The basic idea of the NS10 is that if you can get a mix to sound good on them it will sound good anywhere.
Al, you are a long-time owner of 824s I know; can't you get something to sound good on them and get them to sound good everywhere as well? I'll bet you can. And you'd have a hard time finding a speaker with much different character from the NS-10 than the 824.
What you describe is certainly the common mythology, yes. But think about what that actually means for a second:
First, in order to get something to sound "good" on an NS-10 requires adjusting the mix to fit the NS-10. It's really a variation of the old idea of EQing the monitoring chain to try and correct for deficiencies in the monitoring chain. The difference here is that the EQ is actually *destructively applied to the mix itself* ("destructive" here is not meant as derrogitory, simply meant in the terns of "destructive editing").
Now, the NS-10s are known for weak bass and hyped midrange. Nobody denies that as factual. So this means that the overall EQ balance of the mix winds up with boosted bass and scooped midrange.
Sound familiar? That's 2/3rds of a death scoop EQ, or smiley face EQ, or whatever you want to call it; the very kind of thing that most seasoned audio engineers think of as an amateurish mistake. Yet these are (mostly) the very same seasoned engineers who have been mix checking on NS-10s for years.
Second, just what is meant by getting the mix to sound good everywhere? I think there's all sorts of misunderstanding surrounding that description. What it originally started out meaning in 1978 was making a mix not that sounded good everywhere, but rather, that sounded good on your typical cheap-shit car radio or boom box speaker.
Make no mistake; the sound of the mix on a high-fidelity system was compromised when they did this. It may have still sounded OK on these systems, but not as good as it did before it was NS-10'd. It was a compromise that those shooting for top-40 Billboard listings were willing to make for the price of commerce, not overall fidelity. In this way, it was a technique that is not un-similar to the loudness wars (not to get into that again.) Add in the fact that the common playback mediums back then were vinyl and cassette tape, and the cost of fidelity was kind of mitigated anyway.
But it's now 2008. Boom boxes have been replaced by iPods with earbuds that have surprisingly better fidelity than your average '78 boom box. Vinyl and tape have been replaced BY CD and MP3. Again, today we complain about MP3 fidelity, but it's sure superior to your average cassette tape in 1978. And however nostalgic one may be about the sound of vinyl, the fact is that compromises in fidelity will stick out much further on a CD than it will on an LP. And car radios? With your average car system these days being far more sophisticated and better-sounding then your average home system 30 years ago, and AM radio is just something we use to get news, traffic reports and maybe the local ball game now, mixing for the car is not the challenge it once was.
The great gulf of fidelity on playback systems is much, much smaller today than it was 30 years ago. Just what is it that we need Auratones or NS-10s to adjust our mixes to for? We're chasing dead people with that idea.
If one has a decent pair of monitors, and can't pretty quickly learn that if it sounds good like A on their monitors, that it will also sound good like B or C when taken outside the CR, there's something wrong. Either they have the wrong monitors for their tastes - just like having shoes that don't fit right, or their CR is messing everything up, or their ears just are not cut out for mixing.
But in today's technological environment, death scooping the mix as a shortcut to fool most of the people most of the time is, IMHO, FWTW, and at best, a questionable procedure.
G.
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). We got to give them an audition for a little while, and I remember walking out thinking that there must be something wrong with me (besides the obvious, I know, guys 
) because based upon what I heard, I just couldn't understand what all the buzz was about.
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) I set it up that way; I have HR824s as my main mix monitors on the overbridge, and some Klipsch bookshelves on wall-mounted swivel arms as my "check monitors". I did this for a few months until I fine tuned my ears to the 824s and a mix made on them sounded just fine on the Klipschs pretty much the first time around. The fine-tuning required was actually quite minimal, and was probably just as much learning the room as it was the monitors. I haven't used the Klipschs in years, other than to occasionally (once or twice a year) get a reality check and make sure the 824s or my ears have not drifted very far.
