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In Reply to: Re: Ahh the legend in his own mind TINKERER is back ... posted by Soundmind on August 13, 2006 at 06:30:20:
Well this thread has provided many good belly laughs. Not all of them are with your comments since you have made some valid points, especially concerning real music as a reference, a reference that seems almost contemptable with a growing number of audiophiles.But your comments on the longevity of the Bose 901 did produce a nice belly laugh. Thanks!
The Bose 901 has survived so long in the market place for two reasons. 1. MARKETING primarily. They have marketed the living piss out of this piece of dreck for 40 years. Nothing more. And you have such comtempt for audio companies marketing. Bose, without question, is the marketing king in this industry. Marketing is all that Bose has been about for several generations. As savvy as many hi-end audio companies have gotten about marketing, that can't even begin to compete with the master, Bose. A better example you will not find on how a company can take a terrible product and turn it into a legend simply by marketing. Should actually be a case study in any good marketing class. Couple that with.... 2. Most folks that purchase the Bose did so on the marketing hype alone having no idea, and not caring, what real music sounds like.
I have no problem without about 80% of your comments/ideas. You are spot on in many cases, i.e. live music as the ONLY meaningful reference, massive marketing hype in this industry, the lack of any real innovation, ideas, etc. Some of this is great and I love some of the feathers you ruffle. But then you just went and shot yourself in the foot with the Bose comment. Talk about total hype and marketing. A complete lack of real innovation. It was not innovative even when it came out. It was simply horrid then and is just as horrid now.
A few years ago Ken Kessler nominated the original Quad ESL as the audio component of the century. If one could nominate the worst audio product of the last century, the winner would be the Bose 901 by a long-shot, for one would be hard pressed to find a better piece of hyped junk. Laughable concept, terrible engineering, comical construction quality and way, way, way over priced. A big cheesy shoe box full of cheap ass driver.
BTW, musician here, or at least I fancy myself as one. Voice, piano. Season ticket holder for our local symphony, and I try to spend as much of my time listening to real, live, unamplified music as I do the hi-fi. And a degreed engineer to boot!
Follow Ups:
This is the biggest con job ever. You have thouasands of LIVE venues -- and I can Guarantee you that whatever Soundmind has tinkered with it won;t reproduce not a single one in his home -- you want LIVE then create the philharmonic's portrayol of Beethoven's Ninth in your home and convince anyone that it is the live performance -- I will bet all the money I have on it.It is pure lunacy to compare to "live' in the above sense. A live instrument in room -- I have done this already with musicians.
Bose is best because it sells the most so I have already been down the argument with Soundmind and his logic is heavily flawed. AN only succeeds because of marketing -- even though they never advertise -- how did they sell it to me -- a person who went in cold and NEVER heard of the company -- look at it and it sure as hell won't sell you on appearance. Soundmind is heavily biased -- first he hates Peter Qvortrup and already had a big chip on his shoulder before his so called auditions. He has claimed that to get his wonderful tinkered Bose crapfest working it has taken him YEARS to tailer it to the room. So naturally he can judge a speaker in a room he's never been in set-up super quick. That is not to excuse the makers at audio shows - but at the same time it's also hypocritical to have an apple of years to set-up and tailer recordings the way you "like it" to one where none of those things have been afforded.
Audio Note has a clearly different goal than to tailer the sound to the way you "want" it to sound. I am sorry but SOundmind wants to adjust recordings by altering the intent and original RECORDING to something entirely different...I have no problem with people who wish to do that because that is their choice and the point is to be happy with what you are hearing. Audio Note's goal is to reveal the largest amount of difference between recordings by NOT stamping it's sound at the listening position onto everything. That means by nature that the sound of recordings will not be TAILORED to a homogeneous presentation of a person's likes. I may like the singer in the center and I may be able to get a stereo to ALWAYS project the voice dead center -- but it's not truthful to the recording.
There is no question that unamplified live acoustic instruments need to be auditioned with recordings that exhibit a high level of "quality" on audio systems and a fairly strong knowledge of the instruments' sound by the consumer. Peter Qvortrup has perhaps the largest personal collection of classical recorded music on the planet so at least he has the recordings to pull from to put his Comparison by contrast approach to the test. But a stereo system is not or should I say SHOULD NOT be limited to JUST playing "some" recordings well and everything abysmally. That is an Excuse used by high end dealers to say yeah this Chesky disc sounds pretty damn excellent but the other 99 recordings you brought are dreadful so get a new music collection. Which is not to say that AN won't render some stuff poorly since there are poor recordings but IME some of those so called great recordings have for the first time been shown to be not so great -- while others that made some discs unlistenable actually turned out to be rather steller -- rock to boot. The AN does not in fact favour rock -- it is designed for classical and that is failry obvious but the same time it has not totally been gutted dynamically for a sense of added "air" to gain a false sense of better soundstaging.
Bose is a marketed product almost entirely...it is conceptually completely to make some bucks selling garbage at high dollars and it ALWAYS was and it STILL is. Ford has been around 40 years too but it does not make a great car company. It may make them grreat BUSINESS people but great products and great sales are hardly mutually condusive.
One high end dealer said he'd kill to have the rights to Bose -- but the distribution went to another high end dealer. Not because it's any good but because it requires no work to sell it. Bose refuses to allow a side by side comparison with anyone.
BTW, right now I'm having a lot of fun and great success restoring and experimenting with....AR2a. Dreadful as supplied by the factory, It's turing out to be a very fine speaker with considerable modifications including additional tweeters. You really outght to get out more RGA, there's more to life than Audio Note.
You seem to be hung up about Bose 901. I don't know why. I own many different speakers and different kinds of speakers, original Bose 901s among them. They were never inexpensive in any era they were sold in, so their popularity must have been due to more than mere hype and marketing. I'm not going into the technical details of it again, it is what it is. Just suffice it to say that there are many innovations and unique ideas embodied in it even if it is fatally flawed by current audiophile standards and the original version had some real advantages over series III and every series afterwards (starting about 1975.) Regardless of how you think it performs, two things can be said about it. One is that it was built to very high manufacturing standards. The second is that given Bose's offer to swap my 30+ year old speakers for a replacement new pair at half price means to me that they stand behind their product is ways other manufacturers don't. (once upon a time ago, KLH was such a company.) I don't expect you to beleive that they can be turned into a first rate speaker which still retains the unique advantages of the direct reflecting principle. Before doing it I wouldn't have believed it myself.
I am not hung up on the Bose. I simply stated my observations on the design, performance, etc. That is what this forum is all about. I was not the one that referenced the Bose 901 as one of the all-time greats. I would not have commented had you not referenced the 901 as one of the stellar performers. Nor did you refute any of my comments, especially the marketing, except to say......"their popularity must have been due to more than mere hype and marketing"
Baloney. Folks overpay for stuff all the time based purely on marketing. Absolut Vodka, Starbucks Coffee, the list is endless. The Bose 901 is no different. Hyper-marketing has given the Bose 901 some perceived value in the market place, the corner stone of good marketing. Bose is a master at what it does best, marketing.
"suffice it to say that there are many innovations and unique ideas embodied in it"Where? What? I am more than capable of holding up my end of any technical discussion you would like to have regarding their concept, design, execution, etc. I see a simple box, full of cheap drivers, running rull range. All the ills are supposedly tamed with massive amounts of EQ. We further solve problems with this design by reflecting the sound all over the room. One band-aid on top of another. This is innovation?
Good designs do not start with bad ideas full of 'fixes' to get the thing to perform. That is called bad engineering. Speakers that interface with the room as these, the "direct reflecting principle" you mention, will never be accurate, they simply cannot be. Highly euphonic, at best, is how we can describe this sort of approach. One may be able to fiddle at length with the thing to make it perform better, perhaps. This is good engineering? No way. Highly reflective speakers are highly inaccurate. You may like them, but that is another matter.
"it was built to very high manufacturing standards"
For what? Quality it is not IMO. Cheap box that is now plastic, cheap drivers and cheap electronics. Now I will be the first to state that a great amount of the hi-end gear we see is way over-engineered/built, in terms of packaging, than what is required to get the job done. As I have stated to more than one manufacterer in the past, we are not trying to launch this thing on the Space Shuttle!
"given Bose's offer to swap my 30+ year old speakers for a replacement new pair at half price means to me that they stand behind their product is ways other manufacturers don't"
Of course they will. Most mass-marketed/produced products play this game. Given the huge margins and mark-ups, everyone is still making a killing. Even the largest of hi-end companies are peanuts compared to a company like Bose. Their cost structures simply cannot do this sort of thing and remain viable as a company.
This is absolutely no indication of any kind of quality, customer support, etc. What is does indicate is excellent marketing! It also indicates how very little it actually costs Bose to make the thing versus what it sells for.
Marketing, marketing, marketing pure and simply. And you took the hook. The only difference between the marketing hype you so loath about hi-end audio and the hype of Bose is the scale of the scam!
I bought a pair of 901 series one way back in 1969. They were the best of the 901's because they actually used a cloth surround which lasted forever. All other series use a foam surround which deteriorates in 5 to 8 years.
In owning the 901 for about 6 years, I discovered nothing I did to my system ever produced a significant change. I switched to the Shure V-15 type III when it came out from the type II: no change. I borrowed a friend's Levinson ML-2's: no change. I bought Fulton Speaker wire: no change. It wasn't until I turned the speaker around one day that I realized how much distortion it created. In reveiwing the glowing write up in High Fidelity, I realized they only very briefly mentioned the fact that the speaker produced 5% distortion. No wonder I couldn't hear any differences! That kind of distortion was akin to the worst seats in a concert hall, but then I was young and impressionable and believed all the advertising hype....
Fast forward to 20 years ago. Dr. Bose actually has a home in my town, and had consented to give a lecture at our local university. A friend who had managed to score a couple of tickets begged me to accompany him, but I really wasn't interested to learn the 'secrets' of the Bose speaker. I did ask him to tell me about the contents afterwards though. He came by the next week looking a little sheepish and when I asked, he replied that the lecture was totally about the future of telemarketing.
About 6 years ago, I met a few of Dr. Bose's teaching associates at MIT, PHD's in their own right. They informed me that he teaches only one class: acoustics, at the university and refuses to do anything else. The only reason he does this is to maintain his credentials for advertising purposes, and that he has been doing this for a long time, even before they were at the institution.
Judge for yourself...
Stu
After all George Bush supposedly graduated fromn two IVY league Universities -- those professors look real dumb when he can't out speak a 9 year old.In fact because many unbscrupulous Universities will take bribes - let my moron kid in and I'll build a wing onto your school then you always have to look sideways at what the piece of paper truly means -- I have two by the way so I'm not slamming them. And at some of the big Universities where they place so much emphasis on one test they are often "easier" on students come marking time because it makes the university "look bad" if the scores are low - after all they supposedly let in the best of the best.
Knowing one professor at my small University who taught at two IVY league US Universities I asked him if they are "harder and he said the reverse was true. An A- student here would receive an A+ at Harvard or Yale. So that is an eye-opener.
Having the thearoy of a speaker makes little difference -- the guy running Monster Cable is a nuclear physicist and can yap up a technical storm on why the cable's elements at the molecular level make his stuff better. Bose? I mean now I know why Soundmind hates everything else -- none of it sound like a Bose 901 --- tweaking it won't help.
" All the ills are supposedly tamed with massive amounts of EQ. ""Good designs do not start with bad ideas full of 'fixes' to get the thing to perform. "
RIAA equalization which makes microgroove long playing phonograph records possible 20-20khz....40 db equalization (that's a factor of 10,000:1)
NAB eqalization which makes analog high fidelity magnetic tape recordings possible, 20-20 khz....also about 40 db of equalization.
FM pre-emphesis/de-emphesis which makes high fidelity FM broadcasts possible 75 microseconds, you figure out how many db of equalization that comes out to from 50 hz to 15 khz.
US National Color Television Standards....IF bandpass amplifier section must have properly equalized response required for reception and decoding of the colorburst subcarrier signal while maintianing adjacent channel interference rejection.
Equalization is a valid and long established part of electronics signal processing. Most phonograph records made since the 1950s used considerable equalization tweaking during mixdown. The German term for mixing engineer "Tonmeister" pretty much says it all.
Equalization of the Bose 901 was not a fix of a bad idea, it was an integral part of a very ingenious one where the inventor observed that below the bass resonant frequency, response fell off linearly and could be compensated for with a precision equalizer. Proof that it worked was evidenced during the early 1970s when Bose 901 was among the world champions for producing low frequencies from a commercial loudspeaker for consumer use beating out AR3a and JBL Paragon D44000. The small box was an integral part of the design pushing the system resonance frequeny up to 180 hz where Bose claimed the associatd phase shift was no longer audible. The pentagonal shape of the cabinet reduced internal standing waves. The use of multiple closely coupled drivers eliminated secondary resonances characteristic of individual drivers leaving only the resonances characteristic of the basic driver design to deal with. The similar Bose 802 was widely used by professional installers and engineers who could just as easily have bought other systems like JBL, Altec or EV.
As I said, the overall response was not flat and the speaker could not reproduce the highest octave of sound because the inertal mass of the drivers was too great even with an equalizer. This does not negate the advantages and innovations of the 901. As for its unique radiating properties, it is much closer to the way musical instruments radiate sound into space than conventional speakers and it is uniform as a function of frequency which is also much like the way most musical instruments work. The radiating pattern of the overwhelming majority of high fidelity loudspeakers on the market stinks with virtually all of their high frequency radiation beamed over a very narrow solid angle straight forward. The problem is made even worse by use of 1" domes which are horn loaded as seen by the slight recess around their perimeter. You would be hard pressed to find one which is not off at least 10 to 12 db at 15 khz around 45 degrees off axis. compare that to woofers which are nearly omnidirectional off less than 10 be 180 degrees off axis.
The design offered many unique advantages but it had not been perfected in the embodiment offered to the market and it was decided to cheapen it in the mid 1970s by making it more efficient which allowed it to be marketed to a wider customer base. Undoubtedly this generated far more profits for Bose than had he further refined it into a product designed to compete at the audiophile level. Unfortunately, to do this, the bottom octave had to be sacrificed. Bose began making his own drivers and abandoned wood cabinets for an injection molded plastic one. Given the special shape he needed for his unusual ported design, this was a good choice.
Try to be more objective about the realities of products on the market. If you are an engineer, it is not wise to become emotionally involved with what are only machines. Every one of them has their limitations. It is valuable to learn from both success and failures and there is much knowlegde this professor of Electrical Engineering and Acoustics at MIT brought to this innovative idea.
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