Outstanding value from a great sounding and looking speaker.

First of all, I would like to respond to proaudio's review, which suffers from a variety of inaccuracies.

1. The NS-A100XT DOES HAVE A 3-WAY Crossover. Check out this URL:
http://www.yamaha.com/yec/customer/manuals/14ns-a60x.pdf

One can clearly see the crossover from the bass to the mid occures at 2khz and crosses over to the tweeter at 4khz using a 2nd order crossover.

2. The excessive excursion witnessed in the midrange driver is not due to a crossover problem. The problem here is the air the woofers are pushing around inside the cabinet. If one puts their hand over the port during a bass heavy song, one notices very little air pushing out of the port. Well it has got to go somewhere and as the tweeter is sealed, it tends to push the mid around. I know this for a fact because I isolated the mid by glueing on a tupperware bowl to the back of the midrange port thereby isolating it from inner cabinet air pressure. BINGO! No more midrange excursion on heavy bass drum hits!

3. Lastly, proaudio's review references dual 8" drivers; he either was speaking about the NS-A200XT or got confused. The NS-A100XT's have dual 6 1/2" woofers.

I love these speakers. They really fill up the room nicely. They are wide dispersion so even if you have to put them close together the stereo image will be pretty good. I have them about ten feet apart and "toed in" slightly and they fill my living room beautifully.

Now I know I did mention the modification above. In truth, I thought the speakers sounded fine pre-mod. It's just that I knew what the problem was and how to fix it. Being a tinkerer at heart, I decided what the heck. The reason I think Yamaha was able to get away with this design is the aluminum drivers are strong and stay rigid under high stress. So even though the mid was getting pushed around, it was able to handle it pretty well.

I would also like to note that in this price class, a "problem" such as this is to be expected. Speakers utilizing extensive internal baffling/isolation to solve the above problem are A LOT more expensive; generally starting in the $1000 a pair level and going up from there. Thus, at the price point, it is just not really lamentable and I reiterate that I thought they sounded fine before my mod.

My only real complaint is the cheapy little painted wood black feet that come with the thing, but I would much prefer they spend money on other stuff on the speaker anyway. Overall, they are pretty well built and the rounded edges of the speaker not only make it look cool, but perform a very useful function of diminishing diffraction which is caused by having the corner come to a sharp point.
Check out this URL for a further explanation and cool little animation demonstrating it, as well as more speaker information than you probably every wanted!

http://www.silcom.com/~aludwig/Loudspeaker_construction.html#Diffraction

So, just to be clear, the durability rating is only for the feat, the rest of the speaker is quite well built. Ease of use is a bit of an N/A, 2 wires for god sake. But Yamaha does include full instructions on how to get those 2 on there!