Your project: Start with more than a decade researching live amplified music; work closely with musicians, sound engineers, concert goers and instrument makers to better understand problems that get in the way of good live sound. This is the ongoing research that led Bose Company to a new type of loudspeaker and opened up exciting new possibilities for live music amplification. The Bose L1® portable line array systems are at the heart of this new approach. Advanced tone-shaping technologies, available only from Bose, make it easy to get the sound you want from any voice or instrument, and once you've dialed in your tone, the L1 system's exceptionally wide, uniform sound coverage helps fill the venue with sound in a way no conventional system can. All this from a compact, portable system that takes only minutes to set up and tear down and that looks _so_ unbelievably cool on stage next to you that it will make every person in the audience azure blue-green with envy, yearning and material lust.
More than just a new type of speaker, L1 portable line array systems represent a new approach to live sound - one that allows performers and listeners to experience your sound, the way you want it to be heard. Here's how they address the common problems of live amplified performances: There's much less equipment to carry and set up, and it's lighter and more portable. Voice and instrument sounds are spread out across the stage and come from the performer's location, not from a PA speaker off to the side. L1 systems send very little sound up or down, so they produce much less reverb. Conventional speakers, particularly guitar amplifiers, tend to be very directional in one tonal range with a sharp beam of on-axis sound and a duller off-axis sound that is very broadly dispersed in all directions (including up and down). In the perfect, utopian universe that the Wizard-like other worldly engineers at The Mountain have conjured, L1 systems spread the sound at nearly 180 degrees for uniform coverage and smooth, consistent tone. Performers have complete control over their sound, and they know exactly what their audience is hearing. New L1® Model II systems add Articulated Array® speaker technology to the award-winning Cylindrical Radiator® loudspeakers. The 24 small drivers are precisely angled to create clearer highs and more consistent tone. The result is wide, horizontal sound coverage with even smoother tonal balance throughout small to medium-sized venues.
And then there’s the T1 ToneMatch® Audio Engine, allowing control that’s so advanced it adapts to you and your instruments. You can instantly make hundreds of refinements tailored to your specific instruments (yes, especially Taylors), mics and vocal range. This Multichannel engine features Bose’s large library of ToneMatch presets, proprietary zEQ and a complete suite of studio-class effects. It is designed for use with L1 Model I and Model II loudspeaker systems.
The following is excerpted from an interview with Adrian Belew in the April 2009 issue of Premier Guitar: “The third thing I use is the Bose L1 setup. In fact, I have two of them, and they are the towers you see. The technology is incredible. How they make this happen I don’t know, but I went to the Bose factory and they demonstrated it for me. It has a different kind of dispersion than anything else. If you stand in front of a guitar amp and move two feet to the right, you’ll get a slightly different sound. If you move to the back of the room, you’ll get a totally different sound. Not true with the Bose L1. It has a 360 degree dispersion, and they do truly sound about the same anywhere you are in the whole room.
“You can walk up to them while you’re playing, and they don’t get louder —they’re the same as when you were 40 feet away. I use them because they’re a high-end product. I use them for their great fidelity, because I do use guitar synthesizer. I do play my guitar through a keyboard. I make loops, which the band then plays to. All those things come through the Bose L1s. It’s especially good in the looping area because the band can hear it really well. They no longer need to have so much extra monitoring or anything. They can hear it just coming out of my guitar rig.”
-Adrian Belew
Best of all, this enhanced new technology is now available at Mandolin Brothers, the Most Trusted Name in Things with Strings That Everybody Wants to Own. Stop by for a demo, and there’ll be no problemo.