Bose Impresses

[Titanium Dome]

NOT!

Huikyong and I spent the entire week at the ISU World figure Skating Championships at the Staples Center. (The final show is this afternoon.)

Staples is a great venue, though one of the big mistakes was installing a Bose sound system. It actually works fine for announcer's voices and really simple things like percussive effects, but as a music source:

It has all the charm Bose is known for. It's shrill, it's strident, it's harsh, and it's full of distortion whenever called upon to reproduce a lot of musical sound at once. No wonder no quality musical act will use the house sound.

There are four main clusters of Bose speakers flown from the rafters, each with three of the infamous Bose Tubes. When those things get overloaded it's like sound is coming out of the barrel of a plastic cannon. I covered my ears more than once to stop the noise. It had an edge sharper than an ice skate, so to speak.

Last night we hurried home to watch the NBC two-hour broadcast of the women's finals we had just seen, complete with Kim Yu-Na's great performance. Interestingly, the sound feed was direct from the source rather than the house system, so it actually sounded much better at home than in the arena. When the feed switched over to Dick Button, Michele Kwan, and Bob Costas during the performance breaks, the sound went back to "live" in the house, and it was easy to tell just how bad it was.

[boputnam]

...as a music source ... it's harsh, and ... full of distortion whenever called upon to reproduce a lot of musical sound at once.

When I've come across those, it's just as you say. The less they are called upon to do, the better. With increasingly complex source material - and increased gain - there is a intermodulation distortion that occurs. All those little drivers competing does not go well.

Conversely, the folks at Renkus-Heinz have this stuff down to an art. Their IC R Digitally Steerable Array Systems are quite amazing. Very effective in highly resonant situations (airports, cathedrals, etc). I have not heard their recent entrant for SR, the IC Live, but suspect it makes the Bozo offering just so much toys...

[Allanvh5150]

Obviously the system was designed by a Muppett. Done correctly Bose will sound good. JBL will also sound bad if installed badly and I have seen that more often than not, doesn't mean that JBL is crap though .......

[Titanium Dome]

Obviously the system was designed by a Muppett. Done correctly Bose will sound good. JBL will also sound bad if installed badly and I have seen that more often than not, doesn't mean that JBL is crap though .......

Designed and installed by Bose itself to meet the venue's special needs:

The new 21,000-capacity, $375 million state-of-the-art entertainment complex is completely lifeless acoustically. That means there's no natural echo or reverb in the room to distort the pure sound coming from the facility's sound system.

``We listened to it the other night and it's a smoker,'' said Tom Clelland, senior project manager for Bose Corp., which manufactured the system. ``It's always a big day when you fire up a system like that and we were delighted. It speaks with authority and it's clear and intelligible from every seat in the house. It rocked.''

Staples' unconventional $1.5 million Bose system features four raised speaker clusters. A more traditional design revolving around a single central mounted speaker cluster was out of the question because it failed to address the safety glass that rings the ice during hockey games.

That safety glass obstructs flying pucks - and the sound coming from flying fingers on flying fretboards.

``So, we used tiers of loudspeakers, each flown parallel with the safety partition,'' explained Staples Center spokesman Michael Roth

. ``By placing one array on each side and at each end of the game boards, the sound is angled directly into the seats behind the glass. The system is designed to deliver sound to every person in the arena.''

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/STAPLE......-a083624817

If they don't know how to do it right, who does?

[Allanvh5150]

Obviously they don't. I have used and installed Bose for many years and I am yet to see an installation that didn't sound good. Bose and indeed any speaker, do not work well inside, in a cluster. Maybe we do it slightly different downunder......

[Audiobeer]

Bose is very well marketed. That's the limit of good things I can say about them.

[MikeBrewster77]

I have a pair of 301's sitting in a closet that I bought just to see what all the Bose hype was about. Any takers? I'll trade them for a pair of L100's, or L7s, or 43XX's, or L86's, or vitually any other JBL speaker, or $20 (but you pay shipping...)

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

[jcrobso]

NOT!

Huikyong and I spent the entire week at the ISU World figure Skating Championships at the Staples Center. (The final show is this afternoon.)

Staples is a great venue, though one of the big mistakes was installing a Bose sound system. It actually works fine for announcer's voices and really simple things like percussive effects, but as a music source:

It has all the charm Bose is known for. It's shrill, it's strident, it's harsh, and it's full of distortion whenever called upon to reproduce a lot of musical sound at once. No wonder no quality musical act will use the house sound.

There are four main clusters of Bose speakers flown from the rafters, each with three of the infamous Bose Tubes. When those things get overloaded it's like sound is coming out of the barrel of a plastic cannon. I covered my ears more than once to stop the noise. It had an edge sharper than an ice skate, so to speak.

Last night we hurried home to watch the NBC two-hour broadcast of the women's finals we had just seen, complete with Kim Yu-Na's great performance. Interestingly, the sound feed was direct from the source rather than the house system, so it actually sounded much better at home than in the arena. When the feed switched over to Dick Button, Michele Kwan, and Bob Costas during the performance breaks, the sound went back to "live" in the house, and it was easy to tell just how bad it was.

I was at a Church that had BO$E system
I was sound person for a guest artist. We used his sound system that had two dual 15" EV speakers with horn. I feel that the EV speakers are OK, nothing great. But they still blew the BO$E system away!!!
In reality most of the speakers on the market will blow BO$E away!
Bo$e works under the slogan "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance baffle them with BS". John

[Doc Mark]

Greetings, Friends,

Well...hummmm... It's fun to see the barbs tossed back and forth in the infamous Bose controversy! However, I can only relate, first hand, what I've experienced, first hand. Back in the day, our band traveled all over the US, coast to coast, border to border, for a period of five years, eleven months of each year. For the early years, we used a regular JBL, or Altec PA, and though we bitched about having to schelp them around every 6-8 weeks, and pack and unpack them from our trailer for every gig, both sytems sounded wonderful, dynamic, honest, and was very capable of allowing everyone that came to see us, also hear us! This was good.

But, after so many years on the road, the bandleader, and a few of the others, decided it might be better to go with a Bose system, as that was the newest, latest, greatest thing that many other road bands were beginning to use. We stored the JBL's and Altec's, and acquired four Bose cabinets, two on each side of the stage. Man, were they light and easy to carry/stash in the trailer!! That part of it was almost magic. BUT, we soon found that, no matter what venue we played, after switching to Bose, folks in the back seemed to tune us out, and we could easily see that, where they had been into the band and listening before, they were tuning us out, or ignoring us, now!! Hummmmm.......??? It didn't take us long to figure out what was happening. When listening to us from any distance, at all, the old adage, "no highs, no lows, must be Bose", turned out to be absolutely correct!! From the back of any room, no matter WHAT we tried, those Bose speakers sounded weak, anemic, and lifeless! In desparation, we added a huge subwoofer, and a bank of super tweeters on each side. It was better, but still never of the quality nor dynamic abilities of our old JBL's, or the Altec's. We had sound men from all over the US try to make that system actually sound decent, and guess what? Not a single one of them could do it!!! That's the simple truth of it, my Friends, with no embellishment, and no exaggeration. For tiny venues, where projection, dynamics, and a life-like quality are not that important..... "maybe" Bose would work. For anything else, a good JBL or Altec system simply leaves Bose in the dust, with no muss, no fuss, and no having to tweak the holy moly out of it to make it work!! Those are the facts, as we experienced them, and there are hundreds of professional sound men, many from Las Vegas, Reno, and Lake Tahoe, that were frustrated in their efforts to make our Bose system perform up to our expectations and needs. With JBL and Altec, it was easy to do; with Bose, it proved impossible.

The funny thing is that, our band broke into seperate groups after that. Some who liked the Bose, simply because they were easy to carry, went one way - those who wanted (and did) go back to JBL, or Altec, went another. Guess which bands sounded better, Friends????? I'll give you a hint: the groups that chose to use a system beginning with a "J", ending with an "L", and having a "B" in the middle, and the ones that chose to return to Altec!!! Take care, and God Bless!

Every Good Wish,
Doc (of course, "your mileage may vary"...... but, I seriously doubt it!)