[Audio Empire]

Barkingspyder wrote

Your obsession with Bose doesn't cut it with me. I heard 901's and
was not as impressed with that as I was with Carver's demo recording
of sonic holography. Worst of all for me the 901's had horrible
mushy bass. Like what you want, it's fine with me. You do seem to
have a problem getting all the facts you know into some sort of
cogency.

I have to agree, here. I had friends who owned Bose 901s back in the day, and
I have to say that I never did get it. As you say, they had poor bass and I
also thought that their highs were poor as well. I put the bass down to the
active equalizer that 901s counted upon to get those small speakers to
produce any sound below 60 Hz. I thought that the speakers always sounded
better without the equalizer in the system and, apparently, so did one friend
who owned them. Eventually, he "traded" the equalizer for a real pair of
subwoofers and crossed-over at about 100 Hz. It improved the bass a
thousandfold, but to my ears did nothing for the top-end (to be fair, I
thought Popular Electronics' "Sweet-16" speaker system was terrible as well.
The idea that you could make 16 cheap, small speakers sound as good as a well
engineered commercial speaker was ludicrous). Even so, I always thought that
the "direct/reflected sound" theory to be a bunch of hooey. 901's imaged
horribly. They would take recordings with pin-point imaging and turn them
into vague, nebulous sounding pastiches of sound "thrown up" on the walls
behind the speakers. Frankly, I've always thought that Amir Bose was a bit of
a charlatan. Most (but not all) of his ideas were marketing over engineering.
I recall going to a demo of one of Bose's satellite systems. I'm in a lecture
hall (belonging to a big electronics retailer) and on the stage was a pair of
big speaker boxes that looked similar to a pair of AR-3's. The presenter
started to play the music and it filled the room with sound that you were
supposed to believe was coming from those box speakers. When the presenter
thought that everyone was thoroughly enough fooled he removed the grilles
from the speakers showing that they weren't boxes at all, just hollow frames
with fabric grill cloths on them. Inside the boxes on small stands were a
pair of Bose cubes. Unfortunately, while the music was playing and everyone
else was ostensibly being wowed by the big sound, I was thinking "Why does
this sound so distorted?" When, after the spiel, I asked about the
distortion, the presenter just looked at me - he had no answer. I've heard
these Bose satellite systems subsequently and have always thought that they
were, at the very least, terribly colored.