Okay, here goes.

A couple of days ago my son came home with a 1989 31" Zenith TV with unbelieble inputs, real top of the line, even a PC board edge connector to adapt to RGB inputs.

SOUND BY BOSE.

Well, we are using a 19" TV (shut up) in our living room, and decided to see how this one worked.

The picture was okay, but the bass was just gratingly obnoxious. I turned the bass all the way down and it was gratingly obnoxious.

Then I remembered the illustrations I have seen of the way the wave radio works, with its colon-looking sound tube...and I flashed on how one of Bose's insidious inaccuracies and selling points is its insistent bass...yet totally inaccurate bass, sometimes even bordering on a monotone.

MONOTONE! No matter how much I turned down the bass on that TV, even women's voices excited a resonance in the Bose system in the cabinet, and one particular lowish tone came alive. If I did not know better, I would think it was bass.

Here's the problem: Millions of listeners DON'T know better, and they hear that monotone bass, and they think it is bass. Okay, now think of the crappy computer speakers you have heard, where one lowish resonance masquerades as bass.

Now, hold on a moment for this one -- remember the sound of almost every obscenely loud car system you have ever been hurt by at fifty feet. Can you remember that the bass notes were distinct, or were they just one Bose-ish blob?

Now dance music. One big thud, over and over. Forget actual bass notes. Hell, go listen to "Walking in Space" by Quincy Jones -- you will actually hear SEVERAL bass notes, in sequence, actually playing a sort of melody. I was at a client's house today, a retired choreographer, and he had a DJ dance CD which was almost only bass thud and cymbals.

Oh -- My -- God -- has the ubiquity of that crappy Bose sound made us forget that bass consists of distinct notes, with distinct timbres? That you can actually tell if a low E is played on a cello or on a string bass BY THE DETAILS IN THE SOUND?

Ernie, I wish I could disagree with you, but I can't. People need to grasp the facts of physics, especially that of audio. Just like Bazooka tubes, which produce the 'one-note blues' in car systems, as you described, a resonant chamber is tuned to a particular frequency.

Sure, they're very efficient at system (driver and cabinet) resonance, but grossly lacking everywhere else. Any ported speaker cabinet is also a tuned chamber, only with a lower Q. (Simply put, 'Q', which stands for Quality, refers to the height relative to the width of a frequency-response peak.)

"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." Speaker efficiency is gained at the expense of frequency bandwidth. To get more dB at a given power level, you lose frequency response. Sure, you can get two smaller peaks of response with careful tuning, which flattens the response curve, but it's still a compromise.

Ported systems lose control of the woofer cone below system resonance. I've always preferred the sound of low-sensitivity, sealed speaker systems to that of ported systems. They go lower and do it more smoothly. Low-end frequency response drop-off is much more gradual.

The trade-off is that you need more power to drive them, but these days, that's not tough to attain. In the golden years of audio, there weren't very many 200+ watt/channel amps around, and all speakers were ported. Most early hi-fi systems were adapted from professional audio equipment.

AR made sealed speakers popular, and called them 'acoustic-suspension', because the air, rather than the speaker surround (and spider), provided the main cone-excursion limiting. They were, once again, less efficient, but if you had the power available, they did bass proud.

Deep bass can only be reproduced by moving a lot of air, and that requires cone travel and/or cone area. You cannot cheat the laws of physics. Bose does do what he does well, and preys on the uneducated. I guess my soapbox speech got a little off topic, but not too far, I hope.

Larry
www.fineelectricco.com

Larry,
thanks for the walk down memory lane....

I hope everybody reading these posts understands that what Larry and I are talking about is nothing less than a fundamental removal of fidelity below about 100 Hz.

To be precise, Milton Friedman has just won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and a reporter asked if he could summarize his theory in a few words. He responded, "There are no free lunches." That's a Nobel class theory, folks! and it applies across all of life.

I had the opportunity to work with Rich May (he and his father Ed invented the JBL Studio Monitor in the early 70s) in an actual loudspeaker design department at Marantz in the last couple of their golden years...where the first thing we did in the lab was dismantle and get rid of a six-foot wide breadboard for laying out coils and capacitors and terminals...to create different crossover networks to try with different drivers. We got rid of it because it was too simplistic, did not use Zobels (now THERE's a piece of argot!) and could not be adapted to the newer networks we were using.

Rich had shown the owners of Marantz that their prized anechoic chamber gave inconsistent results depending on speaker and microphone placement. We tested all speakers on a 16' x 16' platform on the roof, the speaker flush mounted, with a microphone 2 meters above the speaker, with Bruel & Kjaer test equipment.

You could hear every bass note. None of what we did had any of that tubby crap that you hear from your average LOUD car stereo. Or from Bose.

I had a customer ask me to install some speakers with his plasma a few weeks ago. I went to his house and he said, " My son gave me some good Bose speakers, How about using them?" I asked,"which did he give you, good or Bose?" I have a response for the inevitable "what do you think about Bose?" question from customers. I ask them if they have ever seen a Bose commercial on TV or heard one on the radio. When they reply with a "yes", I ask them to name another speaker company commercial they have seen or heard. While the customer stands there scratching his head, I say,"now you know where Bose puts their money." This has ended every Bose conversation I have used it on.

This message was edited by TBPAVI on 06/28/03 10:50.

One of the problems i have found is that most people dont know what Live performances sound like. Think about it. Most people who are under the age of 30 have never heard analog recordings. Have never heard live ,unprocessed music. They dont have a frame of reference. So while BOSE is a problem, a real problem. The other issues are in education. Most people are going to Best Buy and the Circuit. And they dont get a chance to hear the good stuff. The best fun i have as a custom guy is letting a customer hear their favorite Cd on a real Killer system. (Martin Logan Speakers w/ Mac Monoblocks) Once you open their eyes to what can be done, you're halfway home.

I agree 100 percent Emdawgz. But, there is still the chance that they have been brainwashed by all the BS marketing and someone telling them something sounds good and it really dosen't.

But maybe to them it does. How is it possible to sway someone into thinking a system they bought sounds great? I mean, maybe if I heard your system of ML speakers with the monoblocks I wouldn't like the sound of it. Actually, I can tell you that I wouldn't. I listen to a lot of metal music and that music takes a totally different speaker setup than that.

This whole thing about what sounds good and what dosen't is too subjective to nail down. But, I do agree that certain brands etc make high fidelity sound have a bad name.

If someone knows how to train an ear in the one day of training or on a short demo, let me know. This would be very valuable.

Matt,
I am interested in knowing why you would not like metal played on a system that reproduces it accurately, like the Martin Logans and monoblocks.

When I first started listening to music, it was on AM radio, and every improvement in actual reproduction quality made the music sound better, with the exception of most of the bebop records made with about zero budget in the late forties -- they had poor bass and generally were done by someone who forgot to mike the drums!

The only sounds that sounded WORSE on better systems were things like the on-purpose distortion in Creedence Clearwater guitar sounds...which were okay to sound worse because, hell, that's how they wanted it to sound, and the idea was to have a dirty sound.

Now, if your metal sounds worse on high quality equipment, that tells me that it is not well recorded or that you really can't stand to hear it -- you really just want to hear what you think it should sound like.

(I remember a music instructor telling me that Ornette Coleman's godawful alto sax sound came from him listening to music on a shitty* record player, and then playing to make his sax sound JUST like what he heard!)

High fidelity means being highly true to the original. Good or bad.

*do not take offense: this is a technical term.

Matt, I don't know, i listen to some hard rock (Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Motorhead) and it sounds pretty good on the logans. Now if that was my main music genre, id probably go with a pair of Wilson's or Jm Labs! But i gotta say, i think youd enjoy the ml's better than a best buy setup. The thing is as a custom guy we have got to let people know that that better is available. I recently sold a guy a Kef speaker package w/ a kenwood Surround reciever. (not the highest fidelity system by any means) When i was finishing the setup. The guy had invited two other Dr.'s from his practice,
to check it out. You would have thought it was a million $ system thay really liked it. The one guy had just bought a Bose lifestyle system and was waiting for the install. Needless to say i stole it from bose.
Was this system Killer? Nope but it was better than bose and all the guy needed was some exposure!

Keep fighting! The "Bose Wars" have just begun!!!!!!

Well, I guess different speaker bring out different qualities of the recordings. Are you saying Martin Logan's are sonically flat? I don't think so personally. Not that they sound bad, just that they bring out different elements of music that I don't appreciate as much. I have a pair of JBL 4408s that rock. About as flat as a speaker as you can buy.

If what your saying is true, then all speakers would sound the same. And they don't....

(Isn't metal on-purpose guitar distortion? It definatly is)

I wouldn't consider Nirvana or Pearl Jam metal, and Motorhead only because they are old. I'm talking real metal such as Type o Negative, or Agent Steel, or Opeth, or.... (Not Metallica anymore either)

Sorry Matt, Didnt realize i was an "Oldhead". I guess what im saying is that any Full range speaker will sound better than Bose. Not quite any but most.

I'm an old Metalhead but get into a lot of new metal as well...

But your right, most any speaker will sound better than BOSE.