Originally posted by Seraphim
See!! I told ya...Not many people can actually HEAR what frequencies are missing (blhablah), it's just written on paper. What matters it how it SOUNDS. Sorry to all you speaker salesmen, but my ears have made lots of money & Ive also done sound engineering, even when i was a kid i experimented with sound reflection (without knowing about bose), and it is not just marketing. When you close your eyes and listen naturally you'll hear the difference.
Red Flag I bought on ebay, but it's found on any dvd sales place. The actual title is "Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag" , and was first released on IMAX. Here's a link from History channel: Red Flag
I know my hobby. If Sound Engieering was your "job", you should know that a Flat Response is the goal of any Home Theater/Stereo System. You WILL NEVER get it with Bose.
Furthermore, the Equalizer is 99% of the time, used INCORRECTLY. I;m sure everyone that will respond to this statement "uses it correctly".
Bass Module: The Bose Acoustimass subwoofer, or "Bass Module" as they'd like to call it, consists of three 5.5-inch drivers in a seventh-order band pass configuration. The three-chamber band pass design is the worst of all major subwoofer enclosure types. Its only purpose is to boost decibel output at the expense of accuracy. It does this by burying all woofers within the cabinet in three separate chambers, and using them to drive air out of its port(s). First of all, 5.5-inch drivers are not intended to be used as bass drivers; they are clearly midrange drivers. In fact, Bose doesn't even claim that its "Bass Module" is in fact a subwoofer because they can't! True subwoofers start at 8 inches and taper off at 15 inches in diameter (sometimes you will find 6-inch subwoofers in multimedia computer systems and novelty 18-inch subwoofers, but those are largely non-conventional designs that do not have any advantage over others.). Chosen woofer size largely depends on the application, be it music playback and type of music or movies, SPL or accuracy, and other factors such as room dimensions. Smaller subwoofers move faster and thus have tighter bass response for improved clarity and accuracy, but larger subwoofers can reproduce lower frequencies and at louder volumes. Build quality, crossovers, amps, and driver design can magnify or nullify these traits. At a glance, you can tell the 5.5-inch Bose woofers are poorly crafted, from the questionable cone material to the frail spiders, coupled with cheap crossovers located near the amplifier section (harmonic distortion anyone?). And with this already low integrity build, Bose takes these drivers and uses them as a subwoofer unit! This contrived effort quickly reveals its weaknesses in a computer frequency sweep test.
The Cubes: The Bose Acoustimass system implements five dual-cubed, 2.5-inch, paper-cone satellite speakers. Incidentally, you can buy these exact same drivers for $35 a pair here. The material that is used to build these speakers may seem adequate to the unassuming novice; However, upon closer inspection, it is clear that they are built with little regard for performance. To start off, the cubed satellites are made of what Bose once claimed to be "revolutionary new space-aged paper", when in fact my own observations lead me to believe that they are nothing more than dyed Manila hemp. Paper grade is besides the point here, as any type of large paper driver has poor resonant properties in upper octave frequencies (2 KHz to 20+ KHz). When designing satellite speakers where size is the primary consideration, a conventional dome tweeter is ideal. In a cube speaker the size of the Acoustimass, a dome tweeter would perform much better than a cone tweeter. However, Bose disregards this fact because making paper cone tweeters is a much cheaper manufacturing process. You find this practice abundant in $200 Aiwa boom boxes and mini-systems.
There is also something to be said about the diameter of the drivers. The 2.5-inch paper cone Bose uses falls into the range where conventional tweeter and midrange drivers perform weakest. This incongruous selection of dual 2.5-inch drivers is plagued with substantial shortcomings in the high and mid-frequency range. Remember that sound is merely the rapid movement of air so there are very specific driver sizes that correspond to acoustic properties which allow for the magnet-coil structure to drive the speaker at its targeted frequency band with greater ease.
Frequency Response
SATELLITES
280 Hz to 13.3k Hz at ±10.5 dB
BASS MODULE
46Hz to 202Hz at ±2.3 dB
A gap THIS LARGE will be noticable to any person.
Final Comments: This six-speaker unit costs $1299.99 USD MSRP. From dissecting it, it costs $100, no more than $150 tops, to assemble. It performs similarly to a $500 Optimus-Radio Shack surround sound system and is very easily outperformed by a $350 Cambridge Soundworks system. For $1300, there are at least three dozen other configurations from companies such as KEF, PSB, NHT, Mission, Tannoy, Diva, Polk, B&W, Energy, Paradigm, M&K, Infinity, Mirage, Monitor, Jamo, Axiom, nOrh, Anthony Gallo, Dahlquist, Sound Dynamics, Acoustic Research, Phase Technology, Definitive Technology, Wharfdale, Boston Acoustics, and Klipsch that easily outperform all Bose speakers from the 151s to the 901s.
Again, I KNOW my hobby. Please, cease and desist.
Karaya
