tisdag 12 juli 2016

New(old) speakers for my Retro-Stereo!

My vintage vinyl-rig got an upgrade today, in the shape of a pair of second hand speakers from the Swedish variety of Craigs list: "Blocket". I found a complete 5.0-set of Yamaha-speakers from 2001, but I was only interested in the front speakers, which didn't matter much as the price for the whole set was only 80$. All speakers use the same type of silk dome,  I can dismount the other three domes and keep as spares.

The front speakers of interest is a pair of the rather rare Yamaha NS 300, manufactured between 1999-2001 in mainly Malaysia afaik. They are robust speakers, 19Kg each of sturdy MDF, using 2x6.5" cast Pearl Mica drivers with large magnets and one 2" soft pure silk dome reaching 35kHz. The bass goes all the way down to 30Hz and peak power handling is a large 400W while continous rated power is 140W. They use a serious network with the tweaters taking over from 3kHz. These speakers where sold in Japan, Asia, USA and Europe so it was a generic model and not one of the local quick jobs. These are true HiFi-speakers living up to the "NS"=Natural Sound concept of Yamaha. They are also a perfect match for my Sony-rig from the same era(2001): a TA-FB940R QS single-ended MOS-FET amp, a CDP-XB930 QS cd-player and a S505ES tuner. I use a direct drive Technics SL-3210 from 1978 with a Ortofon OM10 for vinyl.

These speakers replaced a pair of KEF Coda 7, which are much smaller and weighs only 4Kg each, they had done their job admirably whith the aid of a active subwoofer but the Yamahas was a rather large upgrade. The resolution is not particularly better, as the KEF Coda 7 is a high resolution speaker, but the firmness and authority of every sound is so much larger and also the treble is noticeably more smooth and less grainy. In fact, not grainy at all. These are very good speakers and I'm quite happy to find a pair since they don't seem to surface very often(maybe because the owners are happy owners, well, not their wifes ase these are large black boxes).

A quick cell phone pic of my retro-rig as of today:


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