I own pair of original NS10s with upgraded tweeters. I bought them for $25 from my university with blown out tweeters and replaced the tweeters for $75. They'

I own pair of original NS10s with upgraded tweeters. I bought them for $25 from my university with blown out tweeters and replaced the tweeters for $75. They're in mint condition: I still have the front grills. These speakers are from the early 1980s and yet are still rather valuable. For a long time I did not realize they were so sought after nor understood why: they were just the monitors with crappy bass response that I used for my synths. From the postings here, it seems that a lot of music production people don't understand either. The NS10 has poor frequency response, not particlarly flat and with a big drop off in the bass. They sound pretty bad. Many people have long seen their ubiquity in studios and assumed that they're used either (1) because people are familiar with them or (2) because if you can get it to sound good on an NS10, it'll sound good on any crummy customer speaker (which is a myth that needs to die). There's some truth to #1 but that's not the main reason. Instead NS10s are very good at one thing exactly: debugging. Unlike your typical monitor, these are unported speakers with an unusual driver and stiff paper cone woofers rather than the soft plastic used nowadays. As a result, while their frequency response is crummy, these speakers have rather unusually good time domain response, transients, and group delay. This article is pointing this out: if your mix has problems in this respect, these speakers will make it rather obvious, whereas your high-end wonderful-bass monitors will cover it up. NS10s are the gdb of the speaker world. Of couse for my own uses, I'd be happier with a better sounding speaker.