[Phil Allison[_3_]]

"Trevor Wilson"
Phil Allison wrote:

** MIT's most famous audio guru has passed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/13/business/amar-g-bose-acoustic-engineer-and-inventor-dies-at-83.html?_r=0


Nice obit article - shame so much of it is nonsense.

Amar and his infamous BOSE Corporation were responsible for some of
the most egregiously wrong headed audio drivel and absurd loudspeakers
ever to be misconstrued as clever and inventive.

" Sell the sizzle, rather than the sausage" could have been their
motto, right from day one.

Mark Antony said: " The evil that men do lives after them ... "

So thank god most examples of the Bose 901 and its many relatives
are already dead and buried.

BTW:

L. Ron Hubbard and Amar Bose are alike - both became famous and
wealthy after starting new religions in the USA.


**The 901 was based on a (very highly) flawed premise. Bose assumed (quite
rightly) that most of the sound reaching a listener in a confined space
was reflected sound. He failed to take account of:

1) The size of the space.
2) The reverberant nature of different spaces.
3) Outdoor recordings.
4) The fact that live recordings already possess the reverberant nature of
the space within that recording.

** Don't think the design was based on any scientific premise - just that
Amar liked his reproduced sound bouncing all over the place in a very live
room and found others did too. He was an audio philistine of the highest
order.

Amar first tried to make a spherical, omni-directional speaker that was
quite impractical - so a small, 5 sided box with 9 drivers was the
outcome. 9 x 8ohm drivers in series parallel gives 8ohms again, so one had
to go on the front as a token gesture to stereo imaging.

901s were cheap as chips to make but needed a whole lot of EQ at high and
low frequencies - this is where the real design flaws began. Each puny 4.5
inch driver had less than 3 litres of box volume, so resonance went up to
140Hz. Driving a speaker well below system resonance requires a lot of extra
power - 901s used 18dB worth of fit, which is an absurdity. When played at
a decent volume, the intermodulation that goes on in such a contraption is
appalling.

Treble boost was similarly very large, cos the cheap paper cone drivers used
had no tops without it. They simply had no quality with it.

Plus 901s HAD to be used in a largish room and with a solid wall behind
them, they did not work as intended in well damped rooms or where the walls
were of flimsy material like plasterboard.

Their biggest selling point was their small size and weight made it possible
for wives to move then out of the way when not in use !!!

Then Bose released the 360wpc 1800/1801 amplifier ( an OEM product for sure)
which weighed 80 pounds - so THAT evil monster stayed put.




.... Phil