Bose 901's with "highend ancillaries"??

While no longer considered "high end", Bose 901 speakers are really quite good. Very forgiving and of course they do sound better with good source components and good electronics. I still have a pair, but haven't set them up in the past year or so. They are very accurate in terms of timbre and offer a distant, back of the hall perspective. When they were first introduced (1968?), AR practically owned the speaker market, with something over 50% market share. The original 901, with no where near the quality of sound of the current series, basically buried AR. I sold a lot of 901s back in their heyday. It is important to put this into perspective. No speaker from that era can compete with today's better speakers. But here we are talking about speakers that are still in production today. I could be mistaken, but think these are Klipschorns are the only speakers that can make that claim.

I don't think audiophiles ever considered 901's a high end speaker. J.Gordon Holt trashed them in his Stereophile review when they were introduced. I saw/heard them in two stores in the Santa Clara Valley in 1971---in the "best" room at Pacific Stereo (N. California's leading Hi-Fi chain in the late 60's/70's) in Mountain View, where you could compare them with the AR-3a and JBL L100 (which I did), and in an early true high-end shop, Sound Systems in Palo Alto, where I heard them against speakers from some new company named Infinity (which I also did).

In both stores the 901's sounded just as Gordon described them---a big amorphous blob of sound. Terrible, just terrible. The AR-3a was a pretty withdrawn, distant sounding speaker, yet considerably better than the Bose. The JBL L100 was the opposite of the AR, being very forward and brash. Still, not as bad sounding as the 901. At Sound Systems, even the $139 Infinity 1001 (the lowest priced model in Infinity's 1971 line up) was a far better speaker than the Bose. And Infinity's 2000A (at $299 each, close to the $500/pr Bose) absolutely mopped the floor with the Bose. Then there was the Infinity Servo-Static, at $2000 (which would also buy a brand new family sedan) not a fair comparison. But it did show me how good a speaker could sound. Being a young starving musician, I bought the 1001's, for about half the price of the 901's.

Bdp24,

If you can find them, I commend your attention to the many reviews of 901 speakers that praised them when they were first introduced. Do you remember Bert Whyte of Audio Magazine? He was and is held in very high esteem in the audiophile community and his review of 901s comes to mind as a good benchmark for the reception of the product at that time. While your assessment is certainly interesting, the preponderance of contemporary opinion and the undeniable market penetration of the product in the vastly larger buyer community of that day belie it.

So now you know why TONE AUDIO kept their reviewed pair BOSE 901 SERIES 6 MK2's.........REFERENCE GEAR + THE "LATEST" 901's = AMAZING!...TO THEIR EARS ONLY!!