"Thanks to its time-domain accuracy and mid-heavy balance, the NS10 is an extremely revealing speaker that takes no prisoners. In other words, if the recording is poor, the NS10 will tell you in no uncertain terms. You have to work harder to make things sound good on the NS10 not because it sounds bad but because recorded music, even today, is often a poor approximation of the real thing, and the NS10 reveals it. I found a familiar comment on the SOS Forum that reads: "If it sounds good on NS10s then it'll sound good on anything." Again, that's not because the NS10 is inherently poor, but because it is effective at revealing the fundamental compromises inherent in recorded music. If you've worked hard on NS10s at a mix and overcome those compromises, or perhaps cleverly disguised them, the mix will translate well to other systems because it is a good mix. Put another way, the NS10 better enables you to get to the nub of a mix by more accurately reproducing its fundamental time-domain information — and it is this which can make the task of mixing seem more challenging."

To my mind, that is a very strong justification for the NS10. The NS10 is not without flaws, but it remains a perfectly viable professional tool that can be used to produce excellent mixes. Although it has been superseded by many modern high-end monitors, it retains some distinct advantages over the inexpensive ported monitors that are used in the vast majority of small studios.