artplow's Full Review: Bose 901 VI Main / Stereo Speaker
After several days of careful reconsideration, I settled on my perennial favorite speakers, the Bose 901 Series VI system. There is a tremendous amount of controversy surrounding these speakers, with a very wide range of opinions as to their actual performance. Fueling the debate is the aggressive Bose mass-marketing scheme (but paradoxically not for the 901’s) and a decidedly unfriendly response from Bose to some early 901 system reviewers decades ago. I personally have been around these speakers off and on since about 1969 when they were first introduced, but have never been able to own a set for one reason or another. I have always thought they were excellent sounding relative to mass-marketed, consumer-type speaker equipment.
I have read the negative reviews written by several apparently well-meaning users. Neither is this speaker system mentioned by many professional audio reviewers. My take is that in many audio circles, these are speakers non-grata. However, considering my own experience with audio equipment, music recording, and audio technology development over the last 40+ years, I opted to go with my original plan and purchase the Bose 901’s… and I am very glad I did.
Choosing a speaker design well-suited for a particular listening space, able to reproduce the subjective listener’s taste in sound- and at a particular price point- is a tremendously difficult challenge. Many times success is only achieved through trial and error. This in turn generates controversy as to 1) what is the best overall audio speaker design concept, and 2) which speaker builder best executes the concept. The fact is, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all design for all occasions, a principle apparently not readily grasped by a large number of enthusiasts.
The Bose 901 design marks its 40th year of production in 2008, making this one of the longest and most successful runs ever for off-the-shelf audio components of any kind. The current Series VI design has been on the market since 1988, something of a record in its own right. While other designers tinker and experiment with myriads of concepts, Bose has stuck with its original inspired concept, making incremental improvements over the past 40 years to create today’s highly refined sixth-generation Bose 901 design.
For my tastes, the Bose 901’s are still heads and shoulders above any other speaker system on the consumer market in this price bracket. When properly positioned in the listening room and driven with modest power levels (I am using the Cambridge Audio 540A (V2)), they have astonishing definition and clarity, delivering an open, transparent sound that is neither harsh nor tiring. Frequency transition is fluid and seamless, unlike traditional low-mid-high frequency driver designs. This high level of performance is due to the lack of distortion-producing internal electronic frequency crossover networks, combined with the ‘direct/reflecting’ driver enclosure design. Even the most careful low-mid-high design can never overcome this fundamental weakness, although there are many competent designs on the market that come close… but these are well out of my price range.
Traditional speaker designs split the amplified signal frequencies via an internal electronic crossover network between different speaker sizes within a roughly cubical speaker enclosure, adding electronic and dynamic harmonic distortion to the sound being reproduced. Indeed, this design concept intentionally attenuates bands of frequencies, feeding different frequency bands to different driver designs, the side affect of which is harmonic distortion- and significant amounts of it. This design then depends on the airspace between the drivers and listener to recombine (called acoustic coupling) what the speaker’s electronics have split up in the hope of reproducing what the subjective listener perceives as a ‘good’ sound.
Instead, the Bose design is based upon on each enclosure using nine identical, 4˝ inch full-range drivers using no electronic crossovers, eliminating the modern sound system’s single greatest potential source of distortion. Eight of the nine drivers face away from the listener. The overall effect is that sound envelops the listening space, generating a spacious, fluid, and natural sound for which this design has been renowned for nearly a half century. Using proper equalization compensation at the amplifier stage from the included Bose equalizer (0.002% THD) helps create low distortion sound from the speakers. There really is nothing else that delivers this kind of listening pleasure at this price point.
I have heard some critics say that using an array of single-sized drivers is quite incapable of reproducing satisfying lows and/or highs. My response to this notion is that the human eardrum seems to have little difficulty with this audio physics problem. If size were critical to high-quality frequency transmission, then each of us would have the equivalent of woofer, midrange, and tweeter eardrums in each ear. So, the issue of ‘good’ sound resolves to accuracy, that is, how accurately the drivers are able to vibrate a given air volume. In this regard, the Bose 901’s are simply unmatched at this price point.
The ‘direct/reflecting’ Bose 901 speakers are sensitive to room placement, particularly in regard to low-frequency reproduction- more so than more traditional cubic-type speaker box designs. Combined with different audio recording technical styles, which these speakers are quite competent to reveal, I am convinced is reason for the large spread of listening experiences reported with the Bose 901 design. I would be willing to wager that in a very few listening environments, optimal placement may not be obtainable within some pre-existing confines of interior design and furniture placement restrictions… hence the need for the 30-day Bose home auditioning policy.
The eighteen total drivers in the system are able to move a tremendous amount of air, more than enough to generate tight, crisp lows when properly placed in the listening room. Using an array of mid-sized drivers having a relative short throw as compared with, say, a 12” driver gives them an advantage with low-latency travel times (i.e., accuracy), delivering high resolution lows at moderate SPL’s the typical listener is likely to use. Doing the math, two 12” woofers in a traditional system design have 904 in2 of surface area. Eighteen 4˝” drivers in the Bose 901 design have 1,145 in2 of speaker area, an upside of about 27% in a similarly sized enclosure, giving credence to some owners reporting structural damage to their buildings from low frequencies at high SPL’s.
If improperly placed, the lows can be either boomy or muddy on the one hand, or lacking on the other. Presuming the listening space is of conventional architectural design, i.e., a floor, four walls and a ceiling (not too high) using standard construction materials, spending a little time making small placement adjustments rewards the careful owner with remarkably life-like sound reproduction when combined with other competent audio system components.
Listening to music is a very subjective process taking into account a nearly infinite array of variables. The Bose 901’s are not for everyone, nor do they match every architectural design. Depending on what subjective listeners find ‘good sounding’ in a particular piece of music, they may or may not like the Bose 901 speakers in a particular listening environment… but then again, this ‘psycho-audio’ phenomenon is perfectly true for any other speaker on the market as well.
The bottom line is that the vast majority of enthusiasts should be well-pleased with the Bose 901 Series VI. With the bonus of a 30-day free audition, there is little reason not to give these gems a try.
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