Good bass response and looks.

Too bright for my tastes. Poor timbre matching with the rest of Yamaha''s upper line of speakers. 6-ohm impedence may prohibit some.

In hindsight, I should have just sprung for the NS-A100xt''s and saved myself some dissapointment and hassle. Let me start by saying these are plenty decent all around speakers. They have good bass response for a bookshelf and cover overall sonic range pretty well. They are, however, too bright for my tastes. A good speaker for someone a little older. What does that comment mean? Well, as you age, your high frequency hearing diminshes and these speakers would work well in that context. My real gripe with these guys is there poor timbre matching with the NS-AC40X center. They are all styled and built to go togther (silver grill cloth, aluminum drivers) I always suspected there was a discprepancy between the 2 but it wasn''t until I ran the AVIA timbre match test that I trully discovered that the timbre match is poor. Specifically, the AC40x (as well as the 100xt and 200xt towers) all utilize the same 1" tweet. The timbre match between these guys is near perfect. As I got the NS-AC60x''s for my HT I''m a little cranked out of shape. I now have the 100xt''s as my mains and these as my surrounds as timbre matching is less crucial in surrounds. That being the case I was still to ticked at the timbre mismatch so I have been experimenting with different fabrics to place over the tweet to attenuate it a bit and knock of some brightness. A medium thickness bath towel seems to do a pretty good job, but I will probably keep messing with it for a while (probably until I can just ditch these onto another system and get another pair of the 100xt''s.

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Other Yamaha''s: A638, NS-A100xt''s. Cheap JBL''s and the overpriced for performance BOSE 141''s.

Beautiful =) Mids, Highs

BASS, size

Well I needed some front speakers that are magnetically shielded and these fit the bill. Kinda went out on a limb and got these off ebay without even listening to them. First off when I got em they are NOT bookshelf speakers. Way too big to be bookshelf speakers. Second thing I noticed they are beautiful =) Sitting next to a TV or monitor or just on stands they look great. They are just black finish with dark grey grills but everyone that seems em are always like "wow" and think they are real expensive. Unfortunetly the sound doesnt match the look. For their size I would expect alot more bass. But the 8" driver is not built too great. I am a very technical person and have gone through many different types of speakers for car audio for SQ and SPL. Well because of this I wanted to see the motor structure so I took one of the 8s out =) Shhhhhhhhh dont tell Yamaha. The motor structure is actually very nice and magnet is pretty large for an 8. But the cone is pretty weak, the voice coil is avg size but I think the windings are few. Thats why there isnt much excursion. Yamaha went with a pretty thin cone so naturally it wouldnt be able to hand the stress under long excursion. According to the specs the bass rolls off at 60hz by 10db and I would say that is pretty accurate. It might roll off a little higher, maybe 65 or 70hz. But bookshelf speakers aren't made to give great bass (Even though this monsters should given the size) but with a sub they sound great. The highs were a little harsh in the beginning but it just kinda went away, guess it was just the break in period. Mids are not muffled though which I love. Alot of two way and three way systems have mids that are just too low and are over powered by bass and or treble. The mids and highs on these are balanced perfectly. Not harsh and not too quiet. I am pretty impressed with these sub 150$ speakers even though I am dissappointed in the size/bass.

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Not really similar but compaired to JBL S38 infinity RS3s

Alot more after some Adjustments =)

The 5.25" doesnt have its own enclosure. CROSSOVER

Ok When I first took the 8" out of the cabinet I didn’t see any of this because of the fiber fill they had in there. Well anyways I noticed on some songs I listened to, the midrange kind of distorted when the bass hit. So I took the grill off and watched the midrange when I replayed the song and noticed the 5.25" speaker had allot of throw and couldn’t figure out why. Well naturally I took the entire speaker apart. Now the 8" woofer is just stamped steal but very clean with the magnetic shielding, but the 5.25 has some sort of polymer casket but not like ones I've seen before, it doesn’t look as strong. But there is a second magnet attached to the bottom of the main magnet and I think it has something to do with the shielding because the magnetic field doesn’t stray too far from the magnets, I think the two cancel each other outside of the pole or something. Anyways when I took out the 5.25" the first thing I noticed was the cabinet. There was no second enclosure for the midrange. The box is basically just one box with three holes. The midrange and the sub fight for the air space so the 8” naturally pushes the 5.25” around causing some distortion. It was very very hard to hear which is very strange considering the design. After I took out the 8” and the 5.25” I took out all the fiber fill and saw the “crossover” This is where you start seeing the 100$ tag. There is no crossover there are literally only a capacitor in series with the midrange and tweeter and a resistor also in series with the cap and midrange. That isn’t even a true 3way crossover its just a high pass cross over on the mid and tweeter and its only a 6db/octave slope and there is NO crossover for the 8” I just think the driver doesn’t respond to anything over 200-300hz so its being fed full range from the amp. Yeah its cheap Sony style. Well you might not believe me but it’s pretty easy to fix the separate enclosure part. This is really ghetto but it worked like a charm. You guys even seen those packs of 100 cd-rs? =) Well the ones with hard plastic covers are the perfect diameter for mounting it on the cabinet. I had to take the cabinets and lay them on their faces on two sawhorses so I could get under then and place the plastic tops correctly on the 5.25” hole and apply the epoxy. 24 hours later I made the second enclosure but the crossover is a different story. You basically can’t fix that problem unless you have some random 3.3mH inductors and some 2-way crossovers lying around or better yet a passive 3way xover. I did so I could fix that. After all this they sound great and I can turn them up as loud as my amp can go with no distortion =) But no one buys speakers to put this kind of work into them so………. I’d have to lower my previous score of these from a 4 to a 3 in performance. For price still a 4 cause I mean come on 100$ is how much the wood and speakers cost, cant really ask for more.