Bose 901 Review Well Done.

In 1974 I lived in an apartment building in Somerville, MA. This was long before it became gentrified and housed artists and hipsters. My next door neighbor was an architectural photographer, a few years older than me.* I learned a lot from Bob. He had a pair of whatever the big Bose speakers were at that time (901s?).

I was young and 100% ignorant about audio, but had loved music my whole life. He knew I liked classical but wasn’t in touch with 20th century modernism. So one day he put the Bartok Violin concerto on those Bose speakers and proceeded to utterly blow my mind. I’ve been a huge of fan of Bartok and modernism ever since.

I thought those must be the best speakers in the world. 10 years later when I was putting together my own high end system, I was kind of surprised to learn that Bose speakers were detested by many in the high end. It wasn’t the last time I was surprised by the intersection of music, audio technology, and social perception.

*Bob moved to Hollywood to pursue work in film making. He probably started out as an assistant cinematographer or something like that (he was a superb photographer with his big 4" x 5" view camera), then later became a director. Among the films he directed is the cult classic, HITCHER; and a bunch of very entertaining JESSE STONE films starring Tom Selleck. Most recently he directed 23 episodes of BLUE BLOODS for TV. A very talented man.

This peaked my interest because I noticed a pair of Bose 901s lurking behind Steve Martin, Marty Short and Selina Gomez on the set of SM’s supposed NY apartment in the latest series of “Only Murders in the Building”. I wondered if this was part of Steve Martin’s sense of humor for his nerdy character to be proudly displaying 50 year old speakers. Who knew they are still in production?

A friend’s dad had a pair when I was in high school, and I was never all that impressed. The dad was a doctor that was into nice things so he was probably driving them with a Tandberg receiver or something like that. It was probably related to set up, or at the time I just didn’t “get” the sound. On the other hand, the system I took to college consisted of an AR turntable, Kenwood KA3500 and Bose 301 speakers. It sounded good enough that when playing some acoustic guitar music with my dorm room door open once, someone came down the hall to see who was playing.

kn

Hey billpete,

Lucky you, being stationed in Germany.  I flew C-130's out of Langley and only got to "rotate" for 2 months out of Mildenhall, 3 times...mostly one nighters all over Europe.  Was lucky to get to the AV club.  Miss those days!   AR turntable, Revox dolby B, and Pentax Spotmatic from there too. 

Series one and two were interesting pieces. After that, not very good. I had series one for a good while but quicky progressed.  I tried series 5 for about 15 minutes, there was no hope for them. 

@billpete Thank you. You still have Julian Hirsch's review of the 901s from (I think it was) August of 1968? I admired his style as I read his reviews month after month. I was just a 15-year old kid, but I have wondered all these years about how to achieve some real high fidelity while also achieving the "no sweet spot required" sound of a concert hall or live rock concert because to me, that is one of the biggest problems of conventional systems. (there are preferential seats in a concert hall, but relatively, there is much larger area that's sweet.)

To me, loudspeakers should be sold with a warning label disclosure: "Caution. These speakers do not function well except in a very small spot within a room." Not the frequencies, not stereo sound. But audiophiles, who ordinarily would not accept such glaring deficiencies in a system, seem to accept this problem as a given. As I was thinking on this the other day something occurred to me and maybe I'll have to try it.

Anyway, I may not comment often, but I enjoy the dialogue here.