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Bose 901

I spent a weekend away listening to these .

What a Moronic review.


http://noaudiophile.com/Bose_901/

ishkabibil
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,198 posts
 
The premise  is sound however there are omnidirectional speaker designs out there these days that realize the concept way better.  


ishkabibil OP
422 posts
 
Miller......

Stop it....you are being foolish.
rwortman's avatar
rwortman
40 posts
 
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.
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
9,788 posts
 

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.

clearthink
1,421 posts
 
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.
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