Hi
Back in early 1960's I studied circuit theory under Dr Amar Bose, who built the current BOSE Corp. He was very bright, energetic, knew his stuff, and was a great teacher.
But he's probably even a better businessman that understood the concept of "face validity" for marketing products to a mass, non-technical market. Under this concept, your product must uniquely satisfy a common sense premise & promise (a unique selling proposition) without having to be rigorously true technically. It must also be reliable, attractive, and perform at least as good as the average product. Thus Gillette's Trac II razor offered a second parallel blade to cut the hair a second time before it pulls back into the skin follicle, since the cutting friction of the leading blade pulled the hair up. If 2 blades were good, now we have 5!
Bose set up an experiment in Boston's Symphony Hall to measure the directions of the incoming sound to a particular representative seat (I don't remember the row & seat location).
He found that 11% of the sound came directly from the orchestra, and the remainder were reflections from the venue's walls, ceiling, floor, seats, baffling, etc - ambient sound. So he developed the 901 speakers to mimic this finding using 9 identical equalized midrange drivers for reliability & big or efficient sound: one on the front baffle and two arrays of 4 each on 2 angled baffles on the rear recreating Boston's famed ambience. The he could say the sound from his 901's matches the sound you would hear in that venue. Who could argue? Face validity!
But when you set up and played those speakers in your room, the sound would also bounce off you room's walls, ceiling, floor, etc, thereby superimposing your room's unique ambience on top of Symphony Hall's ambience. For some genres of music this produced geometrical distortion or variance from reality. For full orchestral works such Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, this distortion was not bothersome because lots of other things were going on at louder levels and masking this commingled ambience. However, for purer, simpler works like single vocalists (Joan Baez or Frank Sinatra), it would enlarge and slightly smear their images in the sound field. Moreover, their use of mid-range drivers could not reproduce deep bass or very sharp transients in the upper registers. But the mid-market didn't care.
I listened to them a few times, but never wanted to own them. In the end it depends on what you want in recreating the music genres you listen to.
Gratefull_ear
Back in early 1960's I studied circuit theory under Dr Amar Bose, who built the current BOSE Corp. He was very bright, energetic, knew his stuff, and was a great teacher.
But he's probably even a better businessman that understood the concept of "face validity" for marketing products to a mass, non-technical market. Under this concept, your product must uniquely satisfy a common sense premise & promise (a unique selling proposition) without having to be rigorously true technically. It must also be reliable, attractive, and perform at least as good as the average product. Thus Gillette's Trac II razor offered a second parallel blade to cut the hair a second time before it pulls back into the skin follicle, since the cutting friction of the leading blade pulled the hair up. If 2 blades were good, now we have 5!
Bose set up an experiment in Boston's Symphony Hall to measure the directions of the incoming sound to a particular representative seat (I don't remember the row & seat location).
He found that 11% of the sound came directly from the orchestra, and the remainder were reflections from the venue's walls, ceiling, floor, seats, baffling, etc - ambient sound. So he developed the 901 speakers to mimic this finding using 9 identical equalized midrange drivers for reliability & big or efficient sound: one on the front baffle and two arrays of 4 each on 2 angled baffles on the rear recreating Boston's famed ambience. The he could say the sound from his 901's matches the sound you would hear in that venue. Who could argue? Face validity!
But when you set up and played those speakers in your room, the sound would also bounce off you room's walls, ceiling, floor, etc, thereby superimposing your room's unique ambience on top of Symphony Hall's ambience. For some genres of music this produced geometrical distortion or variance from reality. For full orchestral works such Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, this distortion was not bothersome because lots of other things were going on at louder levels and masking this commingled ambience. However, for purer, simpler works like single vocalists (Joan Baez or Frank Sinatra), it would enlarge and slightly smear their images in the sound field. Moreover, their use of mid-range drivers could not reproduce deep bass or very sharp transients in the upper registers. But the mid-market didn't care.
I listened to them a few times, but never wanted to own them. In the end it depends on what you want in recreating the music genres you listen to.
Gratefull_ear