Bose 901

@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.  

Miller......

Stop it....you are being foolish.

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.