Bought these Yamaha NS-300 some months ago and I am glad I did, every day. They are able to give excellent sound rich of high and low tones. The mid tones are present and very well blended with the highs and lows. When I first brought them home I noticed that the highs were a bit too much for my ears. And the bass was present but not exciting. The previous owner told me that has used them a bit for music and mostly for HT. That said, I thought the speakers should have reached their break-in time, after some years of use so thought I had a pair of speakers but not what I was looking for.
I hear a lot of music, mostly Jazz 50%, classical 25% rock, hard rock country etc. 25%. The amplifier is functioning at non less than 4 hours daily and some times in the weekends, even 10 hours. Surprisingly the speakers, after just some days, have become what can be called monitor speakers, the sound seems to be now what I was looking for. The voices sound natural and the instruments as well. The highs, even at very high notes, have become of a real and natural sound that give the impression of the presence of the band. All instruments in classical music are well defined one from another and present in the space being so easy to define their position in the orchestra, even in depth. The bass is now present without booming reaching very low notes that are distinguished and not just an undefined low frequency sound. I have a Yamaha sub woofer that never actually felt the need to use. The bass is so satisfactory by their own. The rock and hard rock music is where you may find some surprises. There may be some sounds in the registration of the music that are not very well registered, or at the contrary too well registered and all errors will become noticeable. In other words poor or not accurate registrations will be heard as such and this seems to happen a bit more often than other types of music. The Pink Floyd is just a pure pleasure to hear as well as other groups such as EL&P or King Crimson while the sound of more recent music such as Kanye West will just make you jump of your seat with their sound and dynamic bass.
The power of these speakers is 140 Watts RMS and the frequency response is 30Hz-35kHz. I usually drive them with an old Kenwood KA-4520 (2x110W RMS). Have also Arcam, NAD and Denon and Technics amplifiers and a Yamaha 5.1 receiver, but for now I prefer the sound and enjoy the power of the good-old Kenwood.
I think the NS-300 's are part of that generation of speakers that were able to have good specs by their own before the event and large diffusion of sub-woofer units. These last ones have changed the constructors mentality of medium and sometimes even higher quality speakers to be more lazy for what concerns the study of the ability of speakers to reach low frequencies relying on the use of sub-woofers.
I cannot say to buy them or not - if you find them :) - but if you are looking for something similar to what I was looking for then you really need to give them a try.

we bought these back in 2002 for £1000 to go with a Centre NS-C300 speaker, and a pair of NS-200's as the rear surrounds in a 5.1 setup playing mainly DVD's, the amp is a Yamaha DSP-A3090, nobody complains when anyone comes round to our house to watch a movie

anyway, to cut a long story short, the centre speaker was playing up, so we took it into our friendly hi-fi shopeee and asked him to repair it, he said it may take a while because his techie chap had a bit of a backlog but you can borrow this centre speaker Yamaha NS-C700 in the meantime, well after playing some DVD's I called him up and said that the NS-C700 was not very good sounding in our setup and could he have a look, so he came over and agreed that it was not perhaps blending in with the bigger NS-300 front stereo speakers

two days later he came over with a full set of NS-700 speakers for us to demo, another few days go by and to be honest we were not impressed, he said no problem at the weekend I will change them over for a full set of Cambridge Audio Aero 5.1 speakers, and they were in our lounge a big improvement over the NS-700

then I had a brainwave, I compared the NS-300 with the Aero fronts with just a CD player and 2 channel stereo music to see if I wanted to buy the Aero 5.1 system, sadly for the salesman in the hi-fi shop the NS-300's sounded pretty good after all these years, and I called him up and asked him if he had something better than the Aero stereo fronts, he said of course, I have a pair of B&W XT4 floorstanders and a pair of Mordaunt-Short Performance, so yesterday (Sunday 24th Nov) we had an all day listening session swapping over 4 sets of speakers, the hi-fi dealer guy was flabbergasted that the old NS-300's sounded just as good as all the speakers he let us demo and told us we had better keep them, and he will chase his guy to repair the centre speaker asap

so back in 2002 these cost £1000, with inflation that is probably about £1500 today (2013) and these retro cool cherry veneer speakers can still keep up sq wise with speakers costing 2 or 3 times more, and the Morduant-Short even more, I think they cost 10 grand he told us

if you can find a pair of NS-300 to demo with a good amp, you will be pretty pleased with what you hear, cannot rate these speakers high enough

http://www2.yamaha.co.jp/manual/pdf/av/english/Ssys/NS-300.pdf

hi i have used the yamaha ns300 for front and back surround and i think they are fantastic i have used them on the z9 amp for 5 years now and still going strong i love e`m

After auditioning these I was at first slightly skeptical, as Yamaha have produced some great stuff over the years, but nothing really special apart from their reference monitors the NS10's etc. Instruments they produce are also fanastic value and have had good feedback from many musicians about these. Going onto the the NS300's, I had these up agaist some Missions and other mid range manufactuers and to be honest the Yamahas won hands down. The crisp treble, excellent mid range and tight bass gave to my ears what I was looking for. As a sound engineer the price these were selling at are well worth it in my opinion. I use them in my Home Cinema set up and as they go down to 30Hz I don't even bother with a sub, although for the big explosions they could benefit from having a seperate sub woofer but a minor point if you are using for classical or normal Hi-fi listening. So in conclsuion the Yamaha NS300's are a real steel if you come across a second hand pair snap them up !

very smooth highs. Vocals come to life with this tweeter. Not ringing, not fatigue present in almost every metal tweeter speaker in the market.

A like lack of bass. But the audible bass notes produced are very articulate and strong ones. Nothing that could not be fixed with a subwoofer.

The Flagship model from Yamaha a couple of years ago is a very good sounding one for the price I paid for. Very smooth highs thanks to its silk tweeter and unusually clear vocals. High eficciency drivers and stable impedance insure that virtually any receiver or amp can handle them. Audiophile grade components reveal bad recordings or very subtle passages that you couln't hear before in your old speakers. Supreme construction and narrow front assure less boxy-sound. Highly recomendable model.

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Paradigm Monitor Series, Klipsch Reference series, Energy Connoisseur Series.