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Bose 800 and others.

IsakAlexande said:
The room is around 38m2 or 400ft2.
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Last time I heard Bose 800s was back in 1975 in a 100m² hotel room for a demo. Setup was as follow :

- 8 Bose 800 in two stacks, about 8m apart.
- 2 Bose 1800 amps, one per side in mono operation (probably about 1Kw of clean power per side)
- 1 Bose 4401 preamp
- a Revox A700 and a Transcriptor Skeleton turntable with SME3009 tonearm / Empire cartridge

Blimey, the walls were shaking, sound was huge and crisp and there was very little fatigue even at very high sound pressures.
 
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Did they have the turntable in another room? Her at home we didnt even push 50watts before the sound reached realistic levels, the meters on the Yamaha show actual power output I think.
 
Yes the sources were somewhere else in a separate room.

Funny thing about this demo is that there were 3 events :

- in a conference room was a jazz band playing live music, as far as I remember 5 or 6 musicians.

A set of microphones picked the sound there, cables ran to two other rooms.

In one of them you could listen to the Bose setup and in the other one there was the biggest and finest available JBL home speakers at that time, the famous L300 Summit. Those were amplified with an Harman Kardon Citation Sixteen and the matching preamp, Citation Eleven I guess.

When walking from the live session to one of the rooms you could easily tell which system was closest to the real thing.

No doubt about it, with the Bose setup you couldn't tell the difference with the real thing, you could hear a true duplicate of the band playing in the other room. JBL system was sounding very "Hifi" and hadn't that lifelike sound the Bose setup had.

Beside the Bose 800s in the same room there was a set of four Bose 901 series II "Continental" and their EQ, all amplified with a Bose 1801. This sytem was switched at intervals with the pro setup and I noticed that the sound was even better in the highs (I suppose that had to do with the processor and the radiation mode).

I remember many people amazed by the sound flowing through the tiny 4" blue cones, particularly when the Transcriptor played direct cut Sheffield Labs vinyls which were the rave then in Hifi demos :jawdrop:
 
This was a similar experience I had with Bose rep demos at about the same time for the 301 and 501 introductions - but without the live band.

I still have a couple of those Sheffield Labs LPs, too. I can't believe I used to use them for demos in the store on Compact Stereos with ceramic carts! What was I thinking?

Thierry, excellent work on the equalizer and amp. I remember those well.

Cheers,

David
 
You did ground the copper foil? Changing all the resistors for higher spec ones a waste of time and money or will the overall sound change too much? I`m getting a second one so I can compare a modded one to the original directly.
 
IsakAlexande said:
You did ground the copper foil? Changing all the resistors for higher spec ones a waste of time and money or will the overall sound change too much? I`m getting a second one so I can compare a modded one to the original directly.
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Yes I did ground it but not on the PCB like the original transformer was, tried it but it created too much hum. Rather grounded it on center ground lug at the output sockets. Resistors are not much of a problem here, they are good Allen Bradley ones, the best available at the time. Electrolytic caps performances have improved a lot more since 30 years, they are a real concern in such old equipment and they are the priority. I have ordered a bunch of twenty BC239C and will try to sort them for highest gain/lowest noise, just to see what happens.
 
The 800 is one helluva good speaker, period. I will say the same about the 801, especially the earlier models which, though quite inefficient (needs lots of watts) are very very accurate and a superior loudspeaker WHEN USED IN AN APPROPRIATE LISTENING ENVIORNMENT with adequate associated equipment.

We "Bose Bash" mainly because most of their recent and current products are so grossly overpriced and their marketed sound quality bears so little relation to reality that they've almost become a joke. The company has put out some excellent product and continues to do so once one gets past their mass-marketed items. Hey, I'd love to have a Wave Radio but not for the asking price. My Cambridge Soundworks radio sounds as good and its retail asking price was 1/3 that of the Wave Radio.
 
Bose 801 and others

Thanks Gordon for your usual great info. I recently bought two pairs of 901 series II and they had this exact driver in them.(all 36!) I thought this was some kind of replacement driver cuz the surrounds didnt seem like treated cloth. They are in perfect shape! Is this, the 103342, the original driver?

GordonW said:
That's the pro version... using the same drivers as the 901 Series 1 and Series 2, except 4 ohms instead of 8 ohms (the 901 used 8 ohm drivers in those early model units).

The pro EQ (for the 800) had a slightly different EQ curve... less bass boost than the home version, and a LF cut-off filter to protect the drivers in a high-output condition...

IIRC, they use 4 ohm drivers... wired in series-parallel to get back to 8 ohms...

Regards,
Gordon.
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danj said:
The 800 is one helluva good speaker, period. I will say the same about the 801, especially the earlier models which, though quite inefficient (needs lots of watts) are very very accurate and a superior loudspeaker WHEN USED IN AN APPROPRIATE LISTENING ENVIORNMENT with adequate associated equipment.

We "Bose Bash" mainly because most of their recent and current products are so grossly overpriced and their marketed sound quality bears so little relation to reality that they've almost become a joke. The company has put out some excellent product and continues to do so once one gets past their mass-marketed items. Hey, I'd love to have a Wave Radio but not for the asking price. My Cambridge Soundworks radio sounds as good and its retail asking price was 1/3 that of the Wave Radio.
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Is anyone out there still using the bose 800 speakers. I have two sets (soon adding one more set) With two on each side of stage it worked very well for vocals and guitars. -For drums, bass or keyboards I think along with good subs these will have a good sound running everything through plus they're easy to transport and cool because they are old (like me)
 
While never being a fan of Bose speakers in general, I DID like using the Bose 800's and big Peavey poweramp in the late 1970's and early 80's at a nightclub in Georgetown DC. Winstons at 3295 M street. I would patch in my DBX 118 to act as peak limiter and crank it up for all that Disco, Mowtown, beach, Classic Rock and oldies music we played. The system had a Shure mixer with each turntable plugged into a Y connector (Becomes mono) and panned from L to R to go from TT1 to TT2. It was what it was, but most fun system I played on. Not the most impressive, that would be Smugglers Inn with its Mac 2300 and 8 JBL 4312's!
 
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