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In Reply to: RE: Here's another one, only $300 posted by dave slagle on July 16, 2016 at 08:27:01
Well, I put greater faith in measurements than in human hearing. In other words, I believe that measurements have higher resolution and much greater objectivity than anyone's ears.To each his own!
Edits: 07/19/16Follow Ups:
nt
It also might explain why the best selling and most popular speaker in the world is Bose. ;-)
But the brain to which those ears are attached. Bose is popular for the same reason those big-eyed waifs became popular. It was fashionable to have them in the living room.I remember when I bought my house and the then current owner proudly cranked up the volume on her Bose tiny speaker system. She didn't know any better, but all the cool kids had Bose. She thought it sounded great! And she was happy with it.
Of course, we're at that point (we hope) where it's all good, but some like this and some like that. So even if it measures the same, some like the thing that gets to the measure this way, and some like it to get there that way.
It's only important that you like the way you make the sound get to your own ears. Heck... even Bose makes the 901... don't sell a lot of them, but it's a decent speaker.
Edits: 07/18/16
With 8 or 9 two-inch, fifty-cent drivers per side? I guess it would sound a bit better than "The Wave" radio, but only if you have a 500W amplifier.
I have a funny story about the Bose 901. I was at the Air Force Base Exchange in Kiaserslautern, Germany not too far from Ramstein Air Base. Paul Klipsch was there talking to customers because he sold a lot of Klipsch speakers through the Military Exchange system in Europe. This must have been sometime around 1984 or 1985. Anyway, I was talking to Paul Klipsch and he told me he had just installed an anechoic chamber at his manufacturing facility. In our discussions I brought up the Bose 901 and Paul became very excited jumping up to get his three-ring binder containing all his test reports. He had conducted a distortion test of the Bose 901 in his new anechoic chamber and he wanted to show me the results. He did an IM distortion test using frequencies of 100-Hz and 10,000-Hz and he was able to measure 125% intermodulation distortion from the Bose 901 speakers. Both frequencies had amplitudes well within the Bose 901 capabilities, but the fact that the same driver was used to reproduce both frequencies simultaneously resulted in long excursions of the 100-Hz test tone modulating the 10,000-Hz test tone to such an extent that IM distortion exceeded 125%. This sort of thing cannot happen with ordinary speaker, which use separate transducers to reproduce those two frequencies. Anyway, extremely high levels of IM distortion represents one of the major problems with the Bose 901 speaker system.Best regards,
John Elison
Edits: 07/20/16
Thanks for that story. If ever a measured parameter correlated with aural experience, this is one perfect example.
Yep. Roughly $1400 for the pair. Or $400 on ebay, or even cheaper in the thrifts!
I do my share of bashing Bose but the one time (recently) I heard them I thought they sounded good. NOT $1400 good, but good.
I understand Bose makes you buy stands and a special equalizer to go along with them... I'm not sure if that is included in the $1400 you pay for them. But hey... look at my Bose Speakers!
I don't want to bash them if you like them. I suppose that's possible to do.
Back in the 70s, when I was a real neophyte, an audio cognoscenti of my acquaintance who was at the time running two pairs of Quad 57s driven by a Marantz 9, with a 7C front end, described the then very popular Bose 901 as "sand in the public eye". True or not, I love the metaphor.Back in the late 60s, when I was in college, Amar Bose hit the scene in Boston as an important theorist. He was a professor at MIT, and he promoted the idea of filling the room with direct sound. His first product, or at least the first one I ever saw at Tech Hi-Fi in Cambridge, was a quarter of a sphere that was designed to sit on the floor in a corner of the room, right up against the floor and the two walls where they meet at 90 degrees to form a corner. The quarter-sphere had a radius of about 3 ft, so it took up significant space. The surface of the partial sphere was a geometrical array of individual single drivers, driven full range. I don't know what it cost, but it was probably very expensive for those days. I think the 901 was the end-point in an attempt to get the same or a similar effect in a simpler less space-taking device.
Edits: 07/20/16
The nice ting about it is we are all allowed to believe whatever we want. I feel ultimately the burden of proof falls upon those making the technical claims (for or against) and while measurements are indeed factual and accurate, their interpretation is hugely subjective and I find this to be far more variable than human hearing.
dave
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