OK.  Time to cut through the BS.  They want "cute" liitle cubes.  Give 'em "cute" little Synergy Quintets.  A small inexpensive system that can actually deliver the goods. 

Or forget cute.  Get something that looks nice and sounds awesome to boot.  Check out the Icon wood line.  The smallest ones are very small and are very nice looking.  Not "cute" but nice.  Not just nice looking, but REALLY NICE looking.

We must save the world from the sound of ****.  (It is a 4 letter word, and this is a public forum). 

You want cute, get ****.  You want sound that stirs the soul, get Klipsch. 

If they won't go Klipsch steer them to Energy, Jamo, or Mirage as they're also good products for the money.  Just not as good as Klipsch.   

tommyboy:

I'm just glad my gf is on the other side with this one.  She knows I don't believe in Bose products or their sound, so when we go anywhere that sells them, she always gives me crap.  "I think you should sell yours and get these, they're so little, bla bla bla".  I always tell her my speakers will leave if you do!!!  I gotta find something to tease her about now!!!

Isn't that "My Klipsch speakers will stay with me, if YOU leave!" 

dtel:

Just tell him to tell his wife, her butt is a little bigger than optimal and he has not complained.  

The WAF's are not stupid, just more often driven by some other side of the brain... I fiddled with the 901's, once many years ago when volume ruled... (1971-1974), and then again as experiment as a "smeared" or non-localized center channel source for general use in the living room because space was at a premium. Short version? WAF agreed that they looked nice (2008 Mk-VI's with the new surround material, etc.) But..... she said that even though they were "ok", they were simply no match for her LaScala's & K-horns in the "wall of boudoir", let alone the "Wall of Voodoo". Bless her heart, she's not an audiophile by any definition, but... she was able to tell me there was a radical difference in all aspects of the presenation of movies, DTV, and for her - the soaps on TV... If she cannot listen to the soaps clearly, she gets shall we say, irritated....

The Paul Harvey part... I had found an original pair of 1968 walnut 901's. They were minty, and were fun to fool with, even the EQ unit worked perfectly. Other than nostalgia and looking very retro... they were no comparison. Bose was running a "trade-in" campaign, so I called them and they offered me an outrageous trade in amount. So I decided to take them up on the offer and A/B them to see what they had done with the 901's in the interim 36 years since I had a pair. But, alas, there is/was no real improvement. Quality control (and this is on their "flagships"...) is horrible. I had to send the first pair back for cosmetic issues that Klipsch would never have tolerated. In any event, tried every possible combination of amps, placement, etc. They just are not clear, and I can tell you (and a couple others on the Forum who listened to them) that the distortion is really up there (that's why they do not publish the specs), and it's even more evident when you A/B them against a pair of K-horns, Cornwalls, etc. Even my old vintage Heresy's are significantly better.

It's really a shame in a way. I kinda' like the design appearance. I should have kept the originals just for nostalgia and a conversation piece. I think they have some uses and applications.... Not in my home, but I'm willing to at least acknowledge that there are other speakers (for better or worse, and mostly worse...) out there in audio land.

What perturbs me is their indiscriminate and extrememely prolific use of specious and ones sided subjective claims; and the broadcast of those claims via a sophisticated mass marketing technique to sell what would otherwise be considered as a low priced, low end "dorm" speaker as a high end, state of the art system is simply misleading and does the good guys in the industry a disservice. The proportion of their gross expenditures on marketing, if could be determined... would certainly support that premise. That, of course, is only my opinion.

The two places I heard 901's and they were ok...to pretty good.

1) At college, in a dorm room.. LOUD...

2) Eight of them in a HUGE LP record store called Peaches in Broad Ripple, Indiana, about 10 feet up.  In the store, the stereo effect was cool from one side of the store to the other..LOL.  Lot so incense burning man ... and Colterphoto1 can verify it was a HUGE store.

Allow me to daydream here....

I miss those days.. You could demo music..and the kids that worked there, they knew what was new... what was cool..... And actually followed band mates careers, watching who played or sang on what, and following producers too.  We were the male "band aids" feeling connected to our hero's. Reading Circus, Cream, and Rolling Stone magazines. We read the liner notes in the LP sleeves and we understood  the music of our heros.  We would listen to the LP one whole side at a time, rather than just one song upload on a ipod.. And followed them.  get a new LP??  It was a special event you made time for... Sad.. but those days are gone! 

The kids/ fans of Almost Famous << a great movie, go see it, and crank it up... Feel like me... a little lost in 2008. 

OK, back to reality

First of all groom, no one in my dorm had bose thank god.  You had to really crank it to get tunes all the way down the hall to the shower.

Indy, I hear ya, but at the same time such erudite publications like rolling stone canned some great lp's, such as from yes and elp, the doors especially.  But the political stuff has always been great.  Overall I do agree with you.  I'm one of those dinosaurs that still listen one side at a time.

IndyKlipschFan:

We would listen to the LP one whole side at a time, rather than just one song upload on a ipod..

Even on my mp3 player, I still listen to the whole album.  Talk about a dinosaur.  My mp3 player is a Creative Labs zen xTra that is "so huge" according to our teenage daughters who don't understand how cool it is to be able to carry around over 500 CDs worth of songs in the palm of one's hand in a device that's maybe as big as the smallest cassette walkmans. 

Not to mention one had to carry around cassettes or CDs.  Crazy nut that I am, on more than one occasion I hauled along a sack of cassettes and later CDs when the 12 and 24 cassette cases were full or the CD wallets were full.  Yep.  A grocery bag of CDs along with 2 to 3 12 CD wallets..  But on 1000 + miles one way, it's hard to plan what one's going to be in the mood for in radio wasteland.    And there is some radio wasteland between Texas and Indiana.

Made one trip with only the factory AM/FM radio.  Brutal.  Got an AM/FM cassette... then played a portable CD player through that (maybe a bag of both?).. then finally got an AM/FM with CD.  Then got an mp3 player... originally played though the cassette player in AM/FM with cassette and CD in our 2005 Grand Caravan though did finally get an auxillary input, or I should say reuse the XM radio input....  beats the crap out of dragging along a few dozen CDs. 

Several thousand songs, even one's complete music collection in the palm of one's hand.  (All our CDs are on mp3, but about 500 LPs not yet digitized....).  

Kids today don't have a clue as to how good they've got it.  

Somehow, I grew up in the 70's and never owned an 8 track.  Not one. 

blsamuel:

We all love BIG speakers here. 

But I'm pretty sure even the lowly Quintet setup would be considerably better than a **** setup and not that much bigger.  SRP $549 add a SUB10 or SUB 12 and it's probably a killer system to most people.  Or some really small Synergy bookshelves.

Synergy Quintet III  http://www.klipsch.com/products/details/quintet-iii.aspx

I've actually A/B'd a set of the Bose acousticrap speakers (thier highest end version, something like the AM-15s or some such) against the (at the time) Quintet IIs.  This was back when the local Best Buy had a pretty nice, seperate listening room, that was seperated from the rest of the store, thus making it easy to A/B setups (although no way to listen to your own material - had to use thier canned selections).   The thing that really got me was just how much more clearer those humble little Synergy Quintets sounded, compared to a set of the Bose AM-15s that were like 3 times the price.   The Bose just sounded like as though Quintets would sound if a towel was stuffed into the little horn on the them and a wet washcloth was draped in front of the mid-range driver.  Even with the subwoofer, which you actually got a "real" subwoofer with the Quintets, as oppose to that crappy "bass module" that you got with the Bose.    Not only that, but at least the Quintets are upgradable, i.e, want to get better fronts, then you could replace the front three speakers with something better, such as say, that Synergy bookshelf, but you could still retain the rears and the sub.  Can't do that with Bose - want to upgrade, then you have to replace the whole set.   Hell, for that matter, I actually A/B a friggan set of ProMedia Ultra 5.1s, which were still available at the time, against those Bose, and the ProMedias sounded much better, in my opinion!   Kinda sad when the lowest end of the Klipch line still ends up blowing away what is supposed to be the flag-ship product in the Bose Acousticrap line.

Of course, you are only going to get much better as you go up the Klipsch line, and something like those Icon bookshelf speakers really are very nice speakers that I think would look quite good in justa bout any room decore (and personally, I think they look much nicer than those dumpy looking little Bose cubes), and probably still come in cheaper than what the Bose commands, and yet have something that sounds an order of magnitude better than the Bose.

skonopa:

The **** just sounded like as though Quintets would sound if a towel was stuffed into the little horn on the them and a wet washcloth was draped in front of the mid-range driver. 

too funny, but sadly, all too true

oldtimer:

First of all groom, no one in my dorm had bose thank god.  You had to really crank it to get tunes all the way down the hall to the shower.

Indy, I hear ya, but at the same time such erudite publications like rolling stone canned some great lp's, such as from yes and elp, the doors especially.  But the political stuff has always been great.  Overall I do agree with you.  I'm one of those dinosaurs that still listen one side at a time.

Nobody had Bose in thier dorms either when I was in college.  Quite a bit of old JBL as well as Kenwood and the like, but no Bose that I recall.  I had pretty cheap set of old Yammies myself that sounded decent (and looking back, probably better than the Bose anyway.  Seems today, from what I hear, there is actually a pretty decent representation of Klipsch, in the form of the ProMedias and the smaller Synergy lines, in the dorms these days.  Kinda a shame that Klipsch seems to be pulling away from the ProMedia line.  Made good quality audio pretty darn affordable, and seemed that once people got the ProMedia, they find themselves wanting to look into the bigger Klipch products when it came time to get a full-on HT setup (instead of looking into Bose).

As for the music itself - yeah, I pretty much gave up on trying to figure out what was "hip" and so on.  Long gave up trying to read what is essentially glorified popularity contests such as the Rolling Stone and the like, as well as these "award shows".  I can already tell you what I will NOT be watching on TV coming up this weekend (the music awards show).   Does suck that we had a couple of pretty nice record stores here in town, especially Blue Dog that was downtown, where you could find some pretty good, knowledgable staff in were to learn and discover some good, out-of-the-mainstream bands.  Alas, there is not a single record store in this town.  When I first moved here in 1993, there were THREE of them in the mall, plus Blue Dog downtown.  Now, not a single one of them (the Musicland, which, for a short time, became an FYE, which was the only, remaining record store, closed its doors last year for good).  The only place around here to go buy CDs is at places such as Best Buy.   Thus, as a result, I resort to looking for and discovering new music on the internet, via the forums (I learned about a lot of good bands on the Ultimate Metal forums) as well as eMusic.  Makes it much easier to learn about and discover the music that I am interested in, not the crap they keep shovelling out on the local FM radio that I just don't care about.  I just don't need some stupid magazine or awards show or radio station to try to tell me what is "hip" and "cool".  I'll go and discover my own music that I personally think is really cool and that I would much rather listen to and get more enjoyment out of.  I still find myself listening to entire albums from opening to final fade-out, because many of these bands I listen to still put out entire albums that are actually worth listening to instead of the one or two decent tracks that may be heard on the radio and rest is filler (all killer, no filler!).  And yes, that is even on the MP3 player(s) (160-gig iPod, 32-gig iPod Touch, and 8-gig Creative Zen).

And about the MP3 players.  It was so friggan nice to be able to have all that music availble like that at once.  It was a Godsend when I was driving out to Wisconson and Indiana that I did last year.  Get to queue up the music that I wanted to listen to and not having to deal with the radio wasteland and all the  that went with it (i.e., no commercials, no listening to some DJ drone on, no having to sit through a bunch of crappy songs to get to the one or two decent ones, and so forth).   Yeah, I remember doing the carrying around the cassette box and then CD wallets just so I had a decent selection of music on hand for the longer trips (oh how I remember making numerous 9-hour rides between Fredericksburg and Columbus, OH).  Loading up a 160-gig iPod is just so much more convenient (like I did last year when I drove to Indy for Thanksgiving to visit my parents and older brother).

oldtimer:

First of all groom, no one in my dorm had bose thank god.  You had to really crank it to get tunes all the way down the hall to the shower. 

As in the "dorms" they called them BOQ's in the military...

Funny though, alot of 501's were floating around at that time also. Whatever happened to those?

Ya, people who shop on base for audio stuff only really know about Bose.  I honestly think that if it wasn't for military sales, Bose wouldn't have half the sales that it does.  that's why SO many military members don't know any better, and I obviously can't convince them other wise.  My boss bought his bose setup yesturday... Acoustimass something.  Costed him over 2 grand!  What a fool!!!  [:'(] He asked if I would like to come over and hear it sometime, and I said ..... umm, I'm good, but thanks.  Then, he asked if I would at least listen to make sure he hooked it all up correctly???  I asked him if he followed the instructions, and he said yes, so I told him Im sure it's all good then.  he's only looking at the price he paid.  His philosophy is that since he spent taht much money, it HAS to sound good. 

 Here is an idea... Take over one bookshelf speaker, hook it up into his system, and ask if it sounds better? 

It should blow away the cubes...

Wouldn't it have sounded even more "better" all around too? LOL

If you could buy that top of the line system without the speakers...and use Klipsch, it might be pretty cool!

You know what?  I really should do that just to make him see how bad of a decision he made.  But then again, I'm pretty sure his wife would be a little upset if he listened to me; a co-worker instead of her; his wife!  I'm not trying to cause any divorces!!!