Bose 901

Right. Thanks.Good point. Another one he got wrong. As Eric Alexander has shown with his Tekton line its better to take a bunch of tweeters and make them sound like a midrange.

Thanks for the link. Its right in line with what I've been saying!

" J. Gordon Holt, founding editor of our high-end sister publication Stereophile, noted in a 1971 commentary that the 901 “produces a more realistic semblance of natural ambience than any other speaker system, but we would characterize it as unexceptional in all other respects.” My own mentor, Harry Pearson, Jr., told me in the early 1980s that he bought a pair of first-generation 901s after reading the positive reviews in the mainstream audio press and was so disappointed that it prompted him to found The Absolute Sound as an alternative voice."

and

"few factors beyond Bose’s own advertising contributed more to the speaker’s huge commercial success."

The one guy who liked it was the tech obsessed Julian Hirsch, the man who ruined Stereo Review (and countless budding audiophiles) with his incessant measurement uber alles dogma. Yes Julian Hirsch, the man who thinks all wire is the same so long as its thick enough. Time has not been kind to his views. Stereo Review, RIP. Even though he loved it, he still had to admit:

"Electrically, the Bose 901 is rather inefficient, and the 18 dB of bass boost supplied by the equalizer requires huge reserves of amplifier power if loud low-frequency passages are to be played. To a lesser degree, the same problem exists at the very high frequencies."

So its equalized to the max, and yet we're supposed to believe

"The active equalizer introduces no perceptible distortion."

He then goes on to measure its distortion. Right.

J. Gordon Holt founded Stereophile on the idea of listening as the ultimate performance criteria. Harry Pearson advanced that ball even further down the field. Neither of them was a fan. To say the least. The one most famous writer to actually like them is also the one whose professional position, which he pushed month after month his whole career, was that listening doesn't really count for all that much. 

Right. Which is a problem by the way, and not a plus.

Picking a Bose apart by audiophile standards is shooting ducks in a barrel- and a frozen barrel at that. Anyone one week beyond audio-noob can see they’re all so flawed the biggest problem is where to start? So many flaws, so little time!

Which it turns out is a feature, not a bug! Bose was never made for audiophiles. Bose was and is made for audiowives. The first and probably still only speaker company to go after the women in the market. Women don’t want anything to do with speakers that dominate a room, dictate where you sit, or any of that. So Bose made relatively small speakers on cute little stands and you could even put them behind a sofa because who cares, the sound is gonna bounce off the wall all the same in the end. In fact behind a sofa, drapes, whatever, so much the better as another design goal is a diffuse all over sound.

That’s why later on when he got even better at it the speakers got even smaller, little cubes you hardly even see em, and with a sub that isn’t even really a sub because little 3"cubes don’t have bass heck they barely have midrange but that’s not the point, they disappear, that’s the point!

Bose Wave radio, same thing, women love that warm bass heavy top end rolled off sound. Heck even a lot of guys do. Just not any real honest to goodness audiophile guys. Who Bose could not care less about- the big money is in the mass market. Which Bose is.

Bose in other words is the Rolex of speakers. Everyone who knows very little knows they’re the best. Only those with real inside knowledge know the truth: far from it. Not even close. That’s when you know you have a really, really good marketing department.

Can you say, "Lowest Common Denominator"? 

I knew that you could.

There are more satisfied drinkers of Bud than higher end craft ales.
There are more satisfied wearers of Timex than Rolex. 
See if you can spot the pattern.

@millercarbon............

Were they successful?

So you really don’t know then? Okay.

The Bose 901 was introduced in 1968. Back then we didn’t have anything like the standards we do today. Nowadays when someone says however many watts we know (or being audiophiles at any rate we should know) it means not instantaneous peak watts but continuous RMS watts and not only that but it was measured after a prescribed warm up period and not only that but had to be able to put out the measured watts for an extended period of time. All this we take for granted today.

None of this we had back in the 60’s. What we had back then was all kinds of power claims, which if measured at all were mere brief pulses, whatever they could do to get a big number, because then as now the average audiophool was easily misled by numbers.

I’m spending all this time painting a picture because today we look at something like a 6 watt triode like its nothing when back in the 50’s and 60’s that was big, big power. Serious power. Even today, with K-horns it will blow your mind.

Bose however did not have Paul Klipsch. They had whoever it was thought it would be a good idea to throw sound up against a wall and see what sticks, er I mean bounces back. They had just about the most inefficient loudspeaker ever made. And yes I know about the German robot thing, that’s why I said just about.

So Bose had this hopelessly inefficient speaker and it was all they had and so in order to make the 901 not quite so hopelessly lame they made this awesome 350 WPC amp and went on tour around the country, which is where I came in. Because one day the traveling Bose show made it all the way to Puyallup High in Puyallup, Washington and we got out of class and had our little minds blown by this guy playing music in our concert hall and it was really good and really loud. For back then anyway. Nothing back then rates today, except maybe the girls, but even they are hotter now too so nevermind.

Now Bose may have been dumb enough to make speakers bounce sound off walls but the guy they sent on the road was smart enough to know to point the 8 out into the audience. And to put the amp on stage. Which me and my audio pal Doug then drove to Tacoma to see close up. 350 watts! Per channel!

Silly idea. Dumbest thing you can do, make a speaker so inefficient. Second dumbest, make an amp that powerful. But yeah. They did.

Were they successful? Well, do you see them making that amp today? Hard even to find any record of it. So after all that I would be inclined to say, no. But at least now you know where I was coming from.

Bose 901: the first speaker so inefficient they had to invent a 350 watt amp to drive it.