Home Speaker Asylum

General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

Is that a fact?

Hardly.

At the time the Bose 901 was introduced, a number of speaker builders were messing around with omnidirectional speakers, etc. What Dr. Bose did was pure marketing genius, which is still the hallmark of his company.

1. He produced a speaker that sounded (and looked) remarkably different in the showroom. Compared to the direct radiating speakers of the time (which did not image well and projected no sense of depth) the Bose 901s were a revelation. (I know, that's how I first experienced them in 1968.) Marketing 101 teaches that you must differentiate your product from its competitors.

2. He equalized the beejeezus out of a bunch of 4" cone drivers to try and make them reproduce bass and treble. Again, compared to the performance of most of the competitors of the day, the sound was not too bad, although they were huge power suckers and drove the modestly-powered amps of the time into hard clipping.

3. He developed a "story" to sell the speakers (the "scientific research" business that you slavishly repeated).

Over a period of ownership, these speakers are likely not to satisfy because they homogenize the sound, i.e. everything they reproduce has a sameness to it -- spacious, reverberant, diffuse, with a midrange emphasis. With symphonic music, this doesn't sound too bad; with other kinds of music, especially solo work, the effect detracts. Perhaps as background music reproducers, they're o.k.

Keith has pretty much corrected your statement about Magnepans, which have a certain sonic similarity to the 901s (but are much, much better) because they are a dipole radiator. I owned a pair of Magnepans for several years in the late 1970s. I was very fond of them (although they needed a good subwoofer . . . which was not really available then) but they have demanding placement requirements. Again, their strengths are symphonic and other large-scale music recorded in a reverberant space.


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