Yamaha NS2000 Surrounds

The Yamaha A-S3000 circuit is fully balanced from input to output, Yamaha engineers developed the output stage - what they call "floating balanced" specifically for the A-S3000. A number of boutique über expensive foreign companies in US & Europe are copying the output stage!

The CD-S3000 can also be used as an excellent dac for computer music sources. The Yamaha anniversary gear 100th & 125th are exceptionally well made.
 
The Diatone DS-5000 IMO are superior to the NS-2000 in every way except perhaps detail retrieval which are at similar levels. The boron drivers (only ever manufactured by Mitsubishi) are better than beryllium IMO. The exceptional wall of sound they put out is astonishing. Again the ability to play at loud levels without distortion is present.

Their frequency band is very wide 20hz up to 60000hz. The sub bass and bass integration with the mid & tweeter is fantastic. Despite monsterious size the bass is exceptionally well balanced.

Here are my beautiful NS-2000s. I had a local artisan hand make the stands, based approximately on the original design for the NSX-10000 stands

Wow! Those Diatones look great! They look very deep as well as wide and tall. I haven't heard about Boron drivers until your post, while Yamaha's Berryllium have been all the rage for years. Were they a very limited edition?
Unfortunately, I don't have the original stands for my NSX-10000 (SPS-10000). If you look at the Audio Heritage site, you'll see they had a lot of wood curving inward towards the center, to both break standing waves beneath the speakers and direct sound outward into the room.

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Here are my lovely NS-2000's, on their original stands (SPS-2000), which are unfortunately the standard black type. Yamaha also made nice matching wood grain versions, which look more like your hand-made beauties, only with block-shaped legs like on mine instead of rounded ones like yours. This picture is also a bit old. I've done more room treatment since this was taken: bass traps standing in the corners behind them as well as wall abosorbers, which would be outside this picture. The floor pillows are absorbers to kill a bounce off the hardwood floors, as is the blue carpet.

You can see the placement of my B&W 805N's, which have only the tweeters connected. The amp is a McIntosh MA6800, which provides huge, warm sound. The DAC is a Hegel HD10.
 
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...and here's a snap of my current NSX-10000 setup. The apparent curvature and angle are iPhone lens distortion. The cinema/projector screen is temprorary, and when not in use the equipment shelf unit goes back further against the wall, so that it's further behind the speaker fronts. Unfortunately my projector is so noisy it's self-defeating to use it to watch a music video with this equipment. The speakers are on TAOC stands and sound boards. On the bottom shelf is a Chord64 DAC, and Luxman speaker and amp selectors, which enable switching between speakers (Acoustic Energy AE2 signatures as rears) and amps. The second shelf has a McIntosh C20 early model preamp, a 100V->117V power transformer (Japan is on 100V), some fancy headphones (another story...), and a Luxman L-509u SS amp. The C20 can connect to a pair of McIntosh MC30's (current arrangement), or a first-issue model MC275. All the McIntosh gear in the picture were refurbished to mint-condition by Tom Manley and Terry DeWick in the US. The turntable is a Thorenz TD-126 mk II.
 
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Here is the rainbow diffraction pattern effect of the Berryllium dome midrange, which is only a few atoms thick, composed of a single-crystal grown structure, unlike the all other Yamaha Berryllium drivers (except the GF-1), which were produced using a sputtering technique in a vaccuum. I took the screen cover off (simple magnetic attachment) to show it NUDE here, so if you are under 18 years old, look away now and erase any memory of having looked at it. Those of you who are of age can see tiny dust specs on the gold-plated guard cover, which is no biggy, but I don't know how to get the specs off the dome itself - certainly not by touching it or trying to vaccuum it off! Maybe by blasting loud enough music through them. All of my Berryllium domes (4 speaker pairs) have some such specs if I look up close. I doubt it has any ill effect.
 
Absolutely beautiful! And some very fine ancillaries connected to those beauties too.
Thank you for saying that, Vint Age! It has taken me many years and much continuous effort to acquire this collection, having had sometimes difficult WAF to deal with in addition to not being wealthy at all. I have quite a few other nice items that I'd picked-up along the way that I haven't yet had the heart (guts?) to part with (e.g., much of my signature eqpt list). Not a businessman - I'm not sure how best to sell those things here in Japan.
 
Thanks deaf in left really interesting explanation regarding your equipment and home experiments. You might try using compressed air in a can to blow of the dust on the dome - although because of the rarity I would contact Yamaha and see what they recommend first.

Your equipment looks spectacular, I'm very happy you have the NSX-10000 as you are the second person online I have ever heard talk about them. I always wondered how many pairs were made. The beryllium drivers are probably the best ever made anywhere in the world. Yamaha had gained sufficient expertise over the years.

The Diatone DS-5000 were a Japan only flagship Released in 1982 around same time as the NS-2000. I have a copy of Stereosound in Japanese from 1982 with an article about both sets of speakers. Unfortunately I have never had the articles translated so I'm unable to read them. There are however some interesting photos of both speakers.

The NSX10000 also has beryllium bobbins according to TVK I have know idea what they do. Deaf in Left do you know? Did you get a copy of the manual when you purchased them?

Nice turntable BTW. I was wondering why you had the mac amps on top of the speakers? I have seen others do the same thing with Pioneer Exclusive speakers as well?
 
Thanks deaf in left really interesting explanation regarding your equipment and home experiments. You might try using compressed air in a can to blow of the dust on the dome - although because of the rarity I would contact Yamaha and see what they recommend first.

Your equipment looks spectacular, I'm very happy you have the NSX-10000 as you are the second person online I have ever heard talk about them. I always wondered how many pairs were made. The beryllium drivers are probably the best ever made anywhere in the world. Yamaha had gained sufficient expertise over the years.

The Diatone DS-5000 were a Japan only flagship Released in 1982 around same time as the NS-2000. I have a copy of Stereosound in Japanese from 1982 with an article about both sets of speakers. Unfortunately I have never had the articles translated so I'm unable to read them. There are however some interesting photos of both speakers.

The NSX10000 also has beryllium bobbins according to TVK I have know idea what they do. Deaf in Left do you know? Did you get a copy of the manual when you purchased them?

Nice turntable BTW. I was wondering why you had the mac amps on top of the speakers? I have seen others do the same thing with Pioneer Exclusive speakers as well?

I was going to suggest a gentle (artist's) airbrush (borrow or rent one)...that little spit of cold air that sometimes comes out of an air can seems like it could be lethal.

I was wondering the same thing about the amps on speakers thing but was afraid to ask. :rolleyes:
 
This is pretty interesting...from hifido's most recent listing of NS-2000's:



交换前 means before exchange
交换後 means after
青 is blue 赤 is red

So the midrange in speaker b (red) had a genuine problem toward the upper end. Usually they just post the after graphs of their crossover exchange but this is first time I've seen an actual dirty curve.

Here is the link with pictures of the crossover:

http://www.hifido.co.jp/KWYamaha/G1/P0/A10/E/0-50/S0/C17-09192-31392-00/

Seriously gorgeous pair. Congrats to the future owner.
 
808 your artist's brush suggestion is probably the best one - the air can might be lethal like you say - I was thinking at the time spraying from a healthy distance.
 
The NSX10000 also has beryllium bobbins according to TVK I have know idea what they do. Deaf in Left do you know? Did you get a copy of the manual when you purchased them?

I was wondering why you had the mac amps on top of the speakers? I have seen others do the same thing with Pioneer Exclusive speakers as well?
mrtim6 - The voice coil bobbins are Beryllium to reduce heating effects and the losses assocuated with them. In any coil experiencing change in current, there is an impeding effect by the coil against the change expressed as hysteresis and eddy current losses. These effects also have a small effect of duminutive distortion on the input wave reproduction, and therefore on vibratory output sound reproduction. The degree of distortion depends on the bobbin material - solid iron being high, sandwiched sheets better, etc. Yamaha found the effects are miniscule with Beryllium.

The reasons we sometimes put our lovely monoblock amps on top of the speaker in Japan are (in my case at least) two-fold: space is a problem in Japan, and - it looks so amazingly good, no?!
In spite of what some "purists" will imagine, it cannot produce a distorting effect on the sound, while the extra weight on the already heavy cabinets can have a small additional positive effect of further reducing cabinet distortion.

Thank you all for the cleaning ideas. I'm actually not concerned as yet about the tiny dust specs on the domes, but it would be useful to know a safe removal method in case anything heavy enough to produce measurable distortion lands on one.
 
This is pretty interesting...from hifido's most recent listing of NS-2000's:

>snipped<

Seriously gorgeous pair. Congrats to the future owner.

808_state - You can read some Chinese characters. Are you in Japan too?

One thing I'd like to say to anyone considering purchase of NS-2000's and reading this thread: Buy them! The distortions, drawbacks, and inferiorities compared to other speakers on this thread are very tiny, and they are being compared here only to some of the world's very rarest and topmost speakers. NS-2000's are among the best deals in Audio in terms of cost/performance. They are really amazing, and as you can see, those of us crazies who have somehow found even better speakers also still have and love our NS-2000s.

Also, about the NS-1000x: I maintain five main audio systems in two houses. Arguably my (wife's...long story) nicest sounding (though technically less accurate) system is a much lower-budget set in the bedroom of my main house: a pair of standard black NS-1000x's, powered by a classic tube amp, a Luxman SQ-38FD mk II (AH! Njoe Tjoeb CD player, Northstar DAC). These are placed far from any walls in a relatively wide room that is cluttered with Chinese art supplies, an art desk, bookshelves, a huge bed (meant for old folks - it lifts into seating position for listening....), a (Yamaha upright) piano, loads of odd items collected over years of travel, and even a few stuffed animal toys (wife's, not mine. - No, REALLY!). The point is, under the right conditions of placement and room acoustics, any of the Yamaha Berryllium series can be at the heart of a beautiful-sounding system, and for a lot less money than it would take to achieve such sound quality with almost any other speakers.

IMHO, of course!
 
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I'm now on HiFiDo's waiting list for NS-2000's. It will be interesting to see how long it takes to reach the top of the list. In the meantime I enjoy my NS-1000xw's and infinity IRS Delta's.
 
I'm now on HiFiDo's waiting list for NS-2000's. It will be interesting to see how long it takes to reach the top of the list. In the meantime I enjoy my NS-1000xw's and infinity IRS Delta's.
Good luck on that Mark B. Also check the auctions on Yahoo Japan, if you can figure out payment and shipping with the seller. They often go for much lower prices there, although probably not refurbished and guaranteed as HiFiDo does.

By the way - You are only the second owner I know of with the NS-1000xw, besides me. :)
 
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Did you get a copy of the manual when you purchased them?
Sorry, I missed this question. Unfortunately, I have no manual, no original box, and no original stands (yet). HiFiDo said the previous owner "thinks he might have the stands somewhere" ... That really got my imagination going as to how the previous owner might be living!
 
Good luck on that Mark B. Also check the auctions on Yahoo Japan, if you can figure out payment and shipping with the seller. They often go for much lower prices there, although probably not refurbished and guaranteed as HiFiDo does.

By the way - You are only the second owener I know of with the NS-1000xw, besides me. :)
Thanks, I'll keep an eye out for them on Yahoo JP also.
 
808_state - You can read some Chinese characters. Are you in Japan too?

Actually I can speak and read some chinese, probably at the level of a 5-7 year old...but hey you gotta start somewhere :D

I wish I was in Japan! I was just there last October with my wife visiting my in-laws. I hit up every hifido and diskunion I had time for. I'm definitely going hifi I hunting next time we go back.

To be honest I think hifido's rate for NS-2000's is probably better than yahoo jp auctions, especially for condition. Lately a lot of mediocre stuff has been going for inflated prices and the sellers will play games like extending the auction time at the last minute. Buyer beware (or at least mentally prepared).
 
Sorry, I missed this question. Unfortunately, I have no manual, no original box, and no original stands (yet). HiFiDo said the previous owner "thinks he might have the stands somewhere" ... That really got my imagination going as to how the previous owner might be living!

Probably has them in storage in his hometown/country house.
 
With
I'm now on HiFiDo's waiting list for NS-2000's. It will be interesting to see how long it takes to reach the top of the list. In the meantime I enjoy my NS-1000xw's and infinity IRS Delta's.
Mark with a bit of luck Hifido will ship your pair in original NS-2000 boxes like they did with mine. They came double boxed with original box inside - extremely well packaged too.
 
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