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Bose 901 : method to its madness !?

jtrade

jtrade

pfm Member
Any 901 owners here, happy with these speakers ?

I have sometimes wondered if it could be a very good speaker for smoothing over the sound in an overall positive way, ie. doing the opposite of a highly revealing, source-first approach, which might help a lot of modern music streams (Apple, Spotify & Tidal being the ones I have used). I know, the sacrilege...

Couple of reviews :

http://noaudiophile.com/Bose_901/
http://www.tonepublications.com/review/we-review-the-bose-901/

Hopefully someone from North America will have put me off this ridiculous notion by the time I wake up in the morning...
 
Always wanted to hear a pair as they are such an interesting design. I had no idea they were still made, let alone so affordably. I’ve always been very skeptical of the EQ box idea, but I guess in today’s digital world that could probably be done less destructively upstream digitally. Is there a Devialet SAM profile for them? That could be something special if so.
 
I had a play with a set driven by the Bose "spatial control receiver" for a few hours many years ago. Much depends on what you want from a hi fi... By conventional hi fi standards they are poor to very poor in many areas. However, if you want to be pinned to the wall by the shear volume, and visceral impact of something like Led Zepp at extreme volume then they could be for you... They kick ass in a big way! It seems they have massively come down in price, in real terms, over the years as well. IIRC, (and I may not be) they were about the same price 20 years ago..
 
Never having heard a pair I always imagined they’d give a kind of nice big spacious ‘concert hall’ perspective on orchestral classical, but not be huge amount of use for much else. I very much doubt they are for me, but I’d love to hear a pair!
 
Apparently, miniDSP units can indeed be substituted for the Bose equaliser and, using REW, a custom equalisation curve can be made specifically for one’s room.

95% of my listening is now via Apple Music (I didn’t find Tidal consistently better - sometimes, but not always), which cannot match a good CD, so the question is how to make this sound as satisfying as possible ? Not as revealing, analytical etc etc - think of all the enjoyment one had as a teenager playing Purple Haze on a plastic Philips player !
 
Bose know what they are doing with speaker design. My first new pair of speakers were 501's in 1978. Couldn't afford 901's then. I absolutely loved them. Not subtle but turn up the vol and they rock. My ex got them when we split up (I had just got new Kef 107's:))and used them until around 5 years ago. I heard the 901's a few times and was impressed but so many other options so I never bought any.
 
The old saying 'No highs, no lows, must be Bose' is a bit unfair, however, having lived with the sound of 901s filling a three-story terraced house for an entire year during university, I can agree with Arkless above, in that they do in fact 'kick arse' but are also subjectively quite rolled off in both the bottom and top (especially) unless a) used in a lively room and/or b) perfectly symmetrically suspended from the ceiling at ~2/3rds the way up from the floor, where the direct/reflected room gain seems to combine to both fill in the troughs and give the impression of HF extension. Many owners eventually found that hanging their 901s equal distance from back and side walls gave the necessary extra 3dB hump where the bottom should have been; something that the EQ box couldn't really deliver free of phase 'blur'. Some users went so far as to hang them the same distance from the ceiling as from the side and back (3dB + 3dB) and compensated for the resulting bloat with their treble control (plus midrange up if they had a Marantz).

There were/are other Bose models that sound a lot more conventional though; despite the port, I've enjoyed the 301 sounding very much like Advent/AR/KLH, and the 501 was all that plus greater bass extension. To be fair, these are proper two-way speakers, whereas, the 901 is a one-way, that should at the very least have had a whizzer cone up front, and, with 9 typically Bose evaporating surround drivers, a re-foaming nightmare.

Thankfully, Amar Bose took pity on the world by not continuing with the 2201...

cq5dam.web.1000.1000.jpeg
 
It's an interesting effect, but don't expect them to be very informative. I wonder how the same principle would work with high-quality modern full-range drivers?
 
Yank said:
It's an interesting effect, but don't expect them to be very informative. I wonder how the same principle would work with high-quality modern full-range drivers?
Click to expand...

Not quite the same principle, but one I have contemplated building, is the B200 Open Baffle array designed & built by Paul Hynes (requiring a v special amplifier) : http://theartofsound.net/forum/showthread.php?12285-Open-Baffle-Line-Source-Array-Loudspeaker

He writes in the article that 4 drivers per side also works well (it's an interesting read).

I wonder if Paul is a member here ?
 
Craig B said:
Thankfully, Amar Bose took pity on the world by not continuing with the 2201...

cq5dam.web.1000.1000.jpeg
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Wow - apparently only 50 sets ever made, before the 901s :

Bose 2201 speakers. Rare as hen's teeth. Less than 50 sets ever made. Pre-dates the 901s.
This is Professor Bose's first model created. 1966 production year. 22 Alnico drivers in each speaker. Each speaker contains a class-A 100 watt amp built in.
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The various generations all sound a bit or a lot different and to make matters more confusing major design changes don't all align with the series number (e.g. There are both sealed and ported sII!) The early sealed ones are imho the really special ones, as Craig says they need careful positioning...and an extra eq and about 450w per channel...it's still not hi-fi, but it's almost indecently good fun! They can fill a room in a way you can normally only achieve with multiple sets of PA speakers. This is not the polite, refined hifi you take home to meet your parents, this is the party girl that shoves her tongue down your throat on the dancefloor of a seedy discotheque at three am...

The decision to go ported was, I think, driven by a marketing strategy that focused on making sure their speakers sounded better than the price competition on mediocre recievers, this meant easy to drive and bass impact. It did, arguably improve the bass as it improved the response curve, but it became a lot muddier and lost some of the 'bounce' that made the original so infectious! Don't get md wrong, they still fill a room and are great to party with, but have lost a bit of perkiness...

The sV is probably the closest to being voiced like a 'real' speaker, but this seemed to irritate their hardcore fan base and the VI was 'revised after some research into average home acoustics' or some such.
 
Yep, I would quite agree with most of this. Not as nasty as the grief they constantly get, and in price terms, not bad amount of money(around $1300 US/Pair) by the time they stopped making them not too long ago. Whatever floats the boat!
 
https://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/425/index.html

The memory of reading this many moons ago just stired itself from the back of my mind, it offers a more technically satisfying explanation of what the 901 does than the official Bose spiel and a description of its strengths and weaknesses I'd say was pretty fair!

Another thought I had since last I posted was that it's actually a little odd how hated Bose is in some quarters where Shahinian and Carlsson (Sonab) are generally well respected. It makes a bit of sense in terms of some of the overpriced injection molded plastic the current Bose Corp turns out, but Amar's theories are no more out there than Dick or Stig's and in many respects their design practices and products are very similar. When Bose still built loudspeakers properly they made some stonking stuff, I lived very happily with 4x 301 sIII for years and most of my current speakers couldn't stand the abuse those got in my teenage years. The later 10.2 with the Acoustomass bass section are still on my speaker bucket-list!
 
djftw said:
Another thought I had since last I posted was that it's actually a little odd how hated Bose is in some quarters where Shahinian and Carlsson (Sonab) are generally well respected. It makes a bit of sense in terms of some of the overpriced injection molded plastic the current Bose Corp turns out, but Amar's theories are no more out there than Dick or Stig's and in many respects their design practices and products are very similar. When Bose still built loudspeakers properly they made some stonking stuff, I lived very happily with 4x 301 sIII for years and most of my current speakers couldn't stand the abuse those got in my teenage years. The later 10.2 with the Acoustomass bass section are still on my speaker bucket-list!
Click to expand...

My brother and I thrashed the hell out of a pair of 301 II's during our teenage years and had great fun doing so! They had great mid-bass punch for their dinky size. I do recall them sounding coarse/edgy when cranked LOUD, but at moderate levels they were very pleasant in their tonal presentation. In terms of bang-for-buck the 301 was tough to beat. In fact, my uncle still runs his stacked pair (four) 301 II's in his main system and is more than happy.
 
Clattery prominent mids no real bottom end to speak of, easy to blow up but yes good fun. Room filling in terms of mid and treble.
I actually preferred the wooden box mk1, the aero ported injection molded mk 3/4 were smoother but lost some of that room filling over an audience ability.
For their size they are ok with a 250w/ch amp on 'em.
.
 
ToTo Man said:
My brother and I thrashed the hell out of a pair of 301 II's during our teenage years and had great fun doing so! They had great mid-bass punch for their dinky size. I do recall them sounding coarse/edgy when cranked LOUD, but at moderate levels they were very pleasant in their tonal presentation. In terms of bang-for-buck the 301 was tough to beat. In fact, my uncle still runs his stacked pair (four) 301 II's in his main system and is more than happy.
Click to expand...
Yes, that was how I had mine, about five meters apart on the long sloped wall of a 7mx4m ish dorma room, wired up with miles of Dollar Tree 24awg speaker cable I got my sister to help me plait to make up to a decent csa! My brother bought mine off me, and I have a notion they are still in my parents' loft!
 
Yank said:
I find the bit about the 100W class A amp in 1966 very difficult to believe.
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Amstrad used to sell a car radio with several hundred ‘watts’ of output. There were some very creative calculation of ‘watts’ back then. ‘Music Power’ was one of the common offenders.
 
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