Yamaha NS5000

Toed in a just a tiny bit.

Townsend Podiums are placed under the rounded spikes. Made a nice improvement on the sound.

The thing that you will notice about the NS5000 is the incredible coherence in the sound. You cannot tell what the 3 drivers are doing separately. The sound seems to come from 1 driver. That was the main reason I got the NS5000.

The Persona 7F you had is a great speaker to compare with the NS5000. The Yamaha NS1000 was the very first speaker to use Beryillium (Be) in the tweeter and the midrange. This was done in the 1970’s. Paradigm Persona copied that BE tweeter and mid design a few years ago. Yamaha says the new NS5000 Zylon material is better than Be. I agree with this point and do not hear the sharpness or edge in the sound with Zylon as I do with Be.

The NS5000 scales with the gear you put on it. For example, the Schitt Yggi+ LIM DAC was bad with the NS5000. The Schitt Yggi+ OG was a revelation with the NS5000 (incredible). I converted my LIM to the Schitt Yggi+ MIB and that is much better than the LIM on the NS5000 but not as good as the Yggi+ OG. I think the DAC in the Hegel 360 is not as good as the LIM.

I tried a Schitt Wotan amp with the NS5000 and it was passable. I think this amp is as good as my old CODA #8 and other $8k and under amps I owned. However, the CODA #16 takes the sound to the top end levels. The better the gear the more the NS5000 will shine. This is not always the case with speakers I have owned, such as my Magnepan LRS+ or Mini speakers. The improvements in sound with my best gear was marginal. With the NS5000 it is a huge difference.

It is a very resolving speaker that will reveal a lot about what’s upstream of it.

It needs a sizeable chunk of power, as you may have noted. Think of it as some....hybrid between a high end studio monitor and a ’audiophile’ speaker. I have it about 5 ft from the wall and I sit midfield about 7ish feet from it.

Your mcintosh is probably not doing it a lot of favors (with the 2d flattening the mac tends to do). If you can snag a higher end luxman, rotel michi, some of the big older Levinson, etc, it would be a better fit for just listening. I also use it as a monitor when I am trying to fix an endless amount of crappy recordings I have. It is a fairly popular speaker with musician dudes... (not the starving kind, the ones who have slightly bigger pockets). I can think of a few reasons why, but, this is probably not the forum to argue about it.

Get a high quality subwoofer to go with it and it should work well for a wider variety of musical genres.

The mc611's sound great driving my Blades and aren't going anywhere. Ideally the yammi's will play nice with my Hegel H360, another piece I chose after comparing to the others I could try in their price range. 

I managed a few hours with the NS5k in my basement system last night and will try to do the same tonight. I'm replacing the stereo speakers in our tv room and these are probably overkill, but I'm pretty confident wifey won't deed closed captioning anymore as these are very clean and clear. While listening I was wondering if the woofers needed time to loosen up as they sounded a little lean to me yet this morning my mrs said all she could hear was John paul Jones from upstairs! I was playing Fool in the rain. 

When I look at the current market it's the $10-20k price range that holds the most value to my ears and while I've got a couple weeks to decide to keep or return, I haven't really set them up properly yet and appreciate what they do well.

If I had to compare them to the Blades I'd remind they cost double and both punch above their weight.

Oh yeah, are you guys tilting them back to compensate for the low tweeter height? My  ears are 3-4" above. 

IDK what was wrong with the mc611's you auditioned, but there's nothing 2d about the delivery. 

The bass on the NS5000 is a function of the gear in front of it. When I put my Schitt Yggi+ OG DAC, which is well known for bass, the NS5000 was really pounding the air with bass. I put on When the Levee Breaks to see how far the hard-hitting sound would go and it was chest pounding great. A very coherent sound with great detailed bass.

I have heard more bass with the Paradigm Persona 9H speaker but it sounded like bass was coming from a subwoofer. The bass on the NS5000 is less in quantity than the 9H but it sounds better to my ears.

To expand on the comment above about musicians loving the NS5000. My friend, who is a musician, came over and listened to the NS5000. He loved the sound. He even called me up the next day and said he could not get the sound out of his mind. That was an interesting comment to me because that dude has great hearing.

I am not tilting the speakers at all. I used to sit in front of the speakers but these days I listen 1 floor up in a balcony like space (still sounds great). That may change since I quit a job last week.

BTW - both my amps really drive the NS500 well, the Schitt Wotan and the CODA #16. The #16 is a better amp but the Wotan at $2k is surprisingly good and I think sounds like an $8k amp. I have owed a few $8k amps in the past.

BTW2 - how does the NS5000’s clarity compare with the Persona 7F you owned?