"Jonathan Livingston Seagull" Theatre Sound System Competition

[tysontom]

I have compressed to some degree (so it will make it through as an attachment) the report on the competiton that was done by Neil Diamond to select a sound system for the "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" premiere back in 1973. This was an interesting competition, but it showed that the 901 was up to the task of reproducing full-orchestra sound in a large space. This required sixteen 901s being driven by four of the big Bose 1801 stereo power amplifiers.

--Tom Tyson

[tysontom]

I have compressed to some degree (so it will make it through as an attachment) the report on the competiton that was done by Neil Diamond to select a sound system for the "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" premiere back in 1973. This was an interesting competition, but it showed that the 901 was up to the task of reproducing full-orchestra sound in a large space. This required sixteen 901s being driven by four of the big Bose 1801 stereo power amplifiers.

--Tom Tyson

I've split the document into two parts....

[stan461]

Thank you for posting the article.

The BOSE 901 is surely one of the most controversial speakers of all time. The type that folks either love or hate.

Unfortunately, all the 901's I have ever heard were used as a PA or DJ system. Not properly set up as Hi-Fidelity with top-notch amplification and decent room treatments.

When I notice someone of your stature giving credence to their capabilities, it beckons me to investigate.

Maybe even to purchase a pair.

[tysontom]

Thank you for posting the article.

The BOSE 901 is surely one of the most controversial speakers of all time. The type that folks either love or hate.

Unfortunately, all the 901's I have ever heard were used as a PA or DJ system. Not properly set up as Hi-Fidelity with top-notch amplification and decent room treatments.

When I notice someone of your stature giving credence to their capabilities, it beckons me to investigate.

Maybe even to purchase a pair.

stan461,

Thanks for your message, and I am flattered by your comments!

I'm really not trying to "jack-up" the old Bose 901; that speaker rises and falls on its own merits, and it has had years and years of love-hate reviews and comments. However, I do think the speaker is much, much better than some people think it is, and you only have to listen to it in the proper setting (with sufficient power) to understand that it is a very good speaker!

IMO:

(1) There are really few speakers that surpass it when it comes to presenting a spacious, efforless sound presentation of orchestral music. The speakers must be mounted properly (12-inches out from the front wall and properly separated), there must be sufficient power (meaing lots of it) and the room can't be too "dead" on the speaker-end of the room; i.e., the reflective surface must be relatively hard and reflective rather than curtains or other absorptive materials.

(2) There has been criticism of the 901's tendancy to make individual instruments appear "larger-than-life," and this criticism (sort of the basis for the Bose vs. Consumer Reports litigation of several years back) probably has some merit. I don't think it is particularly objectionable, but there has definitely been criticism that solo pianos or violins seem to stretch from one end of the room to the other, and

(3) The 901 has a very effortless, clear midrange response, but there have been some minor frequency-response irregularities (all speakers eshibit irregularities to one degree or another). Usually these anomolies aren't objectionable, but they are present nonetheless.

(4) The Bose 901 is a more-or-less indestructable loudspeaker -- if used in accordance with the published specifications. There are no "tweeters to burn out" in the 901, so the speakers can be played at fairly high levels for hours on end without fear of burning out a voice coil on a fragile tweeter. The absence of small, light-weight tweeters, however, probably prevents the 901 from having an extended (beyond perhaps 15kHz) frequency response in the extreme treble. Once again, Bose thought of this and determined that what you hear at live-music concerts and jazz groups, etc., have very little musical content at the extreme frequencies, and therefore the 901 is equalized to reproduce the music that you would hear at a live concert.

--Tom Tyson

[Carlspeak]

Hi Tom. It's interesting your interest has turned to Bose.

I posed a question to Soundminded recently http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/IP.Boar...amp;#entry74711 (posts #7 &9), regarding anechoic testing of this novel loudspeaker design. However, I'm not sure he answered it. I had an ongoing debate on another forum regarding this question but couldn't find an ally. Some just stuck by their contention that the only standard test is the anechoic test and the 901 should be able to be fairly tested.

Just wondered after reading the HIrsch review (no anechoic data there either - can't seem to find any anywhere) if my theory on anechoic testing of the 901's is a fair test considering the speakers reliance on highly reflective dispersion of the sound in a non-reflective environment test chamber.

Your thoughts?

[soundminded]

Carl, sorry I strayed off the topic last time, I'll try to give a more coherent answer this time.

I haven't seen any anechoic chamber response measurements for Bose 901. Based on everything I know about it, here is what my best guess would be as of now. With the equalizer in the circuit and the controls set for their "flat" indicated settings, it would have a bass resonance peak at about 250 to 500 hz which is about 4 to 8 db above its 1 khz output. Below resonance it would fall at 6 db per octave very linearly reaching the 1 khz output level in the range of 120 hz and continuing to fall. Above resonance it also falls at around 6 db per octve until around 2 khz. It seems to have a couple of db peak around 4 khz and then flattens out from there. On the high end It would roll off around 10 to 12 khz fairly sharply with little or no ouput above that range. The drivers would become increasingly directional too with hf output above 10 khz almost completely on axis. Remember this is just a guess.

OK, now for a slight peek under the tent. The anechoic measurements are a starting point. In my way of looking at the world, the loudspeaker's directional characteristics are very important in how a speaker will sound in a real room. An anechoic chamber is a great place to make certain measurements but as a place to listen to music it stinks, it could hardly be worse. It is a very unnerving place to be in too. A sound system having a speaker with a flat on axis frequency response could be made to sound like a live musical instrument in an anechoic chamber but who would want to listen to it? As you add reflective surfaces to arrive at a real room, the differences between the way the musical instrument radiates sound and the way the loudspeakers radiates sound including changes in frequency response on its off axis radiation becomes increasingly audible. When you arrive at something akin to the living room in a house, the differences are startling. A grand piano in a home fills the entire end of a room with a powerful often brilliant sound, a pair of loudspeakers on the other hand sound like music coming out of a couple of boxes. Not only can't they duplicate the size and subjective power (not loudness) of the real instrument, they cannot reproduce its timbre either, no matter what the frequency response is. When you get to the reflectivity and size of a concert hall, you are in two entirely different worlds between the sound of live music and sound from loudspeakers. Bose 901 obviously radiates sound very differently from the way other loudspeakers do. Its directional properties have more in common with most musical instruments than other loudspeakers (with a couple of exceptions such as a guitar and a human voice) although there are still important differences. It was the only serious effort I know of to overcome these discrepencies but its capabilities in this regard are limited. It's frequency response is far from flat. It cannot IMO reproduce the top octave of sound which is extremely important if your hearing has not been impaired and you are a critical listener. It's low frequency output has an irregular response. Without careful re-engineering, these shortcomings cannot be overcome. Even the skill to install them optimally within what they are capable of is beyond what many who owned them are able to do either because of physical limitations of their room or because they did not follow instructions. And of course they cannot possibly in any way compensate for the vast difference between what the acoustics of concert halls do to sound and what the home listening room does to it, both because most of what the audience hears is not captured on recordings and because a single pair of loudspeakers of any type cannot create the kind of sound fields heard live no matter what signal is fed to them or what sound field emerges from them.

I have not commented on installing these speakers as sound sources for a movie theater because this problem is entirely different from home reproduction of live music and is of no interest to me. You will notice from the photos in the pdf file that the speakers are not used in the direct/reflecting mode recommended for home use, they are largely used as direct radiators. I have used these speakers as a starting platform to design a sound system which attempts to recreate the sound of musical instruments as they would be heard if they were in my room based on an unpublished mathematical model I developed myself about 35 years ago. (it is not a pulsating sphere.) Even knowing exactly what to do, it took me over 3 years to get it right and tuned to the room it is in and it has to be adjusted carefully for each recording to take the differences in the way recordings are made into account. This is also not easy as it sometimes requires trials of dozens of different equalization curves that can span a period of months to come close to what I think a particular instrument should sound like from any given recording if I get there at all. Also one critical factor often overlooked, for accurate sound reproduction, the recording has to be played at the correct loudness. But when it's right....wow. After a couple of years I just got very close to the sound of the Steinway D as I imagine it would sound from the recording on RCA 09026-68911-2 Evgeny Kissin. His performance of the Busoni arrangement of the Bach Chaconne is nothing short of stunning. The Steinway D he performed it on is a stupendous instrument. Small wonder when you hear one live or something close to what it should sound like that such an instrument justifies its sales price of around $90,000, yet most serious classical pianists will perform on nothing else. (The Baldwin SD-10 is its only widely used serious competitor I know of and sells for around a mere $60,000. It typically has a distinctly different sonic profile from the Steinway and is even more brilliant.)

For some reason I will never understand, discussion of Bose 901 often starts all kinds of crazy flame wars. I'm glad to see it doesn't happen here. To me, it is merely one more machine I encounter in my life. Whatever it is or isn't, it's not something I can get particularly excited about. Even music itself which I enjoy as much as anyone doesn't arouse passions in me.

BTW Tom, about the Bose litigation with Consumer reports, as I recall, Consumer Reports claimed Bose 901 made a piano sound like it is 8 feet wide and Bose sued and I think won against this assertion. The fact is, my Baldwin Acrosonic spinnet pianos which radiate sound indirectly are about 5 feet wide like all spinnets, my Steinway M is 5'-7", the Steinway D is 8'-9" wide, and the Baldwin SD-10 is 9'-6" wide. Unless you are in line of sight of the strings, harp, or sounding board, a grand piano is also entirely an indirect radiator although if the cover is propped open, you will hear some of the first bounce off of it. In concert halls, often the cover is removed entirely. If Bose 901 makes a piano sound 8 feet wide, maybe it's because that is what it is supposed to do. It also raises the distinct possibility that neither Dr. Bose, the people at Consumers Reports, nor the Judge in the case had ever actually seen a real grand piano. And BTW, the recordings of solo violins including the literally priceless Heifetz Guanari del Jesu do not sound on my system like they are any larger than a real one does. Violins also happen to be almost entirely indirect radiators. Prove it for yourself at a musical instrument store by bowing an electric violin with the amplifier turned off. That feeble sound you hear is the direct field by itself.

[Carlspeak]

So, from what I gather from Soundminded, my assertion that the reason Bose never published anechoic test chamber results was precisely because of the lack of reflections in that chamber which this loudspeaker must rely on to yield it's proper response back to the listener (or test mic).

[soundminded]

So, from what I gather from Soundminded, my assertion that the reason Bose never published anechoic test chamber results was precisely because of the lack of reflections in that chamber which this loudspeaker must rely on to yield it's proper response back to the listener (or test mic).

I am only guessing at why Bose didn't choose to publish data, I have no way of actually knowing but I'd say it was because they probably felt it was not indicative of what performance would be like in use and would only serve to confuse prospective customers. Anechoic chamber measurements are generally not complete rarely giving polar response measurements adequate for even someone trained to correlate them with expected performance in a given room. I've given considerable thought to this problem myself and it is a very complex one. I wouldn't have published such data were I in their shoes either. To the hobbyist the results would not only look poor but would not in any way demonstrate the unique qualities which differentiated this speaker system from all others.

[tysontom]

Hi Tom. It's interesting your interest has turned to Bose.

I posed a question to Soundminded recently http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/IP.Boar...amp;#entry74711 (posts #7 &9), regarding anechoic testing of this novel loudspeaker design. However, I'm not sure he answered it. I had an ongoing debate on another forum regarding this question but couldn't find an ally. Some just stuck by their contention that the only standard test is the anechoic test and the 901 should be able to be fairly tested.

Just wondered after reading the HIrsch review (no anechoic data there either - can't seem to find any anywhere) if my theory on anechoic testing of the 901's is a fair test considering the speakers reliance on highly reflective dispersion of the sound in a non-reflective environment test chamber.

Your thoughts?

Hello Carl,

Sorry about the delay in answering your post. Well, the interest in the Bose 901 is just all part of the grand scheme of things -- really to understand more about some of these designs that have been famous, yet controversial over the years. As you know, I tend to lean towards the history-aspect of audio, and Bose certainly has a rich history.

You basically open a can of worms when you mention anechoic-chamber testing of a speaker such as the Bose 901. Free-field or anechoic testing is certainly definitive in determining the on-axis frequency response in an echo-free environment, and this measurement is a vital part of speaker measurement. If you recall, Edgar Villchur never attempted to measure the frequency response of an entire AR speaker system in an enechoic chamber; he always measured each individual driver on- and off-axis in an anechoic chamber, and he measured the woofer's output up to the point of ultimate-radiation resistance by placing the speaker in a hole flush with the ground. He used the original and definitive RETMA (Radio-Electronics-Television Manufacturers Association) Standard SE-103, later changed and updated to and 61 IRE 30.RP1 standard, and subsequently updated further to an IEEE standard used today. The woofer's on and off-axis frequency response and harmonic distortion were measured this way. Ultimately, AR developed the reverberant-test chamber in which a speaker's integrated-frequency response, or acoustic-power response, could be measured. With the advent of 1/3-octave RTA testing, the anechoic chamber became very useful in determining the speaker's performance as a system.

The problem occurs in anechoic measurement that when you measure a speaker's overall frequency response, you will envariably get some diffraction, interference effects and artifact that are not audible in the actual listening environment -- unless you are measuring a speaker that is highly directional and has poor off-axis response. The wider the speaker's off-axis response at the higher frequencies, the more pronounced this effect is in measurment. Using an anechoic chamber will, of course, eliminate the reflection off the floor, walls and ceilling. Gaited in-room fr measurements can replicate this characteristic, of course, but I don't think those measurements quite match the accuracy of an anechoic chamber. "Close enough for government work," as they say.

For Villchur, the main purpose of the anechoic chamber was to be assured that each driver in the system (except the woofer) was as measurably flat on- and off-axis as possible. System tests were done, of course, to work out kinks in the crossover networks. But if each driver measured flat (the drivers were mounted on a flat baffle facing into the anechoic chamber), then the system -- as a whole -- should have reasonably uniform and flat acoustic-power response.

Bose considered that determining a speaker's performance was not so simple as measuring its output at a place in space. For room measurements, the question had to do with "what is the actual output of a speaker in a room without including the room as a part of the calculation?" In Dr. Bose's 1968 AES paper, he said, "Even if we can define an output, how do we measure a loudspeaker designed to operate in a room? The room interferes with the measurement and the loudspeaker radiation changes if we try to measure it in a free field." While a lot of people have identified certain anomolies in the Bose 901's frequency response, such as some peaks and valleys, the system reflects so much energy that most of those anomolies are swamped in the overall output. Even Julian Hirsch, who measured (in-room measurements) some fr issues, he noted that these were not audible.

The question is whether there is a way to truthfully quantify the performance of the Bose 901. No one to date has been able to do it with accepted-measurment standards, yet the speaker has always been considered to be exceptionally accurate and "lifelike" in its spaciousness of sound. It all boils down to Dr. Bose's concept of what you hear in the concert hall and how he perceived speakers should reproduce this effect in a listening room. It's a very complex formula, but Amar Bose was/is an extremely knowlegeable and competant individual, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do with the Bose 901.

--Tom Tyson

[soundminded]

Hi Tom, as always you give us an interesting read.

I was going to mention that Villchur didn't measure his systems as a whole but while I was about 99% sure, I wasn't certain. IMO, the results in the crossover ranges would have looked bad due to constructive and destructive interference which would depend upon what point the microphone was placed in space relative to the speaker. I explained this in my posting about bi-amping and tri-amping on an AR thread in the last couple of days.

I must have read Dr. Bose's paper at least fifty times. IMO he got some things right, some things wrong, and some things right for the wrong reasons. At any rate I found it very interesting. If there is one fact I took away from it, it's that a mere 16 feet from the stage at Boston Symphony Hall the audience hears 89% of the sound coming from reflections and as you go further back in the hall, the percentage of reflected sound increases. Because of the necessity of placing microphones relatively close to musical instruments to make an acceptable stereophonic recording and their directional pickup patterns and for other reasons, it is impossible to capture on a recording what someone in the audience hears. And even if it could be done, it is not possible for a single pair of speakers including Bose 901 to duplicate that sound. The sheer difference in the size of a home listening room alone is reason enough. The volume of a concert hall is typically about 200 to 300 times as large. Time delays and directions of arrival of the reverberant field are entirely different by orders of magnitude. A concert hall is a very special room that usually costs over one hundred million dollars in today's money to build and its success is often hit or miss. A different approach is binaural sound. Understanding why this idea doesn't work gave me great insight into what might.

I'm going to have to disagree with you about flat power radiation. A single driver, especially a tweeter can't simultaneously have both flat on axis frequency response and total flat power radiation unless it beams all of its energy though a tube making it unidirectional or is a pulsating sphere which would have flat power radiation in all directions. That is because as you move off axis, the frequency reponse falls off radiating power that is not flat. The higher the frequency the greater this effect. If the power radiated by a real tweeter were flat, its on axis radiation would have to have a peak. BTW, I don't use this mathematical model as it does not satisfy my criteria.

[Carlspeak]

Check out Robert Harley's glowing review of Wilson Audio's $148,000 Alexandria X-2 loudspeaker in the latest issue of The Absolute Sound. There is an interview with David Wilson, owner and father of the X-2.

My take-away was Mr. Wilson's inspiration for the X-2 was a visit to the Musikverein Concert Hall in Vienna, Austria. He liked it better than the highly touted Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. He seemed to discover that the sound propagated in the first 80 ms was the most important in hearing the color of the instruments. To me, that's a nice story/theory. However, I suspect microphones in concert halls may be recording something a bit longer - at least it's not controllable by the palyback loudspeaker for sure.

p.s. sorry for straying off topic

[tysontom]

Hi Tom, as always you give us an interesting read.

I was going to mention that Villchur didn't measure his systems as a whole but while I was about 99% sure, I wasn't certain. IMO, the results in the crossover ranges would have looked bad due to constructive and destructive interference which would depend upon what point the microphone was placed in space relative to the speaker. I explained this in my posting about bi-amping and tri-amping on an AR thread in the last couple of days.

I must have read Dr. Bose's paper at least fifty times. IMO he got some things right, some things wrong, and some things right for the wrong reasons. At any rate I found it very interesting. If there is one fact I took away from it, it's that a mere 16 feet from the stage at Boston Symphony Hall the audience hears 89% of the sound coming from reflections and as you go further back in the hall, the percentage of reflected sound increases. Because of the necessity of placing microphones relatively close to musical instruments to make an acceptable stereophonic recording and their directional pickup patterns and for other reasons, it is impossible to capture on a recording what someone in the audience hears. And even if it could be done, it is not possible for a single pair of speakers including Bose 901 to duplicate that sound. The sheer difference in the size of a home listening room alone is reason enough. The volume of a concert hall is typically about 200 to 300 times as large. Time delays and directions of arrival of the reverberant field are entirely different by orders of magnitude. A concert hall is a very special room that usually costs over one hundred million dollars in today's money to build and its success is often hit or miss. A different approach is binaural sound. Understanding why this idea doesn't work gave me great insight into what might.

I'm going to have to disagree with you about flat power radiation. A single driver, especially a tweeter can't simultaneously have both flat on axis frequency response and total flat power radiation unless it beams all of its energy though a tube making it unidirectional or is a pulsating sphere which would have flat power radiation in all directions. That is because as you move off axis, the frequency reponse falls off radiating power that is not flat. The higher the frequency the greater this effect. If the power radiated by a real tweeter were flat, its on axis radiation would have to have a peak. BTW, I don't use this mathematical model as it does not satisfy my criteria.

Hello Soundminded,

I agree with you completely about the difficulty of capturing with microphones the sound (for home reproduction) that someone actually hears in a concert hall. If microphones were places well back in the hall, the true ambience of the hall might be captured, but the sound reproduced at home would be seriously muffled and dull, and the recording would be deemed inferior. So there is little choice but to place the microphones close to the performers.

However, in the home listening environment, the aim is not to reproduce the exact sound of the concert hall, but to give the listener the illusion of the concert hall, the space and ambience, etc. The more reflective that sound being reproduced in the listening room, probably the more that illusion is made. It’s the old adage that you don’t want to transport the concert hall to your listening room, but you want the speakers to transport you to the concert hall. Since there is “double reverberation” to some degree once the sound is reproduced at home, the more closely (without too much hall reverberation effect) the performers are miked, the illusion of space can be made with speakers that have wide dispersion and good power response in a listening room. The argument for and against this method of sound reproduction is legion, of course, with many audiophiles feeling that wide dispersion ruins the illusion for them because of, rather than in spite of, the reverberant sound field. These listeners would rather listen to speakers with very directional output (especially throughout the midrange) to avoid the reflections off the floor, ceiling and walls. They want the “image” to be correct and avoid reflections as much as possible, and of course they find themselves sitting in a tiny spot in a listening room with huge speakers toed-in and pointing directly at their heads. This all goes back to my feeling that if you want this sort of illusion, why not just don a pair of really fine headphones and listen to the binaural reproduction as though you were sitting at the conductor’s podium. There are points between, of course, but positions are diametrically opposed when it comes to the process of accurate-sound reproduction in the home.

So, therefore, forget about trying to recreate the actual concert hall in your listening room. It’s certainly not possible. It is the illusion of being there that counts, and I think that speakers such as the AR-LST, Allison: Ones and IC-20, DCM Time Windows, dbx Soundfields, Bose 901s and many others with good acoustic-power response in a listening room come closest to giving the sense of realism.

I hope I did not actually state that a speaker with flat on-axis output and good off-axis power would have “flat” acoustic-power response. I believe that what I said was, “…should have reasonably uniform and flat acoustic-power response.” If that did not come across properly, I meant to indicate that if these drivers were measured in an anechoic chamber, and the output from them was reasonably flat and uniform both on- and off-axis (off-axis up to 60-75° with minimal losses), the speaker as a whole should exhibit reasonably flat and uniform acoustic-power response. Of course, there is going to be significant roll-off in response even in the reverberant field, but the illusion of spaciousness is close to what one might hear in a concert hall. The speakers are certainly do not have flat integrated-frequency response all the way out to the limits of hearing, but are “reasonably” close.

--Tom Tyson

[soundminded]

Couldn't find this review on the internet. I've discounted any and all reviews in hobbyist magazines a long time ago. The high end of this market has become worse than absurd a long time ago. There is no conceivable way this or any other single pair of loudspeakers could fool anyone with normal hearing for even one second into thinking that they were listening to a live musical performance in the Musikverein in Vienna Austria or any other concert hall for that matter.

Interesting about this concert hall, Leo Beranek has a paper he published on his web site in which he compares 59 pf the world's greatest concert halls according to 20 different measured parameters and tries to correlate them with the preferences of around 30 conductors and other golden ears each familiar with some of them. This hall is the most preferred. The two factors which correlate most closely are bass response and Binaural quality index (BQI) which is (1-IACC) or one minus the interaural cross correlation. This is a measure of the difference between left and right lateral reflections reaching each ear as a source moves across the stage. It's a kind of sterophonicity index of early lateral reflections. This led him to conclude that lateral reflections are important, something Dr. Floyd Toole concluded as well. So much for loudspeakers which beam their sound in one direction. Beranek did something similar for around 29 opera houses and found that Buenos Aires is number one. Interestingly, Boston Symphony Hall came in number three among concert halls although in other lectures he personally ranks it number two or tied for number one with Musikverein. He also likes Concertgebow and one he designed himself for Tokyo. He's written quite a lot defending himself over the disaster of Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center he designed (now Avery Fisher Hall.) BTW, he didn't think much of La Scala either.

Based on my own model, there is no satisfactory method of data gathering available to accurately model any concet halls definitively. The state of the art is still too primitive. At least some acousticians have stopped using starter's pistols firing blank shells for testing. It's progress.

IMO, anyone who makes any pretense at designing or evaluating sound systems intended for high accuracy electronic reproduction of music and then tells you about hearing it playing a recording of a pop artist like Dianna Krall as one reviewer Ken Kessler of Hi Fi News did can't possibly be taken seriously. The only valid criteria are comparisons to serious live musicians IMO. That's what AR tried to do with its live versus recorded demonstrations.

[tysontom]

Carl, sorry I strayed off the topic last time, I'll try to give a more coherent answer this time.

BTW Tom, about the Bose litigation with Consumer reports, as I recall, Consumer Reports claimed Bose 901 made a piano sound like it is 8 feet wide and Bose sued and I think won against this assertion. The fact is, my Baldwin Acrosonic spinnet pianos which radiate sound indirectly are about 5 feet wide like all spinnets, my Steinway M is 5'-7", the Steinway D is 8'-9" wide, and the Baldwin SD-10 is 9'-6" wide. Unless you are in line of sight of the strings, harp, or sounding board, a grand piano is also entirely an indirect radiator although if the cover is propped open, you will hear some of the first bounce off of it. In concert halls, often the cover is removed entirely. If Bose 901 makes a piano sound 8 feet wide, maybe it's because that is what it is supposed to do. It also raises the distinct possibility that neither Dr. Bose, the people at Consumers Reports, nor the Judge in the case had ever actually seen a real grand piano. And BTW, the recordings of solo violins including the literally priceless Heifetz Guanari del Jesu do not sound on my system like they are any larger than a real one does. Violins also happen to be almost entirely indirect radiators. Prove it for yourself at a musical instrument store by bowing an electric violin with the amplifier turned off. That feeble sound you hear is the direct field by itself.

Hi Soundminded,

Consumer Reports, in their comments on the Bose 901, said, "For instance, a violin appeared to be 10 feet wide and a piano stretched from wall to wall." So your argument about the size of the Concert D grand piano might not be quite to the point. What the CR listeners were saying was that it was harder to pinpoint the location of various instruments with the 901 than with conventional loudspeakers, and that individual instruments tended to grow to gigantic proportions and wander about the room. This is what got Bose, and they felt that the magazine was disparaging their speaker. Bose then sued and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court in the mid-1980s before a decision was reached in favor of Consumer Reports. I believe that the Bose and Suzuki were the only companies ever to win litigation against CR, but I think that possibly (definitely in the Bose case) both cases were reversed.

--Tom Tyson

[Carlspeak]

Couldn't find this review on the internet......

Yes, you couldn't find it because it is a brand new issue and typically, new issues aren't posted to the net for awhile to encourage folks to buy or subscribe. So, if your curiosity gets the best of you, you may want ot consider forking over some $ to buy or borrow one or, visit a Barnes&Noble with a Starbucks, get a coffee and sit for awhile and read it for free!

[tysontom]

Hi Tom. It's interesting your interest has turned to Bose.

I posed a question to Soundminded recently http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/IP.Boar...amp;#entry74711 (posts #7 &9), regarding anechoic testing of this novel loudspeaker design. However, I'm not sure he answered it. I had an ongoing debate on another forum regarding this question but couldn't find an ally. Some just stuck by their contention that the only standard test is the anechoic test and the 901 should be able to be fairly tested.

Carl,

During this discussion I received an interesting message from a friend of mine who was a former Product Manager at Bose. Although we have been discussing (on this forum) what we believe to be the technical reasons for not publishing anechoic-response curves on the Bose 901, this message addresses your question regarding anechoic testing from a practical and marketing/sales aspect:

___________________

I’d like to shed a little insider’s view on Bose and why they didn’t publish (and as far as I know, still don’t) FR curves. I was a Product Manager at Bose in the early ‘90’s, intimately involved with all the design and Marketing decisions for their entire home speaker line and the Radio. We got a lot of mail and warranty cards from customers, and a frequent question was why didn’t Bose publish Frequency Response curves and other generally-accepted loudspeaker data?

There were several reasons.

First, the Direct/Reflecting design of their speakers—from the little 201, right on up to the twistable “cubes” (the AM-5’s) and the top-of-the-line 901’s—didn’t lend themselves to a ‘neat’, impressive FR curve. So rather than publish something that didn’t look as good as, say, AR, Bose opted to not publish them at all, because achieving flat anechoic FR curves was not their design target. Bose did perform internal FR tests on the individual radiators in order to determine their suitability for a particular task, their reliability, etc. But Bose felt the data from those tests were not germane to the end customer.

The second—and far larger—reason gets back to something I spoke to you about several years ago regarding any given company’s marketing philosophy. There are some 400 brands of speakers in the U.S. market, and probably 1000 brands world-wide. Most of these companies fight for the ever-dwindling “audiophile/enthusiast” market, which may be only 5% of the total number of customers for A-V home entertainment systems.

So while 399 U.S brands fight over 5% of the market (publishing fancy FR curves, touting exotic tweeter materials, or crossover topologies with ‘magic’ capacitors, or esoteric cabinet designs, etc.), Bose eschews all that nonsense and markets their products towards the other 95% of the market—the average person who just wants good sound and doesn’t know (or care about) the difference between a choke and a cap. Technical mumbo-jumbo doesn’t help sell their products to the “other” 95%.

The disconnect, so to speak, comes when the "5%" Classic Speakers Forum enthusiasts want to know the technical info about Bose products and holds them to the same standard of “disclosure” as other brands.

It’s not going to happen. Never has, never will. Bose looks at the “95-5% question” and arrives at their strategy accordingly (and obviously). This was never explicitly stated internally at Bose, but it was implied VERY, VERY strongly.

______________________

This message demonstrates that there are practical reasons for marketing products a certain way, and whether we agree or disagree, there can be no question as to the success of Bose Corporation. I read somewhere that Bose ended this year with 2.8 Billion in sales, placing them second only to Sony in this field. I personally feel that another reason for Bose's continued success is the policy of reinvesting most, if not all, of after-tax profits into Research and Development. Few companies ever reinvest that much into R&D, and it is usually measured as a percent of actual annual revenues, not profits.

--Tom Tyson

[soundminded]

Carl, If I was really curious about the Wilson Alexandria 2s I'd go hear them. I've gone to hear so many "jaw dropping" breakthroughs in my life that by now you'd think they'd have the cellist sitting in my lap. These speakers cost more than some houses but even by the account of one reviewer on their own web site, they sound like speakers. Over a hundred years of effort during a time when knowledge and technology has exploded in every field, the best they can do is still make sound that appears to be coming out of a box. What does that say about the state of the art of knowledge in this field? Considering that the implied claim is that they should sound like a reasonable facsimile of actual musical instruments it doesn't say much for it IMO. And what does it say about the reviewers who laud it and the market which buys it?

Tom, a grand piano is not a point source of sound. It doesn't sound like a point source of sound. If a speaker makes it sound like a point source, that is a bad distortion of it IMO. Part of the perceived power of the instrument is that it sounds big. I've lived with Bose 901 for nearly 40 years. I've never heard it make a violin sound 8 feet wide. Between vinyl phonograph records and CDs I probably have over 2000 violin recordings (I've got the complete Heiftez collection on both vinyl and cd.) I've given considerable thought to the perception of directionality and subjective judgements about size and power of musical instruments. (I've concluded there is more to it than first arrival, slight differences in loudness and differences in spectral balance but I'm not prepared to say what else is critical) One factor in localization that is known however is the role of high frequencies. This is an area I feel I have justly criticized Bose 901 for, its inability to reproduce most of the top octave of sound adequately. This can lead to some problems in directionality but not to the degree Consumer Reports said (I've been a subscriber to Consumer Reports on and off for many years myself.) It's easy to demonstrate that percussion and string instruments are multidirectional radiators whose sound arrives from many directions in rapid succession making subjective localization sometimes less than immediately pinpoint. Horns are slightly less obvious. While the sound emerging from a horn (reed and brass instruments) is highly directional, it is rarely if ever pointed at the audience. It is usually directed diagonally downard although in some cases upwards like a tuba or sideways away from the audience like a french horn. Therfore in most cases, horns are from the audience's point of view indirect radiators. In the rare cases a horn is pointed at the audience, those in line with it will often find it makes an unpleasant blaring sound.

I do not understand the obsession audiophiles have with this pinpoint directionality they look for in what they call imaging. This is not one of the four principal elements of music (melody, harmony, tonality, and rhythm.) The question I asked myself when I began experimenting is why is it important to reproduce the sound of musical instruments accurately? My answer is that real musical instruments have beautiful tonalities that are a joy to listen to. I've only heard comercially sold speakers reproduce musical sounds accurately twice and those were the two AR live versus recorded demonstrations I attended. I wonder how I would react to the same demonstration today now that my critical listening accuity has become so much sharper. Yet in reproducing commercially made recordings, AR3 did not demonstrate the same qualities it had in the highly contrived deomonstratons. It strikes me that the usually muffled sometimes muddy sounding speakers of the 1960s and 1970s have given way to speakers that sound typically thin and shrill today. All of those I heard recently were terrible and to my ears sounded nothing like the real thing I hear live almost every day. I'll put the results of my efforts up against anyone's but I haven't figured out how to make any money out of it yet. My last effort which was patented was at first ignored and then infringed upon in less than five years. Lawyers told me not to waste my time or money sueing. Now I have another patent attorney who wants me to repeat what is possibly the same mistake again. I'm not sure his advice is the best plan.

[Carlspeak]

A very interesting disclosure from the former Bose Marketing guy. It fully supports my position taken in the discussion at the first link below regarding the potential for the 901 to fail a standard anechoic response test miserably. Hence, Bose's resultant strategy.

Was pleased to see that Bose understands the rules of surviival in a rapidly changing technological marketplace. R&D is where the future is. I worked in R&D once and fully understand. Wish my former employer put as much of their profit back into the business as Bose. If it hit 2% of sales that was a lot.

http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=38446

Below link is direct to a site which trashes Bose pretty bad from the perspective of the 'flat frequency response if everything' school of thought.

http://www.intellexual.net/bose.html

I find it somewhat ironic with regard to AR and Bose's similar practice of measuring driver performance but not disclosing total system response performance. I can't recall AR's reason since the 3a is a direct radiator type of loudspeaker. Help here Tom?

[dingus]

... I do not understand the obsession audiophiles have with this pinpoint directionality they look for in what they call imaging. This is not one of the four principal elements of music (melody, harmony, tonality, and rhythm ...

very true, but studio recordings are typically engineered to image and lots of folks really like that characteristic of sound. personally think imaging is nice if you have it, but kind of gimmicky. it is not necessary for me to enjoy a recording and i dont factor imaging when assessing the abilities of a system.

[soundminded]

I'm not sure what relevance the review of the acoustimass surround system has to 901. I've heard it on several occasions including at a Bose store in a shopping mall. In its most expensive version it incorporates automatic digital equalization to compensate for the room it's in but as I expected it still fails to reproduce the highest octave satisfactorily. I'm surprised the measurements show any output above 10 khz at all. A 3" cone speaker still has too much inertia for and is too large to be a good tweeter.

The thread started out as the typical Bose bashing you see on many consumer audio web sites but there are two useful links, one to the Stereophile review written by Gordon Holt in 1975 and the other is Julian Hirsch's origially published in Stereo Review Magazine in the late 1960s. Both make interesting points.

Gordon Holt's criticisms are interesting. He found the same bass resonance I found and reported by other reviewers such as e/e magazine. This is now easily managed using a graphic equalizer to nullify it. Hirsch found some other midrange FR anomolies which are also managable with equalization. Gordon Holt made the point that the drivers have too much inertia to reproduce the highest octave. I agree and that is why I had to re-engineer them. Optimal correction is not a simple matter and by my criteria has to be adjusted not only to the characteristics of the speakers but to the room. That's one reason why it took me so long. He also cites some "imaging" problems with certain placement and "loss of detail." I agree with him that if the speakers are placed too far apart this can cause a problem as it can with any speaker. As for loss of detail, I disagree with him there, I ascribe that to inadequate high frequency reproduction. His criticism that the equalizer is too extreme is frankly an invalid conclusion. The equalizer provides 18db of boost at 30 hz and a lesser boost at high frequencies. RIAA and NAB by comparison provide a 20 db boost at extreme low frequencies and a 20 db cut at extremely high frequencies. this is a 40 db range which is approximately 100 + times greater than the 901 equalizer. Precision equalization is an accepted signal processing tool for many applications in electronics and is accepted by electrical engineers unquestioningly even if audiophile purists have been baptized to loathe it. That is their problem. What they often fail to recognize is that not only are their phongraph records recorded and played back with equalization, there are many other steps in the analog recording process they love so much which also requires equalization. Both the master and mixdown tapes require one NAB on recording and one on playback each. And if the recording was made using Dolby A professional, there are four more on recording and four on playback including filters to separate the signal into different passbands and the degree of equalization is controlled by the instantaneous signal strength so the gain is nonlinear. So not counting the deliberate equalizations made by the recording engineer on his mixing console, there are at least 14 equalizations applied to a signal between a microphone and the output of a phono preamp for a modern vinyl record.

Hirsch's tone burst tests show the drivers work excellently over a wide range. Like the rest of the system, they are very high quality. The quality of build is as good as any consumer product of its day, the equalizer using many 1% and 5% parts on a glass epoxy circuit board. Harmonic distortion is very low at low frequencies where most loudspeaker systems of that era ane even today fail to respond at all (7% at 20 hz, 12% at 30 hz.) However, IMO the bass requires further equalization for really deep bass and in single pairs even with enormous power available from modern high power amps its maximum undistorted bass output is limited compared to say AR9. OTOH, in multiples they can achieve whatever is required for a given size room and output level if you have enough of them and enough amplifier power. Since they sell for around $200 used and are often in good to excellent condition, that is also not a problem.

[tysontom]

A very interesting disclosure from the former Bose Marketing guy. It fully supports my position taken in the discussion at the first link below regarding the potential for the 901 to fail a standard anechoic response test miserably. Hence, Bose's resultant strategy.

Was pleased to see that Bose understands the rules of surviival in a rapidly changing technological marketplace. R&D is where the future is. I worked in R&D once and fully understand. Wish my former employer put as much of their profit back into the business as Bose. If it hit 2% of sales that was a lot.

I find it somewhat ironic with regard to AR and Bose's similar practice of measuring driver performance but not disclosing total system response performance. I can't recall AR's reason since the 3a is a direct radiator type of loudspeaker. Help here Tom?

Carl,

As you know, both the Bose 901 and AR-3/AR-3a-type systems are wide-dispersion, reverberent-field loudspeakers. The Bose does it, of course, by reflecting 89% of its output back against the front wall thus widely dispersing into the listening environment; the AR-3/AR-3a through small-diameter dome tweeters with wide dispersion. You just can't measure the "system" frequency response of a loudspeaker like this without horrendous interference effects and cabinet diffraction, etc. There is considerable crossover overlap on the AR-3/AR-3a (absent in the non-crossover Bose 901, of course) which causes lobing and irregularities in the response curve. Before gaited-measurement or computerized system-measurement instruments were available, response curves were attempted by many reviewers but these measurement showed trememdous variations in response -- even in an anechoic chamber -- such that just a slight rearrangement of the measurement-microphone position would change the frequency and location of all the peaks and valleys. This type of measurement is basically useless unless you were to measure the drivers individually and splice the curves together: this would give some idea of the overall system frequency-response capability. On the other hand, 1/3-octave anechoic measurements of system response is very useful; and before that, the reverberant-chamber integrated-frequency response (acoustic-power response) was very important and exhibited the speaker's true acoustic output. After 1966, AR began to publish the integrated-power response curves on its speakers, such as the AR-3a, AR-5, AR-LST, etc., and these curves were in the AR literature. Each of these curves was a combination of the 2Pi woofer curves (outdoors free-field measurements) spliced with the acoustic-power reverb-chamber curves.

Although AR published its objective-test measurement results, I think that Amar Bose chose not to for the reasons that he gave in his AES paper. He obviously quantified the performance of the individual drivers and the system configuration during the development of the 901, and he designed a sophisticated equalization network that compensated for a lack of deep bass in the system and roll-off in the treble, based on his studies and concert-hall acoustics as well as average room acoustics. But as the Bose Product Manager stated, he was not interested in making a statement as to measured fr curves and accuracy (and then spend the rest of his life defending it), but rather wanted to make a speaker with great realism and spaciousness that replicated the experience one has in a concert hall, and clearly he was very successful in doing that.

As for Bose's reinvestment in R&D, it is true that most companies just don't put enough back into research. I nevertheless think it is amazing that Amar Bose established a policy (after all, it is a private company!) of reinvesting all of the after-tax profits back into Research and Development. Hewlett-Packard Company reinvested as much as 10-12% of total revenues (the standard way of computing reinvestment) back into R&D during 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and well into the 1990s. This resulted in some of the world's highest-quality products and innovative electronic-product development (examples: the Ceisium-Beam World-Standard Clock and the HP35 hand-held calculator that obsoleted the slide rule), and thousands of patents that came out of HP clearly show the important of large R&D expenditures. Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett were the principle stock holders at HP, and they set the policy of designing products "that would make a contribution" and of reinvesting heavily in R&D. Today, both co-founders have pass on, but HP has grown with this research tradition into the world's largest computer company with 2008 revenues of 113 Billion dollars, passing IBM by several year back. R&D reinvestment is no longer in the 10% range, but closer to 4-5%, which is still a huge sum of money (compared with the other large PC company, for example, with perhaps 1/2 of 1% reivestment in R&D). That Bose puts such a huge sum into research is probably the reason the company has survived to become such a successful electronics company over the years.

--Tom Tyson

[tysontom]

Carl,

During this discussion I received an interesting message from a friend of mine who was a former Product Manager at Bose. Although we have been discussing (on this forum) what we believe to be the technical reasons for not publishing anechoic-response curves on the Bose 901, this message addresses your question regarding anechoic testing from a practical and marketing/sales aspect:

___________________

I’d like to shed a little insider’s view on Bose and why they didn’t publish (and as far as I know, still don’t) FR curves. I was a Product Manager at Bose in the early ‘90’s, intimately involved with all the design and Marketing decisions for their entire home speaker line and the Radio. We got a lot of mail and warranty cards from customers, and a frequent question was why didn’t Bose publish Frequency Response curves and other generally-accepted loudspeaker data?

There were several reasons.

First, the Direct/Reflecting design of their speakers—from the little 201, right on up to the twistable “cubes” (the AM-5’s) and the top-of-the-line 901’s—didn’t lend themselves to a ‘neat’, impressive FR curve. So rather than publish something that didn’t look as good as, say, AR, Bose opted to not publish them at all, because achieving flat anechoic FR curves was not their design target. Bose did perform internal FR tests on the individual radiators in order to determine their suitability for a particular task, their reliability, etc. But Bose felt the data from those tests were not germane to the end customer.

The second—and far larger—reason gets back to something I spoke to you about several years ago regarding any given company’s marketing philosophy. There are some 400 brands of speakers in the U.S. market, and probably 1000 brands world-wide. Most of these companies fight for the ever-dwindling “audiophile/enthusiast” market, which may be only 5% of the total number of customers for A-V home entertainment systems.

So while 399 U.S brands fight over 5% of the market (publishing fancy FR curves, touting exotic tweeter materials, or crossover topologies with ‘magic’ capacitors, or esoteric cabinet designs, etc.), Bose eschews all that nonsense and markets their products towards the other 95% of the market—the average person who just wants good sound and doesn’t know (or care about) the difference between a choke and a cap. Technical mumbo-jumbo doesn’t help sell their products to the “other” 95%.

The disconnect, so to speak, comes when the "5%" Classic Speakers Forum enthusiasts want to know the technical info about Bose products and holds them to the same standard of “disclosure” as other brands.

It’s not going to happen. Never has, never will. Bose looks at the “95-5% question” and arrives at their strategy accordingly (and obviously). This was never explicitly stated internally at Bose, but it was implied VERY, VERY strongly.

______________________

This message demonstrates that there are practical reasons for marketing products a certain way, and whether we agree or disagree, there can be no question as to the success of Bose Corporation. I read somewhere that Bose ended this year with 2.8 Billion in sales, placing them second only to Sony in this field. I personally feel that another reason for Bose's continued success is the policy of reinvesting most, if not all, of after-tax profits into Research and Development. Few companies ever reinvest that much into R&D, and it is usually measured as a percent of actual annual revenues, not profits.

--Tom Tyson

From my friend, a former Product Manager at Bose, I have received some additional very interesting comments on that company's marketing stragegy and ultimate success in the market place:

_____________________

No question that Bose's corporate strategy is solid. They're the only major speaker company that focuses on doing business in a legitimate corporate fashion: They analyze the market, ascertain what customers want, how customers use the product, what features/performance are or are not important to the majority of their target market, they anticipate future trends, not only in their own industry, but also in the consumer products industry as a whole and in society at large.

The AM-5 of 1987 was the perfect example: it tapped into the unspoken desire by customers for good sound without large boxy speakers that ruined the home’s décor. They were “cool.” The twisting cubes became an icon. Internally, at Bose, this is the product that catapulted them to a new level. Everything there is thought of as “before the AM-5” or “after the AM-5.”

While all the other speaker companies were tripping over each other trying to come up with, as we used to say at Bose, “the metal of the month” (in reference to the silly ‘race’ among competitors to promote titanium or anodized aluminum or beryllium or whatever), Bose successfully targeted the mainstream market and became a household name. Ask the average person on the street who makes the best speakers and 95% of the answers will be “Bose.”

Aside from that 5% enthusiast market I spoke about, do you think anyone has ever heard of Polk, Boston Acoustics, Energy? I doubt it. JBL? Maybe. Klipsch? Possibly, but only vaguely. And those are the ‘big guys.’

How about Monitor Audio? Triad? Revel? Vandersteen? Be serious. These companies all make fine products and hopefully they’re successful and profitable in their own small way, but they’ll never be Bose. Yet Bose started out as small as anyone, a little private venture by an MIT professor and his leading student, and it’s grown to what it is because they had vision, a sense of the overall market scope that exceeded just the technical aspect of the product.

This is the important point, the key to Bose’s success: Bose identifies the outcome that people want, then Bose makes the product that delivers that outcome, then Bose advertises that they can deliver the OUTCOME, not the product/process. The product/process is incidental; it’s the OUTCOME that counts.

People didn’t want little plastic twisty-cube speakers; they wanted great sound without huge boxes: the AM-5 and its successors deliver that OUTCOME.

People didn’t want a pair of expensive headphones; they wanted peace and quiet on an airline flight. The Bose Quiet Comfort headphones deliver that OUTCOME.

People didn’t want an expensive clock-radio-CD unit; they wanted a good-sounding way to play their albums and listen to the radio without a bulky, expensive, ugly stack of “Tokyo-by-night’ electronics that only an engineer could operate. The Wave Radio and Music System deliver that OUTCOME.

The iPOD is another perfect example. It delivers the OUTCOME that people want: easily-accessible, easily-portable entertainment. No one knows or cares about the technical aspects of the iPOD; it’s the OUTCOME that it delivers that’s important.

If you think about it, Bose is a hugely successful company that just happens to make audio products. Their business model of identifying underlying consumer wants and desires, re-investing profits into R&D, creating “pull-through” demand with effective, brand-building advertising, these are the moves that all great consumer-goods companies make.

It’s outcome that matters, not the product/process—if you want your company to grow and become accepted by the general population. Small hobbyist-oriented companies are fine, and there’s a market for them too. But don’t denigrate Bose for being successful at what it’s trying to do. Believe me, if they wanted to make the world’s best tweeter, they could.

________________________

--Tom Tyson

[soundminded]

Bose Corporation can be used as a case study in any business school on how to start and grow a successful small business from practically nothing into a huge successful enterprise starting with a single idea backed with great technical expertise. You can't help wonder if many people are simply jealous of Dr. Bose's business success. Dr. Bose's flagship product, his 901 has been around in 6 incarnations for about 40 years. I can't think of any other product of its type in the consumer electronics industry that has stayed on the market for so long. Like many manufacturers, Bose began offering less expensive products which to a degree exploited some of the same ideas but with less sophistication and at a lower cost. These were the 501 and 301. This appealed to a wider market. But the real change came with 901 series III which clearly diverged from what could have remained an effort to produce state of the art products to one which had wider market appeal. He did this through modest technical compromise but altered the balance of profits. With 901 series I and II you bought a $500 pair of speakers and needed a $1500 amplifier. By series IV you bought a $1500 speaker and needed a $500 amplifier. He also took control of all manufacturing elements no longer relying on an outside source for his drivers and made his speaker enclosure of injection molded plastic. This created uniformity not obtainable with wood enclosures. The success of his stereo speaker business allowed him to branch out into related fields small easy to use products and home theater. The AM 5 represented realization that there were more areas of the market to be exploited with innovative products. In my own limited dealings with Bose Corporation, they have demonstrated a degree of quality customer service unsurpassed by anyone. When I discussed resealing my cabinets they said that they considered series I to be unrepairable but offered me a 50% discount on a trade in for a series VI not even asking for proof that I was the original customer. (I declined.) After 35 years I consider that rather remarkable. While there are larger companies in consumer electronics, Harman Industries for example, Bose is unique for its size in being privately owned. There are no shareholders to account to. This gives Bose complete flexibility in running his business according to his own judgement even if it means that at times the P&L statements are not as rosy as shareholders might demand from one quarter to another.

While the flagship 901 didn't evolve into a more modern state of the art product, there were enough good ideas in it to further develop it independently into something far superior. It wasn't an issue of money, it was one of trial and error based on a theory. It happened that 901 leant itself best to this conceptual model. I looked at the original Wilson Alexandria and the Von Schweikert VR-11, both costing well over $100,000 and was able to identify most of the drivers in both of them. I estimated that I could build reasonable functional facsimiles of either of them using similar drivers from the same manufacturers for less than $10,000, possibly less than $5000 for a pair of either of them but they did not fit my model nearly as well. As for building my on version of 901 series 1, I'm not so sure about that. Maybe but is is as simple as it looks or is that deceptive? There certainly are a large number of high quality 4" full range drivers available, some for very little money and equalizers are now very inexpensive and widely available. But why bother when there are so many old 901s in good condition still on the market for so little money already.

[tysontom]

Bose Corporation can be used as a case study in any business school on how to start and grow a successful small business from practically nothing into a huge successful enterprise starting with a single idea backed with great technical expertise. You can't help wonder if many people are simply jealous of Dr. Bose's business success. Dr. Bose's flagship product, his 901 has been around in 6 incarnations for about 40 years. I can't think of any other product of its type in the consumer electronics industry that has stayed on the market for so long. Like many manufacturers, Bose began offering less expensive products which to a degree exploited some of the same ideas but with less sophistication and at a lower cost. These were the 501 and 301. This appealed to a wider market. But the real change came with 901 series III which clearly diverged from what could have remained an effort to produce state of the art products to one which had wider market appeal. He did this through modest technical compromise but altered the balance of profits. With 901 series I and II you bought a $500 pair of speakers and needed a $1500 amplifier. By series IV you bought a $1500 speaker and needed a $500 amplifier. He also took control of all manufacturing elements no longer relying on an outside source for his drivers and made his speaker enclosure of injection molded plastic. This created uniformity not obtainable with wood enclosures. The success of his stereo speaker business allowed him to branch out into related fields small easy to use products and home theater. The AM 5 represented realization that there were more areas of the market to be exploited with innovative products. In my own limited dealings with Bose Corporation, they have demonstrated a degree of quality customer service unsurpassed by anyone. When I discussed resealing my cabinets they said that they considered series I to be unrepairable but offered me a 50% discount on a trade in for a series VI not even asking for proof that I was the original customer. (I declined.) After 35 years I consider that rather remarkable. While there are larger companies in consumer electronics, Harman Industries for example, Bose is unique for its size in being privately owned. There are no shareholders to account to. This gives Bose complete flexibility in running his business according to his own judgement even if it means that at times the P&L statements are not as rosy as shareholders might demand from one quarter to another.

While the flagship 901 didn't evolve into a more modern state of the art product, there were enough good ideas in it to further develop it independently into something far superior. It wasn't an issue of money, it was one of trial and error based on a theory. It happened that 901 leant itself best to this conceptual model. I looked at the original Wilson Alexandria and the Von Schweikert VR-11, both costing well over $100,000 and was able to identify most of the drivers in both of them. I estimated that I could build reasonable functional facsimiles of either of them using similar drivers from the same manufacturers for less than $10,000, possibly less than $5000 for a pair of either of them but they did not fit my model nearly as well. As for building my on version of 901 series 1, I'm not so sure about that. Maybe but is is as simple as it looks or is that deceptive? There certainly are a large number of high quality 4" full range drivers available, some for very little money and equalizers are now very inexpensive and widely available. But why bother when there are so many old 901s in good condition still on the market for so little money already.

Soundminded,

I have to admit that you delivered an eloquent comment about Bose's ultimate success in the market place! The evolution of the 901 was particularly well described, and I think you are exactly right about the longevity of the 901: there probably isn't anything close to this product with respect to its place in the market. I remember that Henry Kloss used to brag about the success of the original KLH Model Six; later he bragged that The Advent Loudspeaker was the most widely sold loudspeaker in history, or something to that effect, but I believe the Bose 901 long-since supassed any (audiophile or audio-quality loudspeaker) with regard to total numbers sold. I'll have to ask my Product-Manager friend about that statistic. I don't think Bose brags about it, but I can't think of any other product that has endured for so long. You also hit the nail on the head with regard to production processes of using molded-plastic for cabinets and drivers, thus insuring greater consistency and reliability. Incidentally, the new 901 VI series is compatible with amplifiers rated from 10-450 watts (the original and Series II versions were rated for 270 watts) and can safely handle more power than the original series, yet is more efficient requiring less amplifier power.

Bose has always backed their products well. I once bought an Acoustic Wave Music System from Bose at one of their Road Shows, and it was a refurburbished model at a good discount. The system worked well, but the CD player kept causing problems, so I contact them and they sent me a return label to send it back to Bose. It was repaired, and when I got it back, the same problem reappeared. I contacted them again, and they said that a brand-new AWMS was on the way to me, and to simply return the bad one, no questions asked. This is sort of the way AR used to conduct business (I had an AR Amplifier replaced for a similar reason), and it is pretty much the way Bose has always conducted business. Customers are almost universally satisfied with this company's customer-service polilicies.

I think you are right about the success of the company enabling it to develop new technologies, and a great example is simply the Acoustic Wave technology (mentioned above) developed in the mid-1980s. The AWMS, which isn't necessarily described as "high fidelity," nevertheless brings high-quality sound and excellent bass extension (considering the small enclosure) in a very small package -- easily good enough for the vast majority of people. I bought mine originally to have a system to take with me when I was traveling, and it worked well for that purpose. Good headphones and an iPod helped obsolete the AWMS for my needs, but there are many people who use them simply as their music system. The table-radio version has sold widely, too. The sound was clear and clean, if not quite audiophile quality, but nevertheless impressive for such a small system.

--Tom Tyson

[Carlspeak]

I think TT's and Soundminded's comments regarding Bose's success in the last few posts support my signature line to a tee

"IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MUSIC"