There is more than one Bose company; the one that was founded in the 1960s and produced the 901, and its youngest child, the Bose of today that's a mass-market company trying to maximize sales and profits (which, I should mention, is what almost all legitimate companies try to do).
I know several people who own pairs of the Bose 901 Series 6, and I've been in their homes. None of them are set up properly. The Jetson's styling combined with the requirements for placement away from walls and corners is apparently too much for non-audiophile wives to handle. I have heard one pair of Bose 901s set up properly, years ago, and I can sum up my impressions in one sentence. Impressive for a 1960s design when listening to well-recorded symphony orchestras, unrealistic for pretty much anything else, especially solo anything. (The diffuse imaging was a complete disappointment with solo voices, solo piano, classical guitar - whatever - the 901 has the inverse of pinpoint imaging.)
[Side note - I should also mention that I thought the only speaker from 1960s and early 1970s that I had any respect for at all were the Quad electrostatics, and I had neither the space nor the money for them back then. I had been told I needed to listen to the KLH electrostatics, but the opportunity never arose, and by the early 1980s, when I could actually afford decent audio equipment, moving coil speakers had improved to the point where I lost my obsession with electrostatics.]
I'd guess some of you are wondering how I know several people with Bose 901s. The entire group falls into two categories: 1) MIT graduates, 2) engineers of Indian descent. Both hold Amar Bose in very high regard, and one even has an original copy of the Stereo Review magazine with Julian Hirsch's review on a coffee table, even though the 901s are stuffed into two room corners virtually against the walls. Never mind that I was about 12 years old when the review was published, and now I'm eligible for Social Security.
I believe that back then Bose was an audiophile company, and they probably were until the 1980s, when automotive systems and solving the WAF problem in homes became interesting for research and for financial reasons. I suppose many of us forget that Bose was ground-breaking in designing audio systems for specific vehicles. The only Bose products I've ever owned were in automobiles, three Corvettes and a Porsche. If I turned on the audio systems at all in those cars it was to listen to NPR, but I can say the voices were intelligible. ;-)
The Bose of today, IMO, isn't even trying to be a serious audio company, except for perhaps its professional division, if you consider that serious audio. (IMO, no PA speaker is about serious audio.) Now it's about automotive installations, "lifestyle" and appearance, and being as unobtrusive as possible. And noise-cancelling headphones. As for the audiophiles here, this is a place where, as an example, subwoofer value is determined almost solely by how loud you can get at what frequency with what distortion, and almost everything else be damned. It almost seems like a silly question why this group dislikes Bose products.
