind it. Interestingly, the documentation of the time used different values for a recommended distance from the wall, the domestic Japanese documentation suggesting "5 to 10cm" and the overseas documentation "6 inches" (around 15cm). From this we can guess that there was a business judgment at the time that 15cm would be a tough sell for small Japanese rooms. Actual sales in North America and elsewhere achieved a respectable level, but it faced difficulty in the domestic market due to its size and installation requirements.

Creating a major sensation for their all-time originality, the NS speaker lineup later expanded to include the smaller JA-5004 (58x46cm diaphragm), JA-3501 (51x38cm) and JA-3502 (45x32cm) units along with a modular stereo set and wall mountable compact speakers. For five years it served as the face of Yamaha speakers until the 1973 release of the NS-570, which became the recommended speaker for the first run of Yamaha HiFi components, the 700 series. After 1974, the NS-600 and NS-1000M series of general use round speakers were big hits and the NS speaker disappeared from the product lineup, but the idea of considering room acoustics in playback like a musical instrument manufacturer soon led to the creation of the world’s first Digital Sound Field Processor, the DSP-1, in 1986 and on to a home theater product series.

The first speaker system to make use of Yamaha’s pure beryllium diaphragm, as legendary as our SIT (vertical power FET) HiFi technology, the NS-1000/NS-1000M was released in 1974. Lightweight with high rigidity and hardness and a sound propagation velocity more than twice that of titanium and magnesium, from early days beryllium had drawn attention as an ideal diaphragm material. Its brittleness, however, made it difficult to work with, and its susceptibility to corrosion meant that up to then it had never been put into practical application. By utilizing the electron beam vacuum deposition method used in state-of-the-art LSI manufacturing and a special alloy technology developed since its piano frame building days, Yamaha developed a unique deposition molding manufacturing process that produced a diaphragm of 99.99% pure beryllium plasma, for the first time in the world bringing a pure beryllium diaphragm to the commercial marketplace.

The NS-1000/1000M featured the first units to use this pure beryllium diaphragm, the JA-0801 8.8cm midrange and JA-0513 3.3cm tweeter, and along with the JA-3058 (NS-1000)/JA-3058A (NS-1000M) 30cm woofer developed especially for this product it formed a 3-way bookshelf model with precise tone over a wide frequency range, sparkling clarity in the middle and high ranges that won it acclaim around the world as soon as it was released. Notably, it unanimously earned the highest rating in Western audio magazines that up until then had largely ignored Japanese-made speakers, becoming the first luxury speakers made in Japan to become a worldwide hit. Two years after it hit the market, in 1976, the Swedish state-owned broadcasting corporation chose the NS-1000M as its official monitor speaker, and with orders for 1000 units it surpassed prestigious European manufacturers Tandberg, Celestion, Bang & Olufsen and Bowers & Wilkins. Moreover, in 1978 the Finland national broadcaster ordered 200 units of the NS-1000M, cementing its firm position as a professional monitor speaker.

Positioned as a high-end unit for home use and priced at 145,000 yen at the time of its release, the NS-1000 featured an ebony luxury urethane paint finish exterior, while the NS-1000M, priced at 108,000 yen and aimed at use from the home to the studio, sported a birch semi-gloss black paint finish. With a somewhat large thick-walled cabinet and removable saran net, the NS-1000 weighed in at 39kg, 8kg heavier than the 31kg NS-1000M. As is evident from the difference in price, the cabinet finish of the NS-1000 was lavish enough to rival that of a luxury wood grain piano, but the fearless black design and overwhelming cost-performance of the NS-1000M made it the focus of popular attention. The upgraded NS-2000 released in 1982 and the NS-1000X released in 1986 reinforced the reputation of the original machine, and in the 23 years until the end of all beryllium diaphragm unit production in 1997 it was a long-lasting hit with more than 200,000 units sold.

One of Yamaha’s masterpieces alongside the NS-1000M, with more than 300,000 units in the series sold making it one of the world’s most famous speakers. Synonymous today with small studio monitors, the NS-10M was originally intended as something else, a follow-up to the youth-oriented, low cost HiFi NS-451 speaker of 1976.

The NS-1000M had already gained a worldwide reputation and now the new sealed cabinet NS-10M appeared with a playful but realistic sound, the image of its seven-step black painted real birch wood finish, three-way enclosure structure and symmetrical left-right arrangement becoming the emblem of the NS-10M as much as the NS-1000M’s. Unusually for the time it was sold in sets of two, and with an easy to understand price of 50,000 yen per set and a fashionable packaging box designed to make it easy to carry home by hand, everything about it was epoch-making. It was nearly twice as compact as the NS-451 and rival products in the same class, with a price proportional to its size, but it was a bit risky to release it into the popular price range of the day because of the compact size. However, the combined benefits of a sound beyond what you would expect from its size and concept, a sound that made conventional large speakers seem outdated, and a small size that meant unlimited choices for speaker placement, sparked a boom big enough to be called a singular phenomenon.

Its woofer unit was the same sheet process white cone used in the NS-451 in a new slightly smaller 18cm design with the magnet changed from aluminum-nickel to ferrite and a sealed cabinet. Its 3.5cm tangential edge molded soft dome tweeter shared the basic design of the NS-690II and, completely abolishing the seldom-used level control, its high purity sound quality was enough to make even sound maniacs sigh. The NS-10M’s rarely heard ability to skillfully pick up music’s essence made it popular even among professional sound engineers and musicians, spreading widely to become an essential tool at the forefront of the world’s music production and recording studios.

Released in 1980, the NS-690III was the final model in the NS-690 series which had been a long-selling hit since 1973. HiFi components that had debuted with plain wood (castor) cabinets at the same time as the original NS-690 had already undergone a generational change, with the unit exterior changing from castor to an American walnut open pore finish to match the same-generation amplifiers and players. From the plywood cabinet with particleboard back plate used in the original NS-690, the second generation NS-690II changed to an entirely particleboard construction, increasing in weight to 27kg from the original’s 22kg. In appearance there was little change in the basic design of the midrange and tweeter, which used a tangential edge molded soft dome, but the coating material, critical to sound production, was altered to further improve linearity.

But the most important thing about this unit was the world’s first woofer diaphragm made of Yamaha’s proprietary 100% spruce pulp. Made with carefully selected straight grain portions of Yamaha grand piano soundboard-grade spruce for superior tone and sound quality, the raw pulp materials were specially refined for producing the cone paper, keeping the delicate sound that had been described as "European elegance" while producing both deep bass tone and clear resolution.

Without compromising the character of the original, it goes without saying that the aging NS-690III boasted the highest degree of sound quality perfection in its series, but in an audio world shaken by the dawn of the CD in the early 1980’s, a world where analog had become an epithet, its image lost some of its luster and it can’t be denied that it began to look out of date. It wasn’t until the release of the NS-1 classics in 1988 that speakers that could handle the spread of the CD and legitimately be called successors to the line appeared.

In tandem with the 1982 introduction of the first digital audio media geared to the consumer, the CD, the competition in the speaker world to develop new materials to replace the paper cone became increasingly prominent. Part of the competition between companies centered on carbon-based materials with physical properties suitable for speaker use. Having consistently stuck with the paper cone ever since the NS-600 series, in the fall of 1982 just before the birth of the CD, Yamaha finally announced the release of the pure carbon fiber cone, made of 100% carbon materials without using paper, in the new NS-2000. As is evident from the model number, the NS-2000 was developed as a high-end model directly from the NS-1000M which had occupied the position of the face of Yamaha speakers for the eight years since 1974. Naturally, to serve as a higher grade version of a unit that already had a solid reputation like the NS-1000M many of its existing elements had to be refined, and to form the center of that technology Yamaha developed its first 33cm diameter pure carbon fiber woofer, the JA3301, from scratch.

The major concept behind this pure fiber cone was to take full advantage of carbon’s inherent rigidity and elasticity by preserving its long fibers in creating the diaphragm. Specifically, a carbon sheet with its fibers aligned in one direction was cut into eight equal parts with the eight resulting segments arranged in a circle so that when joined they would form a cone with all fibers projecting in a radial direction. This allowed the creation of a cone made from 100% pure carbon, apart from the adhesive used to join it together.

You would need a rational reason for the tried-and-true paper cone to be discarded in favor of the chic new carbon style, and the development team probably had devised such an elaborate process in order to use carbon fiber, with a sound transmission rate and elasticity second only to the beryllium used in midrange and tweeters, in complete purity. Developed for the FX-3, the JA0802A and JA0526A midrange and tweeter adopted the pure beryllium dome. Here too there was success in further enhancing the sound’s expressive power by the deposition of even finer beryllium particles. Strongly advocating the position that audio equipment must be inherently musical and human while also incorporating the trends of the ‘80s, the NS-2000 was a milestone produced by eight years of evolution from the achievements of the NS-1000M, and has to be considered a success even if its direction was somewhat different.

Having remained unchanged since 1978 as it set records as a long-seller, after ten years the NS-10M underwent its first redesign in 1987. There were only three substantial changes along with its unit class and a luxurious seven-coat paint process real wood cabinet, so the model change did not impact any of its essential characteristics. The price increased by 5,000 yen, but it can be said in good conscience that the price had to match the improvements in the unit’s basic specifications.

Part of the redesign was the addition of 5mm thickness felt ring acoustic absorbers around the tweeters for sound absorption. As also mentioned in the catalog, as the use of the NS-10M in its original function as a studio monitor spread, some users began to point out the strength of its treble, and especially as we entered the digital age the technique of covering the front of the tweeter with one sheet of tissue became common among studio engineers. Tuning with the use of felt eliminated the need for this practice. The second change was to replace the simple push-type speaker cable terminal with a screw-on type that made it difficult for the cable to come free. The third was to increase the input resistance. Examination of the specifications of each unit reveals that they were the same as before the redesign, meaning that it should be considered that most of the input resistance was due to the numerical values of the allowable input having been described in expectation of a margin and that they had been revised to appropriate values with an eye toward product planning.

If you compare more closely, you will also notice that each unit’s attachment screws had been changed to a hex bolt, meaning it was easier to disconnect and exchange them. As part of this 1987 renewal, three models, the horizontally arranged NS-10M PRO (front and back character displays with the unit attached laterally at 90 degrees), the NS-10M Studio which omitted the grille net feature, and the NS-10MC which included bolt holes for ceiling mounting the NS-10M Studio and a grille net, were added to the lineup as business models.

Appearing in 1988 in the midst of the popular price speaker competition showing signs of turning into a war of attrition in the Japanese market, the NS-1 Classic had nothing, even in terms of its technical and design elements, to do with preceding Yamaha speakers. But in appearance there was no mistaking that it was a Yamaha HiFi bookshelf speaker and you could even go so far as to call it a reincarnation of the old NS-690 series.

No longer using high-tech materials, it had a simple design featuring a colorless mica hybrid PP cone woofer and a soft dome tweeter made of undyed cotton treated with a minimal amount of phenol forming resin. With an aluminum-nickel magnetic circuit it is clear that it was strongly intended as a return to speaker building basics, and that intention was restated equally in its bare tweeter dome and defenselessly affixed white felt. The six-sided real birch wood cabinet featured a full urethane finish on all sides, and it retailed for 59,500 yen per unit at the time of its release. Knowing how good it was from the point of view of modern values, that price seems surprisingly reasonable, but for customers of the day it was no doubt a difficult choice to have to select between a popular price speaker that was respectable because it visibly weighed 30kg and a unit like this that was not even a third of that. The price of the NS-1 Classic went up to 65,000 yen per unit in 1993, but it continued to be produced for twelve years until 1999, slowly and steadily gaining supporters. The technology of the A-PMD (Advanced Polymer-injected Mica Diaphragm) unit continues to be used in Yamaha speakers.

The desire to eliminate the uncertainty of not knowing which amplifier is going to be driving the speakers they make is natural and probably the same for all developers. If you trace things back further to the unit development stage, even the passive network interposed between an amplifier and unit is going to end up being called the product of a compromise.

The GF-1, which came to be known as an active speaker of integrity encapsulating an active crossover and a drive amplifier directly connected one-to-one with all speaker units, removed all such fateful constraints. It was the culmination of the Yamaha HiFi speaker aiming for the full realization of the true value of the speaker itself and of the unit itself. It was designed with a two-part configuration, the upper half of its 140cm tall, 150kg cabinet housing a three-way speaker element and the lower half a YST superwoofer element. Its four drive amplifiers and active crossover units per channel were attached as four independent modules to the back of the superwoofer, and with a massive external power supply that itself weighed 25kg supplying each of the four amplifier modules with independent power it was a truly heavy piece of equipment. The crossover slope and cutoff frequency were completely fixed and could not be adjusted from the outside in any way, with only fine adjustments of up to ±2.5dB to each module’s input level available to the user. From this it can be seen that the developers intended the system to be perfectly tuned and did not intend the balance to be changed easily.

The tweeter and midrange were of course made of pure beryllium, but rather than using the vacuum deposition process of the past it went as far as using a forged beryllium dome developed for and used in only this model. Its pair of large and small woofers likewise used a Kevlar cone and forged beryllium cap specific to this model, and the magnet utilized a voice coil with reduced diameter and dendritic crystal aluminum-nickel to lighten the motion of the diaphragm system. The tweeter and midrange magnets were also composed of dendritic crystal aluminum-nickel. The gold deposition method was performed on each unit’s diaphragm in an effort to damp the slight squeal of beryllium and produce uniform tone across all units. Overall it was built like it was meant to be the crowning glory, and if there was just one thing left undone it would probably be that it was not possible to use a forged beryllium woofer cone. As Yamaha’s speaker development changed course for a new era of focus on the home theater, the GF-1 put a period at the end of the pure beryllium development story that had played out since the NS-1000M.