2020 Product of the Year Awards High-End Loudspeaker of the Year

Yamaha NS-5000 

$15,000

An effort of 19 engineers and 8 years in development, the full 5000 Series sees Yamaha return to the audio deep end, making waves with a cannonball dive off the high platform. The NS-5000 loudspeaker will be viewed as the Series’ star component, and it rightly takes a place as an underpriced overachiever in the high-performance loudspeaker marketplace. The NS-5000 uses just one material for every vibrating surface—Zylon—one of the strongest fibers in existence, which offers a nearly ideal combination of stiffness and damping. The innovation continues on this large “bookshelf’s” insides, with tuned chambers replacing broadband stuffing to attack resonances more efficiently across the audible frequency band. Though Yamaha first used the term “hi-fi” way back in 1954, the NS-5000 is decidedly not (in my use of the term) hi-fi. It’s the kind of product that invites you to just settle into a very unfiltered, unforced experience. Refined, carefully judged by people who obviously care. Whether it will become the classic that its NS-1000 ancestral variants were is for the market and time to determine. But from our tiny little hidden world of the high end, we should all celebrate when companies from the bigger world of industry and commerce, like Yamaha, passionately contribute to a better audio future.