For all you Bose 901 Haters!

I used to work at a mid-fi store that carried Bose in LA during the height of their popularity.

They sucked then, they always sucked, no amount of modern mods can polish those turds.

Lack of detail, flabby bass, and zero imaging and soundstage. 

We carried a cheaply built 'house brand' speaker that outperformed them.

During the height of their popularity I worked at a hi-fi store (Pacific Stereo).  We sold a lot of Bose speakers.  Not because we loved them so much, but because the public demanded them.  But my best Bose experience was during a product training meeting.  In a rather small setting of about 20 sales people, the product trainer was Dr. Amar Bose.  That was a real treat and a great experience that I remember to this day.

No.  Just...no.  I call foul.  I worked for a dealer in the late ‘90s who sold ATC speakers.  We happened to have a Bose speaker cone to show to potential customers, and when we showed it to a lead engineer from ATC he laughed out loud and said those drivers cost 3 pence — about 6 cents at the conversion rate at the time.  Bose is a marketing company that targets the everyman, and that’s fine.  But don’t EVER think Bose is a legit audiophile company.  They’re better at cancelling noise than reproducing it.

 mammothguy54 did you work at Pacific Stereo in the SF Bay Area?

totally ignoring their beastliness as a corporate concern, i own several bose products- a series II wave radio, an acoustic wave music system [wave radio sounds better to my ears but AWMS gets much louder], a sr1 cinemate soundbar [amazingly uniform wraparound imaging independent of listener position, but no depth], a lifestyle 30 system [good enough for movies, not so great for music 'cept for instrumentals, something about the system removed most of the harshness from bad recordings with upper midrange glare, music with vocals sounded like they were muffled], and a pair of their noise-cancelling cans [mediocre sound quality but useful for noise cancellation in noisy places, they enabled me to mow the lawn sans deafening noise when i misplaced my noise blocking ear hearing protectors. i've heard the 901s several times, to my ears they were basically neutral in tone, the image was vague but wide and had a pseudo-depth to it. they did something to 78 rpm crackle that made it much less nasty to the ear, like it smoothed it out or something like that. seems aside from the compact music systems, all bose products seem to have adequate bass down to 40 cycles and some usable bass left in the range between 30 and 40 cycles but nothing to write home to mama about. they don't seem to care about the bottom octave that much.