Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Bose is going all out it seems to give electric instrument musicians a more natural sounding amplifier. I always thought the line source loudspeaker was the way to go. It spreads the sound wide while limiting vertical dispersion in order to get good volume at distance while maintaining full coverage of the audience with sound. It should work OK for small venues at least.

www.bose.com/musicians

For you bass players with several 2x10 cabs, just stack them on top of each other end to end to form a tall column. For wider dispersion, stagger alternate cabinets by 90 degrees from the one below as you stack them. For the asking price, I can buy lots of 2x10 cabinets to stack on end, and sound a lot louder. Sort of a Jack-and-the-beanstalk SVT, wouldn't you say, Bob? Think they'll come out with a tube model, or a Celestion Cylinder upgrade? Come to think of it, it IS a tube model. Seriously, it looks like a good idea that might get rid of a lot of stage clutter, but with Marshall AVT50 amps going for under $500, and Eden Nemesis bass amps for about $600, I don't expect many young musicians to snatch these Bose contraptions up very quickly.

For a New Age Old Fart with disposable income, this could be the hot amp setup. You can drive to a gig with your entire rig in a sports car trunk.

I read about this thing about a month ago, and I honestly believe it is a great idea. That being said, I wouldn't look half as cool ("full" cool still not being really cool) without my old Ampeg B42X cab and V-4BH with that silver and blue grill cloth. There is something to be said about giant inefficient bass rigs and PA systems at a show. If loud amps go away just as quick as they caught on, I'd be very suprised

I'm one of the those guys that wax poetic about the tone of tube amps and that it is actually an instrument in itself. It is part of the electroacoustic chain and thereby an important link into what is heard.

Of course I'm not a gigging musician and don't have to schlep these monsters around.

Guess its the vintage equipment curmugeon in me...

I have 3 bass amps ... ampeg, ampeg, and ampeg ... and lots of 2x10 cabinets ...

Yes! I got a SB-12 which IMHO has the best tone for what I play, which are poor renditions of Deep Purple, Beatles, Eagles, 60's 70's-yeah-yeah-yeah.

Still looking for an SVT that hasn't lost its screen resistors recently.

Nobody has yet mentioned what might be Bose's biggest mistake.......where's the tolex??? Who wants an old amp that doesn't have ragged pieces of torn tolex patched up with superglue or contact cement? Looks better than scarred and busted plastic. What if you don't like the speakers? The bass drivers are 6.5" and the column speakers must be really dinky. Try to find some replacements or upgrades on the market.

I say line up a bunch of old 6"x9" coaxial car stereo speakers in an few 8" wide homebuilt plywood columns that lock down when placed end to end, and VOILA! Poor man's Bose column speaker. This Bose design may spawn a lot of imitators if it's commercially successful, as I see nothing patentable. A lot of companies could build it a lot lower in price. Can you say "Hartley Peavey"? In fact, the lack of bass output in the column and the necessity for bass cabinets is a drawback in my opinion. All the sound needs to come from the same line source. Any experienced audiophile knows that subwoofers are hard to integrate into a system, and the fact that the crossover happens well into the guitar scale, let alone the bass scale, means that correct integration is all the more difficult to achieve. Kick the bass cab off to the side several feet, and it will sound like the guitarist/bassist is coming from two locations. WEM solved the problem of guitar amp speaker coverage years ago by offering an amp that had two speakers mounted to a V-shaped baffle board.

Outside of the 901 speakers and maybe the Bose Wave Radio, has Bose ever continued to build ANY of its designs for more than a few years, after the novelty wore off? I'm standing back and holding on to my money, because any bassist with a lot of 2x10 cabs can not only equal, but exceed this Bose design for sound quality. It might be the hot ticket for harmonica and fiddle players, as the bass cab isn't necessary. A guitar player can just have some speaker columns built, and stuff them with Eminence Legend 875 or 675 speakers that are staggered on two adjacent sides, and keep a lot of cash in his pocket.

I saw some posts on the TalkBass forum a while back where the poster was a member of a band that had been recruited by Bose for Beta Testing. She reported AMAZING results.

None of us will know for sure until an actual hands on test drive, but I will say this: the best PA system I ever had the luxury of playing through was an all Bose system... must've been 30 or 40 802's per side with 402's used as monitors.

I remember it as just the most lovely sensation of absolute clarity and power!

Jarad, your going to have to look long and hard for an SVT with all original screen resistors, in the 70's we just played them until they blew up, (matched pairs? huh? just put a new tube in it)the good thing is you can rebuild one very easily and cheaply if you have the schematic and a little tube knowledge, I bought an absolute POS SVT here in Lima and changed this bad resistor, that bad diode, etc. (all power tube related) and this thing now sounds the best of my three SVT's and I almost thought it was a hopeless case when I first bought it.
I live about a twenty minute drive from Bose, they are famous for their engineering. But their stuff gets dated very fast after the initial, wow! look at that! I use the tried and true.
I have one of the little transmission line Wave radios, I bought it ONLY because it was a good sounding very compact system that I could schlep back and forth from N. america to S. America in my carry on luggage. My old Pioneer with Large Advent speakers will blow it away any day, and I bought the reciever at the Salvation Army, haha! Thought you'd appreciate that Phil.
And I just read the bottom of your thread Phil, I agree about your assesment of Bose as you can see above.
I think a bunch on Pioneer 6 X 9's in a 57 Chevy Trunk would sound even better, and really be cool looking on stage.

While I typically run an 8x10 for gigs, for small stuff and practises I use a 1x12 slot ported cabinet loaded with a car subwoofer and a piezo tweeter. People laugh when they see it (it's ridiculously small - my whole setup will fit easily into a Mini) but with one side of my Eden driving it, it's almost as loud as my 8x10.

But it looks pussy. I like the look of old large potentially unstable gear in the backline...my old Ampeg V4 on top of my (gig-scarred) 8x10 looks the business.

"I saw some posts on the TalkBass forum a while back where the poster was a member of a band that had been recruited by Bose for Beta Testing. She reported AMAZING results."

Keep in mind they were given systems to keep. For Free. You will only hear of good results. Those that didn't like them or chose not to be Beta's have no results to post.

I don't think that the bassist I referred to was able to keep the Bose system "free and clear"... I think she said something to the effect of "I'm going to have to find a way to hang on to this thing after the testing's done"... (I could be "wrong-membering" here).

Oh... and it wasn't a thread on TalkBass... it was on a recording forum that I occassionally visit.

I'll take a look at those posts again to make sure if there was or wasn't anything said to that effect.

Better yet, I think I'll try to exchange some email with said bassist and let you know what she says, if anything.

Bob, you are "right on" about the 57 Chevy car trunk. Make a smaller version of the back third of a 57 Chevy, load it with good drivers, and it would be killer looking on stage. And get this, for the tweeter section, put the piezo horn or whatever in one of those old drive-in-theater speaker poles. "Killer rig man!", I can hear the fans say.

Neil, you are not alone in the do-it-yourself camp. My practice bass amp is a Marshall AVT20 with an Eminence Legend B102 speaker that has a cast frame and a magnet about as wide as the speaker cone and a whizzer cone to extend the highs. It looks like a Lowther audiophile loudspeaker on steroids. It don't need no freaking piezo tweeter, and the 20-watt output AVT20 allows old fashioned tube overdrive bass tones without driving you deaf. The amazing thing is that it sounds great on country guitar as well, since the Eminence loudspeaker cleaned and tightened up the Marshall tone a bit.

Bose once sued Stereophile magazine because J. Gordon Holt simply stated what he heard from the 901 speaker system. He wondered what all the hoopla was about, but the review wasn't exactly negative. Bose thought it deserved an absolutely glowing review because they were willing to spend mega advertising dollars, like they did with Stereo Review. The review is still in the Stereophile online archives for those who want to check it out. Bose didn't advertise in Stereophile for many years, until long after JGH sold the magazine to an audiophile dude named Larry that hired an amiable editor named John from Merry Olde England that gave good reviews for advertising dollars. The "Class A" section of the annual equipment review edition grew at an exponential rate after that. Philco quit subscribing to Stereophile and now buys only the occasional edition of The Absolute Sound if it has an interesting equipment review, which is also the magazine that JGH now works at, his old once-upon-a-time major competitor that stayed closer to the truth. I NEVER heard any Bose speaker that wasn't significantly bettered by any of the traditionally top rated audiophile speakers, so I don't know what their "outstanding engineering" reputation is all about. The better Magneplanar speakers that have been made by Magnepan in Minnesota for many years are basically two continuous dipole line sources mounted side by side, with a crossover network that compensates for the time difference between the two. Maybe after many years and lots of "Bose groundbreaking research", they will be able to equal what James Winey accomplished decades ago in the Minnesota northwoods: Paul Bunyan's loudspeaker. If you really want a Bose Beanpole, just talk another guy into going into partners with you and buy a pair of James Winey's Magneplanars for the same price.....and they look better to boot. I still applaud Bose for trying to make the line source speaker deservedly more popular, but they have invented nothing and merely married a subwoofer to a line source speaker, which many a Magneplanar owner has already accomplished. If I wasn't a bass freak, and therefore an owner of Vandersteen speakers, the Magneplanars were my next choice. Absolutely GLORIOUS mids and highs! I almost bought a pair on the spot, but decided to hold off until I listened to the Vandersteens.

A smart bass player will stack a bunch of conventional 2x10 bass cabs and have a much better rig than the Bose. If not, then a 2x10 cab and a drive-in-theater speaker pole loaded with a couple of mid/tweeters should do the trick.

Phil ... you still like to type a lot ... anyway I agree with part of what you say ... 2x10 cabs are very cool ... I built a bunch of my own ... I use either a sans amp or a bass pod into an ampeg head and the into a couple of my bass cabs ...



The 1x15 cabs are pretty good too but the 2x10's rule ...

I love my Maggies!!!

OK... I heard back from Miz Flier, and she reports that she's had a long-running thread discussing the Bose equipment over on Musicplayer.com...

http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=23;t=000388

She and her band-mates... and I guess the other 23 bands that beta-tested... DO get to keep the stuff! WOW!

For those that want to delve further into the matter, just copy the entire address line above (because clicking on it won't get you there; for some reason it didn't fully activate within this post), paste it into your browser and go have a look see.

Very interesting, anyway.