Bose 901

Schubert????????

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bdp24   3-6-2020
The basic premise of the 901 is fatally flawed: to imitate the ratio of direct vs. reflected sound in concert halls. That idea ignores the fact that recordings made in those halls contain both direct and reflected sound---there is no way for the listener to separate the two. To then duplicate that ratio via the loudspeaker is to double the effect.

Very true, Eric.  In addition, the difference in time between the arrival at the listener's ears of the directly heard sound and the reflected sound is so vastly different in a concert hall vs. in a home listening room that the reflected sounds will be perceived entirely differently in the two cases.

Best regards,
-- Al
 

@almarg 






Seriously..........who really cares for the sophisticato answer....Recently a poster  dropped several thousand dollars on a system and cannot play certain tracks because the sound is intolerable.

The 901s with Panache can play this track. 

Right. Which is a problem by the way, and not a plus.

Picking a Bose apart by audiophile standards is shooting ducks in a barrel- and a frozen barrel at that. Anyone one week beyond audio-noob can see they’re all so flawed the biggest problem is where to start? So many flaws, so little time!

Which it turns out is a feature, not a bug! Bose was never made for audiophiles. Bose was and is made for audiowives. The first and probably still only speaker company to go after the women in the market. Women don’t want anything to do with speakers that dominate a room, dictate where you sit, or any of that. So Bose made relatively small speakers on cute little stands and you could even put them behind a sofa because who cares, the sound is gonna bounce off the wall all the same in the end. In fact behind a sofa, drapes, whatever, so much the better as another design goal is a diffuse all over sound.

That’s why later on when he got even better at it the speakers got even smaller, little cubes you hardly even see em, and with a sub that isn’t even really a sub because little 3"cubes don’t have bass heck they barely have midrange but that’s not the point, they disappear, that’s the point!

Bose Wave radio, same thing, women love that warm bass heavy top end rolled off sound. Heck even a lot of guys do. Just not any real honest to goodness audiophile guys. Who Bose could not care less about- the big money is in the mass market. Which Bose is.

Bose in other words is the Rolex of speakers. Everyone who knows very little knows they’re the best. Only those with real inside knowledge know the truth: far from it. Not even close. That’s when you know you have a really, really good marketing department.

The premise  is sound however there are omnidirectional speaker designs out there these days that realize the concept way better.