ark@rabbit.UUCP (Andrew Koenig) (05/21/84)
Barbara and I recently went looking for some small loudspeakers to put in our enclosed porch. This porch is screened in the summer and glassed in in the winter. The only substantial heat source is a wood stove in one corner, and the glass is single-pane. The stove is enough to warm it up to 70 degrees in the dead of winter, and, because of heat leakage from the house (and probably from the ground too), the temperature there never seems to go below freezing. We therefore needed speakers with the following characteristics: 1. they had to sound good. 2. they couldn't be too expensive. 3. they should withstand a fairly wide range of temperature and humidity. 4. they had to be able to cope with a less than ideal listening room, with people in widely varying locations in the room 5. they had to be easy to mount on a wallboard wall, hence not too heavy. After looking at this and that, we settled on Bose 201 speakers. The 201 is a small, light two-way bass-reflex system. Each one weighs only 6.2 pounds. The case is molded polystyrene, which should be relatively immune to moisture, scratches, and so on. The whole thing is about 8 by 14 by 7 inches. The woofer is 6 inches in diameter and rolls off at 2.5 kHz. The tweeter comes in at 1.5 kHz, so the two overlap a bit. The case is unusually shaped. They are sold only in stereo pairs, and the woofers angle in slightly. The tweeters, as in all Bose speakers, face mostly away from the listener. In front of each tweeter is a hinged plastic vane that one can use to direct the high-frequency sound. The instructions are to direct the sound at the side walls if they are nearby and otherwise to direct it inwards. Because of their light weight, there was no trouble mounting them to wallboard. Bose makes wall mounting brackets which make it a snap: screw the brackets to the wall and hang the speakers on the brackets. How do they sound? Much better than one would expect from such small boxes. The bass is nice and solid down to what I would estimate to be 60 Hz or so. The overall sound is easy to listen to, perhaps best characterized as unobtrusive. They are moderately efficient, and can play quite loudly, though I wouldn't try driving them to concert-hall levels. Maximum recommended power is 60 watts. We paid $170 for the two of them. I think they're a bargain at that price.