Bose 901's with "highend ancillaries"??

Also note if you are looking for a pair you must have the equalizer. Seen many for sale without one. Also the equalizes for the different series are not comparable across all the different series if 901s produced.over the years.
Bose 901 series 1 and 2 equalizers are comparable, series 3 and are comparable with each other, and series 5 and 6 are compatible. Do some research on this, it's very interesting. And as mentioned above a good powerful amp goes a long way to improve their sound.

I have heard these 901's with very.. very high priced McIntosh gear and they did sound "amazing" BUT.. they don't sound very good at all with cheap and mid-priced gear!

If I had the ""money"" to buy the "right gear" I would keep my 901's as my "Reference speakers"!!.. MAYBE that's why "Tone Audio" kept their "reviewed pair of 901's" BECAUSE they found out how good they sounded with "very high priced gear"!!..!!...!!...!!... BUT.. "THEY" are not going tell you all how good they sounded with "REFERENCE GEAR" because that would start a WAR on all these forums !! ...

I cant imagine how they would sound much better with high end gear. i heard them on mid fi and all i got out of it is a bunch of so so midrange, lousy high end and fat bass with no details. would be neat to hear some refitted with good drivers tho.

While no longer considered "high end", Bose 901 speakers are really quite good. Very forgiving and of course they do sound better with good source components and good electronics. I still have a pair, but haven't set them up in the past year or so. They are very accurate in terms of timbre and offer a distant, back of the hall perspective. When they were first introduced (1968?), AR practically owned the speaker market, with something over 50% market share. The original 901, with no where near the quality of sound of the current series, basically buried AR. I sold a lot of 901s back in their heyday. It is important to put this into perspective. No speaker from that era can compete with today's better speakers. But here we are talking about speakers that are still in production today. I could be mistaken, but think these are Klipschorns are the only speakers that can make that claim.

I don't think audiophiles ever considered 901's a high end speaker. J.Gordon Holt trashed them in his Stereophile review when they were introduced. I saw/heard them in two stores in the Santa Clara Valley in 1971---in the "best" room at Pacific Stereo (N. California's leading Hi-Fi chain in the late 60's/70's) in Mountain View, where you could compare them with the AR-3a and JBL L100 (which I did), and in an early true high-end shop, Sound Systems in Palo Alto, where I heard them against speakers from some new company named Infinity (which I also did).

In both stores the 901's sounded just as Gordon described them---a big amorphous blob of sound. Terrible, just terrible. The AR-3a was a pretty withdrawn, distant sounding speaker, yet considerably better than the Bose. The JBL L100 was the opposite of the AR, being very forward and brash. Still, not as bad sounding as the 901. At Sound Systems, even the $139 Infinity 1001 (the lowest priced model in Infinity's 1971 line up) was a far better speaker than the Bose. And Infinity's 2000A (at $299 each, close to the $500/pr Bose) absolutely mopped the floor with the Bose. Then there was the Infinity Servo-Static, at $2000 (which would also buy a brand new family sedan) not a fair comparison. But it did show me how good a speaker could sound. Being a young starving musician, I bought the 1001's, for about half the price of the 901's.