Is There an Audiophile in the House?

Factual Questions
1

Hi Everyone

Well, the basement finishing saga is nearing an end. I am now setting up all the goodies.

I have a set of Bose 901s that I want to set up in there. I have had these for a long time, and I really like them despite what some have to say.

Anyway, as you may know, Bose has specific instructions for where to set these up, including a certain distance from the walls, due to the fact that they are designed to reflect some of the sound off the wall.

Due to the configuration of the room, I have three choices for how to locate these, and I need to decide whch is the least of the evils. I plan to hang them from the ceiling to save floor space.

  1. Dierctly in front of the seating area, as would be typical. However, that wall is not unobstrucrted. The wall has a built in set of shelves on one sideand a closet on the other. So the left speaker would be reflecting off of what amounts to a bookcase, and the right would be about 12" forward of the left.

  2. I have an unobstructed wall behind the seating area, which would be perfect, but the speakers would be directly above

  3. I could go way off the reservation and put them on the “side” walls, facing each other with the seating area in between.

What say you? Experimenting isn’t really viable, since hanging them requires enough effort (and putting holes in things) that I want to do it once and be done.

I don’t consider my self a sophisticated listener, so as I said I am looking for thoughts on what is the best with the situation, not what is ideal.

Thanks!

2

Can you not experiment with positioning by having them on some kind of stand that you can move around? Then once you have decided the best place for them, hang them from the ceiling.

3

I would go with the front. Yes the bouncing off walls is all fine and dandy, but I don’t think it will be as big of a deal as the claim.

4

Set them up in front as close to equidistant from your ears as possible, measured from the optimal place to listen from. Don’t worry about the reflections so much. Bose does some odd things but they make decent speakers. Good luck and enjoy the finished basement.

Capt

Live sound engineer

5

Theres’s an equalizer that you have to hook up between the receiver or preamp and the amplifier. They won’t sound right without it. Do you have that? It can be tricky because a most people these days use receivers where the amps are in the same box as everything else.

Some receivers have preout/main-in jacks that you can use. You hook up the preouts (preamplifier outputs) to the inputs of the equalizer, then hook up the output of the equalizer to the main-ins. (Main amplifier inputs.)

Some versions of the 901s (all versions?) have foam edges around the speakers that dry out and crumble eventually. Look at those. If they’re falling apart, stop using them and get the speakers refoamed. This can be expensive because there are 18 drivers total. Don’t touch these edges (surrounds) because that might make a hole in them and hasten their demise if they’ve rotted all ready.

6

The Capt nailed it. Just listen to the music and make sure it sounds good to you. Too many audiophiles listen to the distortion more than the music :wink:

7

The way I like to say it is that so called “audiophiles” listen to equipment instead of the music.

There should be a universal contest among audiophiles and sommeliers to find out which group is more pretentious and FOS. It would be a tight race.

Enjoy your music. I hate a bad music system as much as anyone. Distortion drives me crazy. The best system won’t make bad music sound good. Great music can still be enjoyed on far less than state-of-the-art equipment.

8

go with the advice so far but I would add that some soft furnishings are always good in rooms for audio. My instinct says in front would be best and bouncing them off a book shelf is OK.

9

The 901 is a funny beast. If you like the sound, well fine, but be aware of the curiosities in its implementation.

The fundamental design idea in the 901 was to approximate the reverberant sound field with a reflected one. So where in real life a live venue delivers the majority of the sound level as reverberant, and only a small fraction as direct, the 901 reflects sound off the back wall and tries to claim that this is the same. Since your listening room isn’t the same size as a typical live venue, the reverberation times don’t match and the idea is only partially successful.

However the balance of frequencies between direct and diffuse field are critical, and many speakers get this wrong. You do want the overall frequency balance between the direct and diffuse fields to be the same (and flat). This is where you get into trouble. Bouncing sound off a bookshelf versus a blank wall is going to yield very different diffuse field responses. Since the majority of the energy going into the room with a 901 comes from this, you can expect to have a very unbalanced sound between the channels. This can lead to all sorts of unfortunate problems.

The single driver in the front of the 901 provides the direct field, and this driver has a few issues too. It is really a bit big for a full range driver, the diameter means that at high frequencies it becomes very directional. You can’t sit all that far off axis before you get nasty frequency response problems. This means that you need to get the toe in angles right, and this can seriously limit your seating position and speaker location.

A lot will depend upon your listening needs. Something worth trying. Forget the rubbish about the reflected sound, and install them the “wrong way” around, and face the 8 drivers into the room. It might be dreadful, but it might also work for you.

As noted above, some drivers have foam surrounds that rots. If you feel handy you can buy refoaming kits, but expect to burn a full day doing all 18 drivers. It isn’t hard, but is a bit fiddly and exacting to get right.

Something that is missed so much with audio, the most critical component is the room. Then getting the speakers correctly integrated into the room. Very modest systems can sound phenomenal when you get this right, and vice versa.

10

In my experience any speaker sounds better when it is mounted at ear height. I certainly would not mount them facing each other.

I just installed a modest home theater setup and the A/V receiver (Onkyo TX-NR509) has a calibration feature where you put the microphone in your listening spots and the system generates tones and makes the appropriate changes. I like the results. Does your receiver have a similar feature?

11

Thanks for all the feedback, I appreciate it. It seems that the consensus is to locate them in the “usual” space and so that is what I will do. Just a few follow-ups:

As I mentioned, I do not consider myself an audiophile, although at one time as a younger man I may have harbored such pretensions. I have found the 901s to be extremely clear and what I know about me is that when other people speak of poor response, flat highs, etc. I just don’t hear it. I believe those who can, but not I. I am not sure why there is so much animosity for these out there, but the reality is that they are better than 95% of what’s on the market.

These are Series VI, purchased around 1998. The disintegrating foams were on series III, and Bose had an exchange program for those who suffered this fate.

Finally, whenever the subject of the 901s comes up, someone will always mention the EQ- is there really a rash of people trying to run these without the EQ? It seems strange that one would spend the money for 901s and not know that this item is an essential part of it.

12

I agree with the concensus. In general, I find that too many people think that stereo speakers should be as far apart as possible, along a wall. To the contrary, they should be equidistant from you from as much of the listening area as possible, which usually means keeping them closer together than most people place them. If they’re not nearly equidistant, the closest speaker tends to dominate and you lose the stereo imagery.

That said, the 901 is definitely an odd beast, and tiny adjustments to location or angle can cause remarkably big changes in imagery. I remember in particular a small living room of friends, with large openings on two adjacent walls, and noplace to put them symmetrically on either of the other two walls. Instead they tried all sorts of different locations and ended up with something that looked like it couldn’t possibly work well but sounded great (after a lot of experimentation).

The resulting imagery was quite a bit different than what the audio engineers for any given CD planned, but nonetheless it was nicely balanced and lively and everyone from grunts to snobs liked it. So, don’t be afraid to experiment and break the rules.

I do agree that ear height is ideal. In the living room cited above, the two speakers couldn’t even be at the same height, which is normally a mortal sin, but as I said, it worked.

I’ve never owned 901’s but I’ve always appreciated their virtues, while noting their vices.

If anyone uses them without the EQ and doesn’t immediately hate them, their opinions on sound is irrelevant.

13

Thirded or fourthed on the ear height placement. I actually use the term eye level because your ears and eyes are on the same plane. If you cannot see the tweeter you cannot hear it, with a few exceptions for oddball spkr cabinets.

Enjoy

Capt

14

Oh nonsense. There’d be some people who were members of both groups.