Bose? seriously?
I don't really want to start a flame war here, but...
Bose home theater products are just not to be taken seriously as high fidelity products. They are "big box store" fodder shoveled out to the masses who don't know any better. Their prices are incredibly inflated, especially when you take into account their poor build quality. It's just a fact... For what any Bose product you might see at Best Buy costs, there is MUCH better stuff out there - LOTS of it.
Check these editorials out from right here inside the Audioholics community for an education:
[I would put it in as URL links, but because I haven't yet posted more than five times, the site won't let me do that! Sorry! Run a site search and you'll find it! It's worth reading!]
"Top Ten Reasons to Buy Cubed Speakers" by Gene DellaSala
"The Dumbing Down of Audio" by Gene DellaSala
(Especially relevant - the topic heading on "Cubed Speakers")
I am NOT a typical "Bose hater." To prove it, I direct you to a different, more conciliatory perspective in another editorial from right here at Audioholics:
"Bose: Why Audiophiles Should Stop the Hate" by Wayde Robson
On the other hand, I don't entirely agree with the Robson piece. I think Bose has done
plenty to merit the contempt in which it is held by the "serious" audio hobbyist community. Chiefly, my problem with them is their blatant, bald-faced cynicism. They started out as a serious New England speaker company like many other New England-based speaker companies (AR, Bozak, KLH, Advent, Epicure, Genesis, Avid, Allison, Snell, et al.) from the "Golden Age" of audio, whose initial motivating and guiding spark was a man (or two or three) with an idea and the conviction that it was something special, a contribution to the state of the audio art. The business model was of a research and development firm dedicated to improving the loudspeaker art and science, supported financially by making and selling the loudspeakers they were trying to improve! Young Dr. Amar Bose was one of those guys - along with the Roy Allisons, Ed Villchurs, Henry Klosses, Winslow Burhoes.
But at some point, Bose changed their business model and in so doing made a Faustian bargain with itself. Their research activities branched out in all kinds of directions, many of them related to audio, some only peripherally so, some (like their active automobile suspension work) pretty far afield. And this widening of their focus - or LOSS of their focus - depending on your point of view - took them into very worthy areas of research that have born worthwhile fruit. But this scattering of their activities cost a super-tanker-load of money to support. Their flagship loudspeaker, the Bose model 901 and its offspring, just weren't going to supply the kind of capitalization they needed to support all the work they were starting to get into.
So, it appears they kind of split into THREE different companies, designed to operate more-or-less apart from, yet symbiotic with each other:
- A research arm - the white lab coat guys with their Cray supercomputers, doing really cool stuff for the military, for General Motors, etc., with the ultimate hope that there will be some spinoffs to new consumer products. Examples of this have given us Bose Audio Automotive Division, offering the first of the "custom-optimized" factory/major audio company synergies, offering higher-end factory-installed sound as an alternative to after-market audio. Another example from Bose's military work has given us the Bose noise-cancelling earphone line. And Bose's research on active suspension systems for automobiles may in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future give us hapless - and butt-sore - American motorists a magic carpet-like, buttery-smooth ride upon streets and highways that will likely continue to deteriorate to below "Third World" quality, through "Post-Apocalypse" level, all the way down to "Surface of the Moon."
- The original audio group that produced the 901 and its brethren - kept for the heritage value of what built their initial name and brand, useful mainly as background props - aura, or image products - for the purpose of justifying high, undiscounted pricing for their mass-market lines. Bose kept these "legacy" image products for the same reason "New (made-in-China) Klipsch" still keeps those doddering old dinosaurs back on the reservation in Hope, AR, still building the "Old Klipsch" Klipschorns and progeny for the six or seven souls every year who want to spend the price of a used car on a pair of those beloved living fossils created by Paul Klipsch WAAY back in the 1940's - a couple of years before I was even a condom in my dad's back pocket.
- And finally, the big tail that wags the dog - the most visible lightning rod of the three - the crass, commercial, advertising and hype-driven purveyor of products designed to impress the unwashed by sounding "impressive" in a loud, noisy big box retail environment. Outside, their look sends all the right slick and modern messages, but on the inside, the Chinese have masterfully executed a build quality cheesy enough to guarantee gross profit margins previously unheard of from anything bearing a name-brand logo. A triumph, to be sure! The idea was to sell them, to leverage them into an inflated price on the strength of a "name-brand" logo and a glitzy ad campaign, but in the end slip them what, under the slick exterior with the "BOSE" logo, is barely more than a "white van" speaker. The result? Profits, profits, PROFITS!!
I don't think this makes Bose an "evil" company. Tobacco? Now THEY are evil! Because they sell addictive products that KILL us. Halliburton? They secured (with the help of their former CEO and then U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney) hugely profitable no-bid contracts from the Pentagon and [allegedly]
knowingly sold defective Zylon body armor to the U.S. Army for use by our soldiers on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. So THEY are well and truly evil... Darth Vader evil. [Allegedly] <snark!>
But a company that peddles mediocre-to-piss-poor home theater audio at premium prices, laughing all the way to the bank? Balanced on the scale opposite all the really egregious nastiness, slime and sleazery afoot, perpetrated by the rest of corporate America - to say nothing of the governments of Sudan, North Korea, Iran, China, Russia, the Klingon and Romulan Empires, as well as the U.S. Congress, Wall Street, the American public school system and most organized religion - Bose doesn't even register! So, I DON'T hate Bose. But I certainly won't give them my respect. The bottom line is that they are selling smoke and mirrors, products backed by an integrity and reputation earned by the company Bose once was, NOT by the company it now IS. There is no gentle way to say this; Bose uses flimflammery and slight-of-hand deception to build their business from out of the wallets of suckers. And that's OK, in the Grand Scheme of the Universe... Millions of people in America and worldwide make their livings every day by doing worse.... That said, it's still not particularly admirable.
Since I'm talking about "doing worse"...
I used to sell audio gear for a living. If a customer would come ask me to help him buy the "most bang-for-the-buck" theater audio gear for say, $1000, I would do my best to show him what I sincerely thought was the best we offered for that kind of money. If another customer later that day were to come in and ask for a demo of the Bose Acoustimass systems, I would smile and happily crank them up for him, playing the explosions from whatever action flick Blu-ray was all the rage that month. And if he followed with, "Pack 'em up! I WANT 'em!", I would NOT try to steer him to something better and possibly dynamite the sale entirely. Most likely, I would pile on every accessory I could justify and gently twist his arm into adding the "extended service plan" and then TAKE HIS MONEY! Then I would shake his hand, smile, and wish him all peace and happiness with his new purchase... And I would sleep like a baby that night. Because I need to make a living. And because I don't see it as my mission in life to help fools make better buying decisions!
