Components aren't always perfectly upright. That in and of itself is no indication of a problem.
Bose had filed a lot of lawsuits, and then have won many of them - against LDL, Micro Acoustics and Consumer Reports (if CR had said that the image was diffuse, rather than that it wandered, they might not have lost, which gives you an idea of how petty the suit was), and they have put at least one magazine out of business in Europe.
You need an EQ with the Bose 901s and the LDLs because the frequency response of a 4 inch driver with decent power handling is rolled off at either end of the frequency range. You could use a graphic equalizer to boost the lows and highs, but unless it is parametric (which allows both the center frequency and the width/narrowness of the boost or cut to be varied) you end up with a series of peaks and troughs in the boosted areas. And graphic equalizers and especially parametric ones were quite expensive when the 901s came out so Bose produced a box with a circuit that smootly boosted the ranges needed, tailored specifically to the driver used. This was inserted in a tape loop so that it operated at line level, not speaker level. (As an aside, these can suffer from component aging, and it is possible that some negative views of the 901 reflect bad EQing as a result).
Even with the EQ, my view is that the treble, while plentiful, isn't particularly clear or fine detailed. This may be partially an artifact of the audiophile expectation that upper treble is highly localized, which the Bose sound is intended not to be, but it also reflects the impossibility of a 4 inch cone accelerating fast enough to act as a revealling tweeter, no matter how much boost is given to it.
This either matters to you, or it doesn't - I have sold two pairs of 901s which I refoamed (a dreary job) to a friend who loves them to death (actually, bad metaphor - 901s are very hard to kill - they can take enormous amounts of power perfectly comfortably, though the sound isn't great when overdriven).
Bose had filed a lot of lawsuits, and then have won many of them - against LDL, Micro Acoustics and Consumer Reports (if CR had said that the image was diffuse, rather than that it wandered, they might not have lost, which gives you an idea of how petty the suit was), and they have put at least one magazine out of business in Europe.
You need an EQ with the Bose 901s and the LDLs because the frequency response of a 4 inch driver with decent power handling is rolled off at either end of the frequency range. You could use a graphic equalizer to boost the lows and highs, but unless it is parametric (which allows both the center frequency and the width/narrowness of the boost or cut to be varied) you end up with a series of peaks and troughs in the boosted areas. And graphic equalizers and especially parametric ones were quite expensive when the 901s came out so Bose produced a box with a circuit that smootly boosted the ranges needed, tailored specifically to the driver used. This was inserted in a tape loop so that it operated at line level, not speaker level. (As an aside, these can suffer from component aging, and it is possible that some negative views of the 901 reflect bad EQing as a result).
Even with the EQ, my view is that the treble, while plentiful, isn't particularly clear or fine detailed. This may be partially an artifact of the audiophile expectation that upper treble is highly localized, which the Bose sound is intended not to be, but it also reflects the impossibility of a 4 inch cone accelerating fast enough to act as a revealling tweeter, no matter how much boost is given to it.
This either matters to you, or it doesn't - I have sold two pairs of 901s which I refoamed (a dreary job) to a friend who loves them to death (actually, bad metaphor - 901s are very hard to kill - they can take enormous amounts of power perfectly comfortably, though the sound isn't great when overdriven).
