NX-N500 ‘Studio’
The NX-N500 active stereo speakers are now marked ‘discontinued’ on Yamaha’s website, certainly long in the tooth by product cycle standards. But we can’t not mention them, because they remain our favourite of all the wireless multiroom products we have ever reviewed, and blow any other similarly-priced wireless speaker we know out of the water. It’s true they could be neater, requiring two mains cables and two linking cables between them — one signal, one data, whereas more recent active stereo pairs like KEF’s LSX do everything except mains power through the air. The remote control is also a little plastic thing (though hey, most wireless speakers have no remote at all). Meanwhile the NX-N500 speakers win out by having MusicCast onboard, by having a full range of inputs (Bluetooth, AirPlay, USB-B for computer, optical digital and analogue minijack), and by sounding wonderful. They look like classics, too, being designed to evoke Yamaha’s NS-10M studio monitor launched in 1978, white woofers and all; their original MusicCast moniker was simply ‘STUDIO, a good name to conjure their precision and power. While they are only 29cm high, they deliver more weight than you would imagine from speakers that size, with a beautifully imaged and toned soundstage powerfully underpinned by taut and tight beats. Sometimes we felt there was a slightly lean lower midrange, so that radio voices were clear but could emerge a little thinned. But on the whole, these are the active speakers that have held our favour in the nearly five years since they scooped a Sound+Image award. If you’re going MusicCast for your multiroom, seek them out if you can.