[caddisgeek]

Sounds good! whats the title, I'll see if I can get it on Gemm 

Did I mention that 'Paralysed' by the Legendary Stardust Cowboy is one of my all time favorite tunes

[martyo]

When jam band fans grow up they turn to jazz.

I'm 56, love jazz but still like that jamband stuff, especially the Dead. Keep thinking I's  all growed up, my wife must be right.

[macrojack]

Martyo -- My wife sees me the same way. Doomed to a protracted adolescence.

If you love jazz but enjoy the jamband thing, that just says to me that you like to let your hair down once in a while -- if you still have any.

I don't think the Dead are unlistenable or anything like that.........I just see a huge disconnect between what they provide and what their followers seem to receive. I never really got Elvis or Frank Sinatra either. Clearly they both have talent but not enough to be worshiped. I do get the Beatles thing completely but I never screamed when they performed. Try to appreciate Tom Waits. I see that as a higher level.

[mcullinan]

Re: Bose 901
« Reply #36 on: Today at 03:29:31 am »
Quote
I resisted earlier my thought that Deadheads are given to fantasy but this last post has forced my hand. It appears that the same mechanism which creates this kind of plane crash circumstance in your mind also provides you with a musical experience that isn't happening. Perhaps that is why I have never known a Deadhead who wasn't also a Star Trek devotee. Music fiction and science fiction apparently attract the same  mesmerized souls.

When jam band fans grow up they turn to jazz.

You really cant be that bitter about a band... Actually there are tons of jazz elements in Grateful Dead music. And I do like Start Trek.. the original.. I grew up watching it on Sat mornings. Of course my horn rimmed goggles helped me see the tv, while I was smoking pot to improve the sound of the mono tele...

Id say music is a greater part of imagination. Part and parcel. and parsely. And sometimes what isnt there can be more captivating than what is.

Oh and I like Tom Waits... so... nani nani poopoo
Mike

[martyo]

I never really got Elvis or Frank Sinatra either

You didn't get The CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD.   
Really, I'm just having fun here.

If you love jazz but enjoy the jamband thing, that just says to me that you like to let your hair down once in a while -- if you still have any.

Not much left on the top.
Music's a real personal thing and it must mean alot to all of us here, I know that's why I'm into Hi Fi.
But us Deadheads(who really do come in all shapes and sizes) take alot of abuse so we jump to the defense quickly.

[doug s.]

hmmm...  many different topics in this here thread...

i bought bose 901's at the ripe old age of 13, back in 1969.  the 1st time i ever heard them sound good was in 1983, when i ran them thru an electronic equalizer, adjusted relatively flat w/a pink noise generator.  only then, did i realize how awful they really were.  what was odd was that the eq pattern needed was pretty-much the same, regardless of room, indicating how warped the 901's frequency response really was, even w/its own included eq - the pattern on the eq (12 band) controls always had a shape similar to that of a "w"

while i have always been a big fan of the grateful dead, i am no where near being a dead-head.  tho i did live in a group house with a couple of them, whilst in college.  whenever the dead were within a day's drive of ann arbor, they were at the show, w/their spendy mics & nak tape deck in hand, doing some recording.  and, about once a week, they'd get "care packages" in the mail - tapes from total strangers, all over the usa, who would send out tapes; my room-mates also did the same, sending out tapes to strangers on a regular basis.  they had almost a thousand cassettes of the dead.  (and a couple hundred little feat bootlegs, as well; i turned them on to lowell george's magic, & they did the rest.)  they were certainly potheads.  hell, in the mid 70's, it seemed everyone in ann arbor was a pothead, what w/the law being a $5 fine for possession of any quantity of herb, in those daze.  even the weekly ann arbor newspaper used to raffle off a pound of hi-grade colombian pot every year.  but, they both got their degrees; the guy in mathematics, the chick in sports therapy - she was a killer basketball player...

i can't stand star drek  but that's not surprising, really - i can't stand tv in general; i gave it up before i turned 14, & haven't had one in my dwelling in quite a few years.  and, even when there *was* one in the house, it rarely ever got turned on, & was never in a living room/rec room, etc.  my wife liked one in the bedroom; it helped her fall asleep when she went to bed.  which meant i would see about 5 minutes of tv when i was getting ready for bed, before i turned it off.  usually, it would be the news, leno, letterman, or a test pattern...   

tom waits is one of my all-time faves - killer lyrics, music, & yes - even killer woice.  i saw him once; leon redbone was the intro act - what a show!     dylan is also a fave - yup - woice included.

i can't stand the music (oxymoren?) of black sabbath, or any other hard-rock/metal type of band.  to me, led zeppelin, which i really like, is about the hardest-rock/metal type music i can deal with.

i really like frank sinatra now, tho i couldn't stand him, until i was in my mid thirties.  i don't ever think i will appreciate barbara streisand, judy collins, johnny mathis, or nat cole, to name a few reknowned artists.

as in most everything else, ymmv,

doug s.

[Papajin]

Sounds good! whats the title, I'll see if I can get it on Gemm 

Did I mention that 'Paralysed' by the Legendary Stardust Cowboy is one of my all time favorite tunes

Charles Manson "Sings" is the title.  Some of it isn't horrible, but the Garbage Dump song is pretty bad... There's samples on that link!

[Wayner]

My friend had a pair of 901's. I brought over my Marantz Stereo 250 amp but could not really drive them like they should have. I thought they imaged poorly, had no dynamics...flat sounding, but did fill the room with the horrible sound. I've never liked Bose and I never plan on owning any product with the Bose name. I think it's low-fi at best. Maybe O.K. for grandma, but that's it.

W

[weirdo]

tom waits is one of my all-time faves - killer lyrics, music, & yes - even killer woice.  i saw him once; leon redbone was the intro act - what a show!     dylan is also a fave - yup - woice included.

When was this? I saw them around 76 or 77 in Merrilville Ind. Leon had a sore throat and could not go on. His back-up guys did some instrumentals to no applause at all. Waits stopped and yelled at the coroud for being noisy. I saw Dylan and the Band in Ann Arbor around 71. Cloud of smoke indeed. Clinton was there but he didn't inhale.

Best I heard 901's was in a pizza parlor in Tulsa OK, where they were suspended from the ceiling on chains and driven with lots of power. they still make them and they should cost about 200.00 instead of 1300.0.

[gjs_cds]

My first pair of speakers 34 years ago.

The design is positively silly. 9 little TV speakers in a box. The front is parallel to the front wall of your room and the two sides are perpendicular to the front. The rear of the speaker is two panels joined at about 120 degree angle. All of the drivers are identical at about 4 inches in diameter. One driver is off center in the front panel firing forward and four drivers are mounted in a square pattern in each of the rear panels. All of these fire at the back wall. This is the basis for Bose's direct/reflecting "technology".
Because those little drivers can provide no low bass and no extreme high frequency, an active equalizer is employed to boost the hell out of both ends. There remains no real HF extension but a boomy, thuddy artificial bass is created. They don't image at all well. The mids are muddy and muted and the fun is to be found only in fireworks. In those days all I wanted was earbleed R&R so I was unaware that anything better could be had. If you are now like I was then, they are worth playing with. If you have learned to listen to audiophile products you will be very disappointed by these hoaxes.

To say that the design is positively silly may be a little disingenuous.  For the time (and even today), the concept (i.e., goals) behind the speaker's design was a good (albeit ambitious) one.  If one listens to an opera, the sound comes from primarily one source--a singers' vocal tract.  Further, by the time the sound reaches the listeners in the audience, it's reverberated all over the place.  Point being--we've got a single point of sound and a whole ton of room acoustics.  And if one believes that the only reference is live performance--then you've gotta go with what God gives you.

And conventional speakers fail in these two goals.  Frequencies are crossed over to different drivers--each of them having their own characteristics.  (And cross-overs will screw things up regardless, in terms of phase etc...)  Further, the towers that I'm listening to right now spread the sound dispersion over a 5 foot (tall) area.  This is hardly natural or realistic.  Secondly--conventional speakers are primarily designed to be aimed directly at the listener--provide a straight line between the sound and one's ears relative to changes in air pressure.  Nothing could be less realistic relative to a real "live" performance.

So the design of the 901 tried to provide 2 things:  (1) Better and more accurate tonality by using 1 type of driver.  (2) More realistic presentation of the sound, by using room acoustics. 

Now--with that said--did it succeed?  No--not really.  Hardly at all.  The drivers were cheap and had a limited FR, it required vast amounts of equalization, speaker placement was crucial, room acoustics were crucial.  It was a solid set of goals, but the technology and implementation of the technology did not readily achieve those goals. 

No--I'm not a fan of Bose;  I just believe in giving credit where credit is due.

[avahifi]

My comments from my Audio Basics newsletter back in 1982.  They still apply.

DIRECT-REFLECTING SYSTEMS. Those
systems in which many of the speakers face the
rear, in which the claim is made that the sound
from the rear of the cabinet, reflecting off the
walls behind the speaker, creates the illusion of
“concert hall” acoustics. This claim is usually
justified with the reasoning that “in a concert
hall much of the sound you actually hear is
reflected from the walls of the hall and is not
direct sound.”
A typical type example is the Bose 901 series
loudspeaker.
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 nonreflective
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.

Regards,

Frank Van Alstine

[macrojack]

Bose didn't restrict themselves to lousy speakers. They made the 1801 power amp and a receiver also. And who can forget the Bose 1101 diesel powered chain drive turntable. Talk about torque, this thing could play itself up a steep hill. It had a small rumble problem but you have to give something up to get those Bose dynamics.

[thunderbrick]

I know this is an old thread, and I, too, was blow away by 901's in 1969 +/-, but 25 years ago I shared an office in Germany with a former Bose salesman, and he lived and breathed that crap (he had 4 suspended from the ceiling).  On a  trip back to the US I brought my DQ-10s along on the plane 'cause I missed them.  Set 'em up, and when he and his wife came over for an office party, she listened for about 15 seconds, and turned to him and said "these sound a LOT better than our speakers, honey, why is that?".
He wouldn't talk to me for a week.  It was great!

[yeldarb]

I worked in an audio store in the late 70's and my boss picked up Bose to sell.  I and the other audionut salesmen had heard a lot about the product but never the product itself.  When the truck dropped off our opening order we started ripping open boxes and hooking up the speakers.  201, 501 were ok for what they were but cost more than we thought they should have.  Then we tackled the 901.  They sounded terrible in our fairly large room.  We moved them 90 degrees.  We moved them to our smaller listening room.  We put them everywhere.  We tried them with all sorts of equipment, from the Bose electronics through Sansui, Yamaha, GAS and even some high zoot Luxman seperates.  No matter what we did the speakers sounded nasty.

Bose dispatched 2 factory guys to "show us how to set them up".  They basically did every thing we did with the same result.  They sucked.  The 901's went home with the factory guys and we never carried them after that.  201 and 501 were never real popular but we did get rid of them.  There was no reorder.

[Wayner]

A shop in our town just picked up the Bose line....to lure customers in, then they let them listen to the good stuff and make sales. They haven't hardly sold any Bose!

Wayner  aa

[soundbitten1]

Just today I called a person having a garage sale about electronics . She said she had a pair of Bose 901s w/ equalizer in perfect condition  . She was asking $400 but sounded like she would take a lot less .

[ssmith]

IMO There is no good Bose speaker they all sound bad compared to any real speaker manufacturer.

As they say Advertising does work.

[satfrat]

IMO There is no good Bose speaker they all sound bad compared to any real speaker manufacturer.

As they say Advertising does work.

Thanks for sharing,,, I had never heard that before.