Cool! found something to disagree on Blue!!
NS10's certainly didn't get popular because Yamaha gave them away, there were always plenty of alternatives. Apart from that, you can find NS10's in just about every major facility - not exactly the kind of places that would skimp a couple of bucks on nearfields?
More hits (and records on the whole) have been referenced on NS10's than any other monitors, but no engineer on earth will have a pair at home to listen to.
First - its difficult to get anything to sound good on NS10's. Rest assured, if you do manage to do just that, it will sound GOOD on anything else.
Second - they are extremely unforgiving. Make a mistake and you hear it, it will more or less jump in your face.
I fully realise that, for people who always work in one place, it is possible to use whatever system, and obtain good results. But for people like myself, who work all over the place, in lots of different facilities, NS10's have often been the saviours.
If ever I go somewhere where I'm not sure about the monitoring system, acoustics, or system calibration, I will use NS10's, as do MANY of my collegues.
Personally I find a large number of modern monitors totally useless.
Why should I reference on monitors which sound "nice", monitors which hide any errors I might make?
I learned my lessons the hard way. For example, I remember working in a large facility with extremely expensive main monitors, and Genelex near / mids. My mixes sounded great on both, but when I put them on a cassette when I drove back to the hotel they sounded bad in the car. Also on a boom box they didn't do very well. I asked for a pair of NS's, hooked them up, and everything sounded awful - had to make major changes to the balance and structure of the mixes, which took 4 extra days.
After that the mixes sounded good on the NS10's. on the studio's mains and nears, in the car, and on the boom box.
You can keep "nice" - as long as I can have a set of monitors which scream WRONG at me, I'm happy
