It's a well-known engineering fact that audiophile-quality speakers
such as the 901s work well on tube amplifiers. snip

This was a joke. Sarcasm does not read well on Usenet.


Now, THERE'S the truth. Amar Bose developed one of the leading
fraud houses of audio. People with ANY knowledge base at all laugh
at anything with the Bose label. Want to know where he got the idea
for the ill-sounding 901? Look back in a 1948 issue of Radio magazine
at their article about the "sweet sixteen" homebrew speaker, where
a guy fills up a box with 16 cheap 4" speakers rather than spend the
money on a good 15" driver.

The "Sweet 16" article actually appeared in Popular Electronics in the early
'60s, at least five years before the 901 hit the market.

The gestation of the 901 was via the 2201, an attempt to produce a "perfect
point-source" speaker. Dr. Thomas Stockham, the founder of Soundstream, worked
with Dr. Bose on the design, providing digital signal processing that "proved" a
properly equalized (???) array of drivers could subjectively reproduce sound in
a way that was indistinguishable from a perfect * point source at the same
position in the listening room. There's a Web article explaining the design
process, but I can't find the URL. This is the closest I can find...

http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/stockham.html

Only a few 2201s were sold. (Julian Hirsch gave it a rave review.) Their sound
displeased Dr. Bose, mostly because it seemed too bright (even though it
measured flat). ** This suggested bouncing most of the sound off the wall, to
smooth and soften it. The business about the "optimum" concert-hall ratio of
reflected-to-direct sound is, as far as I know, an ex-post-facto justification.


"Got no highs? Got no lows! Only midrange... MUST BE BOSE!"

The "principles" on which the 901 is designed (other than the use of
equalization) are all technically or aesthetically invalid, and the speaker's
poor sound is proof of this. However, the lack of frequency extremes is no proof
of poor sound quality. The original QUAD electrostatic has an anemic low end,
but is still considered an outstanding speaker. When people criticize the 901s
for "no highs, no lows," they are criticizing it for the wrong reason.


* "Perfect" in this context means not only in terms of point-source dispersion,
but sonic accuracy.

** I don't know whether Dr. Bose asked himself whether this was due to the
recordings, or bothered to make his own live recordings, to try to get a feel
for where the problem lay.