Yamaha's compact NS-AW150 bookshelf speakers provide an affordable way to enjoy your music or television programming on a deck or under a porch. You can bring them in during the cold months and set them up indoors, too: their high build quality and good sound lend them equally well to two-channel indoor listening.

The speakers, which are sold as a pair, each use a 6.5-inch high-compliance, polypropylene, mica-filled woofer and .5-inch PEI dome tweeter. The drivers are optimized for high rigidity but low mass, giving them reasonably high sensitivity (80 dB with 2.83V at 1 meter), another way of saying modest amplifiers won't have much trouble driving them. Their acoustic-suspension cabinets are sealed to prevent undue resonance or tubby, tuneless bass, which often results from low-cost ported designs.

With a nominal impedance of 6 ohms, the speakers will work nicely with amplifiers up to 35 watts per channel, nominal, or 120 watts, peak power. They boast a frequency response of 80 to 40,000 Hz (+/-3 dB), giving you decent bass output for their compact size and unusually extended high-frequency response for your most demanding digital media. For indoor use, you may want to augment their performance with a subwoofer to deliver deeper and more powerful bass; be sure to select one with a variable crossover so you can tailor its upper frequency to effectively "take over" at the point of the NS-AW150s' lowest deliverable frequency.

The speakers are magnetically shielded, so you can place them on or near a TV or video monitor without fear of picture degradation from their magnetic fields. Five-way binding posts simplify connection with several different terminations of speaker cable (including banana plugs), and the NS-AW150s even come with two lengths of cable to get you started.

While you wouldn't want to leave the speakers exposed on, say, the deck of a boat, they are water resistant and designed to withstand light wind and rain--a benefit of their sealed enclosures and rugged metal grilles. The speakers come with mounting bases and brackets.

What's in the Box
Two speakers, two lengths of speaker cable, speaker bases, mounting brackets, a warranty card, and a user's manual.