I went to college for audio engineering in the 90s, during the undisputed reign of the NS10. Literally, every studio I worked in had a pair. I've done quite a bit of recording, mixing and mastering on NS10s.

Don't believe the hype; they weren't terrible speakers. They weren't good speakers, but they weren't terrible, either.

The context that gets lost, I think, in a conversation today is that you could easily find worse speakers in the same price range, from similarly respected brands, back then. NS10 was a reliably consistent speaker available in every market at a price that was good for the time. The consumer and prosumer audio revolution was just starting to ramp up, so getting clearly better quality had a very high price back then.

Even at the time, every experienced engineer acknowledged that the NS10 had some flaws; they were a bit tiring to listen to for long hours. There were harsh especially in the upper mid-range, and brittle in the high end. But, you could hear everything in the mix pretty accurately, and you could estimate what it would sound like on the average home or car stereo system, once you'd spent some time mixing on them.

It's also worth mentioning that NS10 isn't the only cargo-culted speaker (and this article briefly mentions Aurotones, which also were in several of the studios I worked in, to provide a "car stereo" simulation) or product. The audio industry is all about cargo cults. Specific compressors, microphones, reverbs, preamps, and these days plugins, have "can do no wrong" products that everyone covets; often despite some obvious flaws.

When you have an industry that rides the line between science and art so closely, and that has extremely unpredictable trends, you'll find an almost religious zeal around the tools. NS10s were king because they were used on some famous records and showed up in some famous studios at the right time.

Sometimes the cargo cult gets attached to something that is really, demonstrably, good (Neve preamp channels or even the entire console in which they live, Neumann microphones, etc.), but at any given time there are probably several comparably good products that don't get the industry nod because they don't have the right connections at the right time, or the records they appear on have the poor luck to go unnoticed by the listening public due to shifts in taste, etc.

The cargo cult had its uses. It allowed people in a low-information, high-expense, industry to make reasonable choices just by talking to other engineers. You wouldn't kill your studio by choosing NS10s back in 1990. But, these days, the cargo cult is silly, and counter-productive. We have an embarrassment of riches in terms of high-quality low-cost equipment, test tools are available on a tiny budget so you can literally know exactly what you've got with some time and knowledge about how to use the tools. There are high-quality reviews of every product going back decades on the web so you can choose between new and used with confidence.

Nobody buys a product like an NS10 for the exact reasons people bought the NS10 in the 80s (cost+proven+available+good enough+cargo cult approved), anymore. And, there are few products exactly like the NS10, anymore. The mid-range, where the NS10 lived, is dominated by very high quality products today from a dozen different manufacturers (including Yamaha, who have produced a very good series of "sequels" to the NS10). The low-end has plenty of stinkers, still, but they're cheap as hell.

It's a different world, though the audio engineering cargo cult lives on.