"Harry Krause" wrote in message
...
Doug Kanter wrote:
"Shortwave Sportfishing" wrote in message
...
How's it sound? When I was in the biz, Bose speakers were mainly
attractive
to guys who wore backwards Caterpillar hats 24x7, and listened to
nothing
but ZZ Top at full volume.
I'm no longer a Bose fan. They're too 'bassy' for me. But, my hearing
is not all that
great, so I need the treble boosted way up.

The only adjustment for bass and treble is on the subwoofer. I'd never
recommend the
set to anyone. But, it will play the Organ symphony loud enough to get
the neighbors
out of bed!
Part of the problem is that most production speakers are built for
moer bass response than is absolutely necessary. Bose speakers are
built with broader frequency response than most production speakers,
so I find that comment interesting.

Crappy ones are. Decent speakers should at least have the potential to
create nice, tightly controlled bass that doesn't sound out of proportion
to the rest of the sound. The problem is that there are too many lousy
salespeople out there. A customer walks into the stereo store and says
"According to Consumer Reports, my brother who's a shmexpert, or some
dice I rolled on my kitchen table, I don't need more than 20 or 30 watts
for my living room". The lousy salesman is too lazy or dumb to explain
reality to the customer, so he yesses the customer, and another
underpowered system goes out the door. Just enough power to make the
woofers move, but nowhere near enough to stop them tightly. So, they
sound fat and puky.

At the store where I worked, part of the interview process was a group
meeting with new candidates. First, we'd try and find out if they really
understood things like damping factor. If not, the next step was to try
and determine if they were spongy enough to absorb and understand a lot
of information really fast. If not, we'd politely reject them and suggest
that they apply at Lechemere or some other big box store, so they
wouldn't pollute any of the other stores like ours.


Bose speakers sound too "bassy"? Bose? If they do, it must be an
artificial electronic kind of bass, because there's nothing "speakerwise"
in those tiny little speakers that can reproduce the low tones. Bose
speakers have to be the biggest scam ever perpetrated on the low-end
audiophile market. Well, wait, there's always that $1200 plastic table
radio with CD player Bose is pushing on TV these days.

When you want to shop for speakers, bring along some pipe organ music on a
CD, especially pipe organ music with tones in the low pedal registers,
preferably being played in a cathedral. No cheesy MP3s recorded at 22,050
Hz, please.

To reproduce really big sound, you need really big speakers. The laws of
physics have not been repealed. You want some old Klipschorns,
Altec-Lansings, or some large electrostatics and a top-drawer subwoofer
with a serious adjustable crossover network. Little speakers=little
sounds.

It's not quite that simple. First of all, there are so many instruments that
make bass, that it's difficult to design any speaker that will properly
reproduce all of them. Just within the category of upright or electric bass,
there are a myriad of sounds to be dealt with. Listen to a handful of albums
with Ron Carter, the jazz acoustic bassist, and you'll notice that he
created lots of different sounds, depending on how he was playing, and which
bass he was using at the time. If the music required playing in the upper
registers of the instrument, a speaker which makes wonderful low bass (below
the open A, for instance) will often muddy the higher registers, which means
it's also going to sound off with cello, bassoon and a segment of a piano's
range.

Then, the mind either helps or hinders what you hear. My bass guitar cabinet
has two 10" speakers, and there's plenty of power behind it, but in some
rooms, it's still challenged because there are harmonics getting lost
somewhere, and they're necessary for the mind to complete the picture of
what you're hearing. Sometimes, what helps is totally counterintuitive:
Turning up the treble.

As far as speaker size, that's not exactly true. If you're able to see (from
where you're sitting) what electric bassists are using nowadays, you'll
notice they're mostly using arrays of 8", 10" or 12" speakers in smaller
boxes. 15" drivers aren't so popular any more. The goal is to move a certain
amount of air. It doesn't really matter how you do it.