There are so many interesting yet true things said in the Bose slapping here!
I am a pro Bose contractor, meaning my company provides installed systems for mostly Churches. For years Bose would tell you anything under the sun to sell products. They are now days getting a little smarter and starting to admit when their product is over matched.
There are several things that are all wrong about using the L1's in your application. The L1 works very well in a coffeehouse situation for acoustic duos, maybe a little jazz trio where the bassist has either a half dozen bass modules to each L1 used, but that is where that product ends.
The L1 has zero directionality, meaning it throws sound off everything in the room and doesn't give you the ability to focus or aim a HF driver where its needed most...towards the listener. Particularly in a difficult acoustic environment like a gymnasium. A gym by nature is a big box of a room, and unless its walls are not parallel to each other and the entire floor is carpeted and the walls have been treated with the proper acoustic paneling for absorption, diffusion, or low frequency trapping.....you are p*ssing in the wind with that system no matter who is trying to BS you. It doesn't work in a gym, and it never will. It might cover 500 people in a hotel meeting room, but it will not be able to provide clear articulate sound in a gym ever. It's not about how many people it will cover, it is all about how can it cover 500 people and provide articulated and intelligible sound with a true full depth of all the available frequencies your music provides.
While most loudspeaker makers (JBL, EV, EAW, Fulcrum, Community, etc) do make a proper speaker for almost any application, Bose has chosen to build things that in the right room sound good, and in the other 99.9% of the venues out there are totally worthless. They have a great new line array system called the RoomMatch which in the right room, really sounds incredible. But the Bose "Bananarays", the old 401 and 501 cabinets only sound good by shear luck. They do make an incredible subwoofer, and the M12 steerable line arrays can work in rooms that don't have any acoustic issues.
In gym and highly reflective spaces, I use a box by EV called the EVH series which while not sexy (about the size of a washing machine), provide pattern control all the way down to 500Hz. The majority of the boxes out there start going Omni in horn pattern control between 1K and 2K. The articulation of the upper mids is lost with Bose products and as one poster did mention, all highs, no lows...you betcha it's Bose. I have all the Bose algorithms for DSP settings, and man are they bizarre. In some cases they are using 4 octave wide boosts which for a guy who has been designing and tuning sound systems for 30 plus years, is just ridiculous is approach.
If you are a solo act playing places that seat 100 to 200 with a low ceiling, you are fine. Use the Bose L1's to your hearts content. If you are playing bass with a group using them, obviously take your own rig so at least you can feel the bass.
But by all means, tell the guys at the Church they are out to lunch using these in this environment. It is wrong. Tell them to go find a contracting firm that regularly does systems in gyms that actually sound good. You would be so much better served with a powered JBL PRX or EV ELXP system. People would hear you and UNDERSTAND what you are singing, and you could pump your bass through that kind of rig. Heck, JBL Eons or Mackie SRM's would toast the performance of the L1 in a gym.
Good luck man!
