"Stewart Pinkerton" wrote in message

On Mon, 23 Aug 2004 00:06:45 +0100, "chris"
wrote:

Oohhh "technical competence" again !!
sinewave and meters:- here we go again !! - they have NEVER proved
listenabilty, quality -beyond THD, or very much else!

They have however been an essential part of *designing* any
decent-sounding gear.....................


Whilst I will not deny that in some circumstances BOSE have been
superseded.

Actually, try to name one circumstance in which BOSE has *not* been
superceded!

What is incompetent about the bose designs then:-

Almost everything.............

To deal with the 'classic' 901:

The use of multiple full-range drivers leads to smeared midrange and
hopelessly muddled treble. The use of heavy EQ to get *some* kind of
bass response out of those fundamentally poor drivers leads to
horrible distortion of any high-level bass notes. The use of one
forward-facing and eight backward-facing drive units leads to a very
vague soundstage. Also, the 901 was always *grossly* overpriced - as
is true of everything Bose ever made. A company driven entirely by its
marketing and legal departments, and with a *very* nasty attitude.

The Bose 901 active equalizer's response curve has changed over the years. I
don't know of one that is online, but there is one online for the 901s
professional audio sibling, the 802.

http://www.audiorail.com/802_controller.gif

Bass rolloff must be -3 dB at about 100 Hz, and treble rolloff is -3 dB at 7
KHz.

The weak spot of the 802 is probabably more in the treble where it takes
about 15 dB boost to do just 12 KHz. Pushing a drum kit with cymbals through
this could
be a recipie for disaster. Just guessing, but I'd suppose that the system
designers were from an era where drum kits were acoustical instruments and
there was no such thing as an electronic drum set or they weren't in
widespread use.