Bose 901 series VI & Yamaha A-S2000

With all due respect guys, for a $3,500 price for a set of speakers and an integrated amp, you are suggesting that Bose 901s are the best choice? Sorry, I am not buying it.

Henryjudy - you can do a lot better than the 901s for your system. At least, listen to some other options before making a decision. In my opinion, the idea that 901s are the best you can do in your price range is, quite frankly, ludicrous.

Remember, I have 901 series VI in my attic for a reason. I listened to them for years, not at a party for an evening.

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HenryJudy, I see that you are very new to Audiogon. You will find out soon enough that a lot of knowledgeable people on this forum disagree on just about every topic, sometimes they vehemently disagree. I suggest you take in all of the opinions that you read, then go with your ears, gut and wallet in choosing a system for yourself. You are the one that has to live with the system. What one guy recommends for you might not sound good to you in your room. I am not making a recommendation for or against...I'm recommending you buy what you like. You should be able to buy a good set of used 901 series VI for about $500. That way you get to try them in your home to see if you like them. If you don't like them, you should be able to unload them for little or no loss. If you like them and just have to have a new set, sell the used set and buy yourself a new set. Don't fall for the audiophile snobbery. When it's all said and done, it's YOUR money.
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Everyone should buy what they like. However, all of us, if we are honest and we can still remember that far back, made a lot of costly mistakes finding our way. In those days it was much easier to turn your product back into the market place than it is today. So decisions made now are harder to correct than they were when we were fumbling.

Smart people learn from history and the mistakes of others thereby sparing themselves the expense, disappointment and inconvenience that an emotional or otherwise unwise purchase can cause. This is why we read Consumer Reports and ask for advice on this and other forums. Apparently many, maybe most, of us believe this to be true.

That being said, it is also true that we only know what we know and, in most cases, can't see how little we know vis a vis the whole body of available knowledge. To overcome this handicap, I strive to locate and emulate the individuals who impress me as well experienced and intellectually sufficient enough to guide me by the way they spent their money. That removes much (probably all) of "personal agenda" questions from my evaluation of their selections.

So --- please find me an amplifier manufacturer who involves their company with Bose. The potential to hitchhike a partnership with a sales monster like Bose would be very tempting, I would think. But no-one does it. Could be because of the credibility bruising they would suffer from embracing a product which the majority of audiophiles denounce -- or --- it could be because Bose really is that bad relative to the various and sundry other alternatives available. I suspect the latter, having owned 901s for 4 years in the 1970s and having sold hundreds of pairs of them during that time. Quite by accident I found myself using a pair of $100 AR speakers back then and being amazed at just how much better they sounded than my prized 901s.
What a shock that was. It took me awhile but I got over my ego and my staunch evangelical recalcitrance and sold my 901s. Got a pair of B&O S-45 speakers and never looked back.

For what it's worth - that's my answer to your inquiry.

Incidentally, I own and use daily a pair of horn hybrid loudspeakers nowadays that outperform anything else I've ever heard anywhere. And I drive them with a Yamaha A-S2000 integrated which is very well up to the task. So you are on the right track amp wise in my opinion but you should look elsewhere for speakers if you value nuance, tonal accuracy and timbral fullness. Bose doesn't do that stuff. There's no harm in buying them and there's the chance that you will like them for awhile, but the most likely scenario has Bose going down in your personal experience as an unnecessary detour.

There are certain things in the Bose 901 design that are desirable, especially crossoverless full-range drivers and an array designed to interact with the room. There are many speakers designed to interact with the rom to good effect. Examples include omnis from MBL, Ohm, Mirage, and Duevel, bipolars from Def Tech, and dipoles from Quad, Alon, Martin-Logan, Magnepan, and others.

There are other things I don't agree with. For example, Amar Bose arrived at an 11/89% ratio of direct-to-reflected sound based on his measurements of Boston's Symphony Hall. The thing is, Symphony Hall is one of the most reverberant concert venues in the world. Mirage, on the other hand, has over 25 years research into psychoacoustics and they arrived at a 60/40 ratio of direct-to-reflected sound for their Omniguide-based speakers. I've been living with a pair of those for nearly 4 years and still find them to be engaging and timbre-correct.

I think the Bose concept could be a lot better than it is in the 901 format. Bose has improved their 4" driver somewhat over the 43 years they've been in production, but they could do better. GoldenEar's 4" driver has a cast frame and is light and fast enough to have usable response out to 20KHz. What if Bose made a floorstander with GoldenEar-quality drivers backloaded with a transmission line? What if there was a curved front baffle to angle 5 of these drivers for optimum dispersion and 4 drivers on the back for ambience? With a light, fast driver and transmission line loading, the active equalizer circuit wouldn't have to work so hard and would presumably be less intrusive regarding phase relationships and whatnot.

That said, I have to admit that I haven't listened to 901s for a long long time, and certainly haven't listened to Series VI, so I have no business saying exactly how good or bad their current product offering is. For all I know they've made significant improvements in how resolving and how wide the bandwidth is in their 4" drivers, but I don't know. The current driver still has a stamped frame and the cone material is still blue paper like the Series III as far as I can tell. They've evidently improved the baseline bandwidth, however, because the current active equalizer isn't compatible with Series I-IV.

i get a good laugh when ever i think back to my 501 and 901 days. had a carver receiver pushing them and thought they sounded great.

i was wrong =)