Audio stores are becoming a thing of the past.
FAANG part of it..
Bose 901
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Presented without comment: The audio equipment retailer Bose said in January that it planned to close 119 stores globally, including all its stores in the US. |
Ok I admit it.... I owned a pair... I was 16 and working at Lechmere Sales in the Boston area. I got a pair of 901 V for super cheap.... they were returned , no box or manuals so my boss let me take them for next to nothing. Set them up with my Sansui AU 9900 and Sony CDP 101. They cranked, but were so hungry for power I ended up getting a Carver m1.5t amp. My neighbors threw a lot of parties, so I would just open the windows and crank those suckers.... I used them for a few years then got my first real speakers Paradigm Studio 100s..... I eventually paired them with an PS Audio 6.1 pre and a pair of B&K M200 Sonata mono amps for my first decent system. |
I owned a pair series IIs way back in the day, yes they were setup properly and I thought they sounded great. Sold them. I now have a pair of series VI that are in my garage facing backwards. It may sound crazy but they sound really good in a 1000 sq ft space that is all concrete and cement block. And no doesn't sound anything like the main rig. They don't image at all, but they fill that space with bone crushing volume if you desire. Which I do regularly......I don't get out much. \8-). |
@ishkabibil So glad you never came into my shop. I guess we did not have a punched "AUDIOPHILE" card or whatever YOU think is RIGHT. Probably be one of the customers I "fired" each year at xmas. Pain in the rear, and no, it did not matter HOW MUCH MONEY you had or what you bought. You were let go from the shop and given a contact at something like Sound Advice or some other pop retailer in our area. Enjoy the music! Cheers! |
I’ve listened to 901s, Series IV, properly set up. They are just flat fun to listen to! Very fast, dynamic, detailed, with nice imaging and room fill. Visceral and not fatiguing at all. Enjoyable speakers, with a small footprint. I thoroughly enjoyed them. 65 Watts/ch and I was very satisfied. I actually miss them! |
As I mentioned in my 1st post, I am very familiar with the set up of the 901s, as I was professionally tutored by a Bose staff member, of the delicacies and details of proper set up, and, the importance of a high quality, high output power amplifier to drive them, because of the eq’s boost of bass. They are as critical with room set up, as anything else, to obtain their magic. At the last retail price of $1400., they were fun, fun, fun, and unless you heard them with proper set up ( I truly doubt many of you negative folks heard them optimally set up ), with a " proper reflective " wall behind, and, to the sides of them ( distance from both, based on the listening room and the listener’s position ), you might change your mind, because what they did well, they did extremely well. I remember playing the Sheffield Drum / Track record, through several pair I set up....... Maggies, ML’s, and some other speakers, owned by many of you, wishing, they could do the same, displaying the force, the intensity, the realism, that could be had, through the 901’s ( but you would not know ). My modified and tweaked Lascala’s, can do it ( although, without the radiation pattern of the 901s, preferring my horns). Omni’s, and panel’s, are not for me, as they all display compression, to these ears. I am sorry Ishka, I am done here. Enjoy ! MrD. |
Thanks for the link. Its right in line with what I've been saying! " J. Gordon Holt, founding editor of our high-end sister publication Stereophile, noted in a 1971 commentary that the 901 “produces a more realistic semblance of natural ambience than any other speaker system, but we would characterize it as unexceptional in all other respects.” My own mentor, Harry Pearson, Jr., told me in the early 1980s that he bought a pair of first-generation 901s after reading the positive reviews in the mainstream audio press and was so disappointed that it prompted him to found The Absolute Sound as an alternative voice." and "few factors beyond Bose’s own advertising contributed more to the speaker’s huge commercial success." The one guy who liked it was the tech obsessed Julian Hirsch, the man who ruined Stereo Review (and countless budding audiophiles) with his incessant measurement uber alles dogma. Yes Julian Hirsch, the man who thinks all wire is the same so long as its thick enough. Time has not been kind to his views. Stereo Review, RIP. Even though he loved it, he still had to admit: "Electrically, the Bose 901 is rather inefficient, and the 18 dB of bass boost supplied by the equalizer requires huge reserves of amplifier power if loud low-frequency passages are to be played. To a lesser degree, the same problem exists at the very high frequencies." So its equalized to the max, and yet we're supposed to believe "The active equalizer introduces no perceptible distortion." He then goes on to measure its distortion. Right. J. Gordon Holt founded Stereophile on the idea of listening as the ultimate performance criteria. Harry Pearson advanced that ball even further down the field. Neither of them was a fan. To say the least. The one most famous writer to actually like them is also the one whose professional position, which he pushed month after month his whole career, was that listening doesn't really count for all that much. |
The Bose 901 does not satisfy audiophiles but it is one of the most successful speaker designs of all time and it is funny how the audiophile snobs hear who consider themselves objective experienced experts, authorities, and scholars fail to comprehend they’re own failure to accurately define, determine, and assess performance of the 901. |
One of the better hi-fi theorists (perhaps Peter Moncrieff in IAR) opined that the only way for the 901 to work as Dr. Bose intended was with a recording made in an anechoic chamber (or outdoors, I suppose). The sound captured by the recording mics would be only the direct sound of the instruments and voices, no reflections or room sound. Such a recording then played back on the 901 could at least have a chance of working, though as Al correctly points out, the arrival time of reflections off the walls and ceiling in a small listening room are much closer in time to the direct sound than are the reflections in a concert hall. J. Gordon Holt was of the opinion that the real answer was to capture the direct sound with one set of mics, the hall ambiance with another, the two on different sets of recorder channels. The direct sound channels would then be played back on the front loudspeakers, the ambiance channels on rear speakers. |
Amar Bose set out to make a speaker that reproduced the sound of an orchestra playing in a concert hall where the majority of the sound reaching the listener is reflected. When you hear acoustic music being played in a hall the pinpoint imaging many audiophiles get all goose bumpy over is nonexistent. I have only listened to them in loud rock and roll settings where they did ok but weren't amazing. I have a friend who is a concertgoer who maintains that a properly setup pair of 901's does indeed do a better job of simulating a concert hall than any other two channel experience. Surround recordings played on a multichannel system are superior, in creating the reverberant field, than any two channel system can come close to, thereby making the whole "direct/reflecting" thing irrelevant today. Dr. Bose has a Ph.D in electrical engineering,. He's not an idiot. I am not a huge fan of their tiny little home systems but have owned three cars with Bose engineered systems in them and they all sounded way better than the modest option price would suggest. |
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. |
bdp24 3-6-2020 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 |
I bought a new pair of Bose 901s back in 1972. I and many of my friends loved them. I bought Magnepan MGIIAs about ten years later. The Maggies became my main speakers, but I kept the 901s. The 901s did wonderfully as surround sound speakers in my first HT rig. The 901s are still playing in the basement party room at my son's house. |
Back in 1982 I listened to 901 Series IV, I believe. Fun speakers! College dorm rooms. Mine were Boston Acoustics A70s. The 901s took up very little space, played to loud volumes, and did a nice job rendering detail without fatigue. Bass was tight, not boomy or overblown. AC/DC “Back In Black” was a favorite, from an Empire 2000Z cart. Billy Joel “Glass Houses” was fun. Michael Jackson “Off The Wall” and Thriller at loud volumes sounded pretty amazing! i wouldn’t mind having a pair today! Great bang for the buck, if you’re careful! I would not reform; I would use butyl rubber surrounds. |
I have a pair of the final series with a pair of Foster external tweeters and Klipsch 12 inch subs. I’m driving them with monoblock VTA Amps and they sound pretty amazing. My previous set up was AR MGC’s with an SAE solid state amp. Yes I’m a child of the 70’s and early 80’s audio. I’m quite satisfied with my 901s. |
Congrats to the winner of the most ridiculous unaudiophile reply. This is the dark side of our hobby From...rchop or something like that. 10:30pmThe most hilarious experience ever in my shop when I tried them. We laughed so hard I still remember it. Successful? Sure, at marketing and taking out really "cool" ads. These were the days of Hugh Hefner's TV show where pipes, smoking jackets, jazz on the stereo, and scantily-clad ladies discussing Heidegger and the politics of sex were successful, too. It was a period in time where the company, which continues its ways, presented itself as based on total science--I think they had guys in white coats in some of their print ads--to cover the ridiculous products they tried to sell. Never has there been a worse-sounding speaker MASQUERADING as a great scientific achievement. Well, I take that back. Some of today's charlatans charge infinitely more for their hoo-doo, and they get it just like bose did back then. Evidently, some of their stuff is once again popular for some reason. I would not waste any of my time seeking to hear anything they made back then or today. But hey, have at it if you wish. The world is a big place full of many people. Cheers--and still laughing! |
richopp, if you do not understand plugging a speaker into an electrical outlet, instead of an output stage of an amplifier ( using an ac plug, instead of spades or banana plugs at the amp end ), I do not know what to tell you. Comparing an old transistor radio, and stating the superiority, of a properly set up, properly driven set of 901s, shows me a few things about you. I will not go into those details, as I do not want my post to be deleted by the Audiogon police. Enjoy ! |
I'm not calling anyone out personally for being vitriolic. That was just my overall takeaway from the thread: much vitriol among the naysayers. It's one thing to say you prefer one speaker to another or that it sounds better in your opinion. But it's then quite another to empirically state that "speaker a is better than speaker b". It begs the questions: With what amp, with what music, in what room...and better in what regard...and so on and so forth. Maggies are good speakers but they have glaring weaknesses, IMO. Bose 901's are also good speakers and have glaring weaknesses. But I can tolerate the 901's weaknesses much better than I can the Magnepan's. I prize dynamics, powerful bass and lower mids, effortlessness and unfettered sound -sound not tied to a speaker. The 901's give me lots of all these. Maggies, not so much. But really, with me it always comes down to the "big goofy grin" factor. Whatever speaker can put one on my face wins! Klipsch Cornwalls can do that and so can Bose 901's. |
@mrdecibel Sorry, not sure what you mean by "plugging speakers into an electrical outlet." Possibly you could provide more explanation with that. I am not good at guessing what that means. Minimus 7 was kind of a joke, but pretty much any hand-held transistor radio from 1960 sounds better than anything bose makes today or ever made, IMO. Sorry if you disagree, but that is what makes the world work and what brought customers to my shop back then. Cheers! |
