The NS-1000 loudspeakers

Meanwhile in 1974 came the NS-1000 loudspeaker — of which we’ve been hearing much recently due to the arrival of the NS-1000-‘inspired’ NS-5000. Its great innovation was the introduction of beryllium vacuum deposition. Beryllium’s properties were well enough known — it had the classic combination of stiffness and lightness desirable in a loudspeaker cone, its ‘numbers’ superior to other options such as titanium, aluminium or magnesium. But its resistance to stretching or bending caused it to split under any attempt to form it into a shape for use in a loudspeaker driver.

Yamaha managed to overcome the problems by electro-beam vacuum deposition and a special alloy technology developed in its piano frame building. With an aluminium substrate and a preshaped copper former, Yamaha achieved a diaphragm of 99.99% pure beryllium plasma, used not only for the JA-0513 33mm tweeter but also the JA-0801 88mm midrange driver. The JA-3058 bass driver was a 12-incher using a more conventional paper cone, nevertheless developed especially for the NS-1000.

The new design was not an immediate ‘classic’ — in the hi-fi market it wasn’t helped by being sized too small to be a traditional floorstander yet too large and heavy for bookshelf use. And the speakers pushed 39kg each, with the solid polyurethane-coated ebony finish not mere veneer but proper solid wood.

But it did solicit some high praise from audio magazines which had, in the main, not thereto been great believers in Japanese loudspeakers. Despite reservations about ‘metallic’ drivers sounding, well, metallic, the NS-1000 soon increased in popularity through its sheer performance. The professional ‘M’ model was adopted as the official monitoring speaker of Sweden’s state broadcaster and later Finland’s, and the speakers remained in production, with variations, for 23 years, until beryllium diaphragm production was ended in 1997.