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Maybe HFSG is really Corey Greenberg having fun. It's got to be something like that. There's no way anybody could really be as weird and worthless in real life. I'm sure there's a joke behind this ..... or something genuinely malevolent.I'm ready to see pictures too. Show us you are for real.
just keeps getting funnier.
Here is my take on the Bose 901 speakers, lifted directly from my 1983 Audio Basics newletter set.Design advantages: This type of system can, if properly located, produce a large and pleasing sound field on some types of music.Design disadvantages: One cannot “turn off” the large sound field on music inappropriate for this (such as a solo voice in a small room). We would also suggest there may be flaws in the logic supporting the claims for the desirability of a system with substantial “reflected” output. One could point out that if we took the orchestra outside, and recorded it playing on an open flat field and then played the recording back in our home on a “reflecting” speaker system that created a “concert hall sound field,” that we would then have a concert hall sound that did not exist. Although you may like this, it is a departure from the reality of the acoustic environment of the recording.Another disadvantage is that many reflecting speakers, including the 901, are designed for active equalization. The raw system frequency response is down substantially at both high and low frequencies. The designers claim to overcome this by supplying with the system an active frequency equalization circuit, which, it is claimed, shapes the signal to the power amplifier to compensate for the raw response of the system, thus giving satisfactorily flat response.The “catch” to this design technique is that for each 3 dB boost in acoustic output (an increase barely audible by most people) a doubling of amplifier power is required. Thus, if the boost at 20 and 20,000 Hz was in the area of 15 dB, for example, the amplifier would have to be thirty two times as powerful at these frequencies as in the mid-range where no boost was applied. Thus, if you were driving your amplifier to a 10 watt level on mid-range material, the equalizer would drive the amplifier to 320 watt levels at high and low frequencies, clearly beyond the capabilities of most amplifiers. Active equalization can only work well if the amount of boost is within the power capabilities of your amplifier. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.Finally, remember that microphones are stupid. The mike cannot distinguish between direct or reflected sound in the recording process. The microphone picks up all the sound at its location, no matter whether it came directly from the instrument or was first reflected from the recording surroundings. This sound, a mix of direct and reflected acoustics, is sent on to the recorder, and if the engineering is good, will finally show up on your record. In a linear system, the output of front facing speakers will play back this mix of direct and reflected sound (what the microphones “heard”) in the proper proportion (assuming good judgement by the recording engineers in original microphone placement) and your system will play back the sound of the “hall” as it existed quite satisfactorily.We would suggest that further deliberate “reflections” in your room is, at best, redundant. We prefer, in fact, a very “dead” and non-reflective listening environment in which we listen to the direct output of the speakers, with the acoustics of the listening room minimized. We desire to hear what is on the record, and only what is on the record. If the recording is bad, we want to know so, if it is great, we want to hear it, and nothing else. Fortunately, there are enough super recording engineers around (Jack Renner and Bob Woods of Telarc, for example) that our desires for well engineered records are met.Frank Van AlstinePS All back issues of Audio Basics are available as free .pdf downloads at our web site, www.avahifi.com
Mr. Van Alstine may be extremely talented tweaking the design of Dynaco amplifiers and preamplifiers but in this case he is badly mistaken.
In my experience, you are wrong on every possible level and account . The rest of your post thus rendered useless, to me.
Hifisoundguy, can you try this with your 901s and report back?
My most memorable experience of Bose 901 Speakers was in the late 1970s, when during a Bose demonstration, the sales rep in a local, hi-fi shop said, "Watch this!" and proceeded to fasten an electric cord (zip cord) to both terminals of the speaker's binding posts. He then took it one step further and plugged the speaker into the AC wall socket. For real! It made an unearthly amount of noise, drove everyone out of the listening room and apparently didn't blow the speakers. Me thinks that was the whole point of the demo. In other words, these speakers are so badass, that you can plug 'em right into the wall. Phil Spector eat your heart out.
I think the >Tweaked-out 901 system.. version< are in a league of their own ! BEST SPEAKER MONEY CAN BUY....(PERIOD) !!...
Hey, no big deal. You can do that with many a loudspeaker. All you have to do is use a woofer(s) in an enclosure that has its impedance peak (fs) close to 60Hz! Let's do the math, Voltage Squared, Divided By The Impedance. Suppose you have a woofer with a Zo of maybe 60 ohms, then you plug it into your 115VAC wall outlet, the woofer only gets 220 watts. The trick is having the loudspeaker resonance at or near 60Hz.I did this once with a really cheap three way loudspeaker that had a 15" woofer, the woofer just hummed loudly, producing a 60Hz tone. Then I deliberately put my hand against the woofer cone to damp it. The impedance immediately dropped down to its nominal value and pssst, goodbye woofer.
Soundminded sounds very credible to me if, in fact, he really devoted 40 years of his life to converting the Bose 901 from the garbage that comes from the factory to something useful and enjoyable. You gotta question the ROI on that project though. Was it really worth so much trouble? And why start with Bose rather than something else that actually sounded good in stock form?
