Spec Overview
Speaker type: powered, ported
Continuous power output: 50 W
Peak power handling: 100 W
Frequency response range: 25 – 180 Hz
Warranty: 2 years
Review and Discussion
Yamaha produces a lot of solid loudspeakers at low and often unbeaten prices, and they’re often the best choice for people who want to spend as little as possible. The NS-SW100 is the bigger brother of their very popular and inexpensive NS-SW050, and is essentially the same design save the larger 10 inch driver and a slightly lower response floor.
A 50 watt subwoofer is something you’d want to pair with similarly budget-tier speakers, intended to only serve a small to medium sized room. That said the response floor is one of the best we’ve seen at this low of a price.
The design is pretty plain, save the interesting feature of the curved and protruded foam grill cover. Pretty par for the course for budget-tier speakers, where the goal is usually for it to look decent enough. The unit is pretty light for a 10 inch sub, and with its port on the side, placement and set up is about as easy as it gets. Yamaha’s 2 year warranty on it’s subwoofers is OK, but other brands have better 3-5 year warranties.
Our Overall Take, As Compared to the Competition
Pretty hard to go wrong with Yamaha, and this is a perfectly decent subwoofer. That said, it’s hard to justify the price increase over the NS-AW050 (reviewed here) when there’s no concurrent increase in power, even if a larger 10 inch driver will probably perform better.
The highly popular Polk PS10 10 inch subwoofer (reviewed here) has a slightly inferior response floor, but is cheaper and has the better warranty. We’d say just get whichever’s going for the best deal at the time.
Beyond that, this product is just kind of at an awkward price point where, for not much more money, several subwoofers that are bigger and 2-3 times more powerful. In a lot of cases it’s just worth it to spend the extra money for a really solid product that will last a long time. See the links below for more information there.
