Allen HR-100 speaker - are Bose 901s reasonable antiphonal substitutes?

[Bruce.Simonson]

Greetings, magnificent group.

Our church has just been offered a pair of Bose 901's.

I'm curious - does anyone have thoughts on these speakers? One idea is to use them as the pair of antiphonal speakers for the solo or chorus division on our newly donated Allen L-451 DK.

(We plan on getting HR-100s and HR-200s for the main speaker arrays - the idea is that these 901s would be in addition to the main speaker arrays - the 901s would be used to give us either a solo or chorus division as an antiphonal option through an Allen univrel relay.)

Worth considering using the 901s for this purpose?

Cheers,
-Bruce

[Melos Antropon]

As antiphonal speakers, (set up some distance from the main speakers) you might be able to make the 901's effective for that purpose. Might. Bose speakers in general, and the 901's in particular, are famous for being touchy as heck about how they are set up and equalized. For sure, try them out for that purpose (antiphonal speakers) and see what you can come up with. They may be a godsend, or they may sound godawful.

Tony

[rjsilva]

Are these the home 901s or the commercial/PA 901s? I forget the model number differences.

If they’re the home model it might take a reasonable amount of effort and setup to work well. There might be some concern over the volume necessary to project well in your church’s room with lower notes and driver excursion. So you'd need to do some setup with the Bose equaliser to find the best balance of volume, tone, and bass for the room. (On a side note, if these are older pair of 901s, recapping the equaliser could be beneficial.)

If they’re the PA version then I’m sure it’d be fine, although you may get a different overall tone vs. the Allen speakers. Maybe that’d be good for antiphonal.

It may be worth a shot at least :)

[michaelhoddy]

The 901's, like many Bose products, require the use of a signal-level (not speaker level) inline processor to flatten out the response. In general practice, this means that the response without the processor will be midrange-heavy. Bose basically uses these processors to bring the high frequencies and low frequencies in line with the natural predisposition of the small cones toward midrange frequencies.

You might be able to put the processor inline before the amps if there are dedicated antiphonal amplifiers, but otherwise, there are probably better (less difficult) options if you want it to sound balanced.

But your mileage may vary without the processor. The worst that would happen is that you don't like it.

Be sure to verify that the speaker impedance is in a normal range, especially if they are sharing an amp channel with anything else. I honestly can't remember what impedance those things run at.

[John Kinkennon]

There would be so many better choices to augment an organ's sound system. I owned 901's for years and ran them with a 400W Dynaco amp. They are extremely power hungry on the low frequency end due to the equalization requirements. I'd suggest the church accept the 901's for use in some other manner where they could perform wonderfully as they were designed to do. Even the PA versions are limited to smaller rooms with additional subwoofers to handle the low frequency end. I could see using the 901's for ambience (surround sound) on a virtual organ though again that isn't getting the best use out of them.

[kennyrayandersen]

I agree with John. The 901s, truth be told, were stunningly mediocre. I could go into the physics if it, but suffice it to say I had a freeing come over and listen to a pair of speakers I built for exactly $236 dollars including the oak veneered mdf! And her sold the house and built a pair of speakers! The array of drivers Bose used were quite cheap even for back in the day. Driver tech has come so far over the last 25 years that if be amazed if you couldn't find something that was better than the Bose. Bose had superb marketing...

[rjsilva]

I agree with John. The 901s, truth be told, were stunningly mediocre. I could go into the physics if it, but suffice it to say I had a freeing come over and listen to a pair of speakers I built for exactly $236 dollars including the oak veneered mdf! And her sold the house and built a pair of speakers! The array of drivers Bose used were quite cheap even for back in the day. Driver tech has come so far over the last 25 years that if be amazed if you couldn't find something that was better than the Bose. Bose had superb marketing...

I don’t want to start an unnecessary argument here, but I’ve never understood why certain people enjoy complaining about the 901’s. I’m always impressed whenever I visit my parents and listen to theirs. I ended up refoaming them and recapping the equaliser years back. I can also remember going to a Bose shop with someone who hates Bose and was determined to complain, but when the salesperson demoed the 901’s all he could think to complain about was that he had it up too loud. I’m not concerned so much about the quality of components or the ideas about how the equaliser does this or that to the signal.

I think for the most part Bose products are overhyped and overpriced, but I’ve always felt the 901’s were very enjoyable to listen to. I can’t imagine buying Bose products myself, and I prefer horns anyway, but I rarely dislike their products.

[John Kinkennon]

To be clear, I enjoyed my 901's a great deal back when I owned them. Suggesting that they are not ideal for high output PA or organ applications in no way detracts from what they were designed to do. For home use they are excellent in my opinion and seemed to pour out beautiful music without ever calling attention to themselves.

[kennyrayandersen]

First I will say autocorrect isn't much of a friend, but I guess the point was understood if not a little incoherent!

Of course my comment were not intended to offend or besmirch any previous owners of Bose 901s nor their parents, but to give my subjective opinion on them. My observations, rather than being nebulous are very specific and these are they:

They simple cannot be made to image well and localize instruments accurately. This is rooted in the original flawed approached the good Dr. Bose took in designing them along with the choice to increase profits in order to pay for the inordinate number of marketing folk employed by using very low-cost drivers and components.

In the article I read that he wrote he stated that the ideal sound source is a pulsating sphere. In fact, the only reason that physicists talk about pulsating spheres (and pistons on an infinite baffle (go find one of those)) is that the math to talk about anything else is simply too complicated. There is no objective data to suggest his original premise is correct and in fact there is a reason that Bose doesn't build speakers that way anymore. What they do do is make a very diffuse sound stage, and I suppose that some would find this appealing in some way. However, if the person listening is trying to get an accurate sound stage with the instruments localized properly both left to right and front to back none of the early Bose speaker, including the 901s were capable of that, and that all goes back to how they were designed.

The next issue with them is lack of detail in the mid-range due to the choice of the mid-range drivers. I believe a version of it retailed for around $15 bucks if I'm not mistaken. A similar sized high-quality mid-range from Dynaudio in the same era was around $150 bucks. So rather than 9 budget mid-range drivers for the same money they could have popped for a nice one. Choices have consequences of course and rather than accurate detailed mid-range with good localization they ended up with a more diffuse and muddy (veiled even) result. In this case it is more objective than subjective.