"The Triumph of Marketing over Performance."
The more you know about Bose, the less you like the company itself. The products are not terrible, but they are overpriced and over-marketed. Bose's annual sales $$$ dwarfs those of virtually every audio company.
First of all, saying anything negative about Bose invites a lawsuit. The have sued reviewers (not just the magazine, but the reviewer personally) when a less-than-stellar review is published, thus no negative reviews.
Dr Bose, who was a professor at MIT, implies that his academic credentials somehow result in advanced design and performance.
The truth is his first famous product, the Bose 901 speaker system, was purchased from another company, marketed to death, supported by the odd lawsuit, and is not particularly good in the first place. It took two revisions to make it reasonably good sounding (901 Series III and up), and that was done by active electronic equalization, not driver or cabinet quality.
If you've ever seen a 901 replacement driver, you would still be laughing (I once owned a HiFi store, we serviced our products, and we were, for a few years, a Bose dealer. We liked the Bose 301, a $300/pair speaker that sounded not bad; we sold a lot of them to radio stations and recording studios. Why? Keep reading. We actually never sold any other models, although we did have demo stock in the showroom).
4 inch speaker, injection moulded plastic frame construction, paper cone. They even moulded it with just three mounting holes, to save money on fasteners.
The equalizer was a simple low cost device with generic parts; you see similar circuits and build quality in modern car audio gear.
I would estimate the 18 drivers in a pair of 901 Series III's to cost about $150 retail (@ Parts Express prices). That's for all 18. That in a product that sold for $1800 retail.
I've done a take-apart on the Bose Wave CD-Radios, I can tell you nothing has changed.
It offends me when I know of so many sincere audio manufacturers who build products with high value components at very reasonable retail prices.
Bose products are built to be inoffensive. They study human reaction to sound and then engineer the sound to appeal to ordinary consumers. Since forever, recording studios have used table-radio-quality speakers, along with the high definition monitors, to make sure the record sounds good on the radio. Examples:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may14/articles/spotlight-0514.htm
Bose speakers have the same response. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not HiFi. It's what you hear in the elevator or at the Mall, or by the bedside at 6AM so you can get to work on time.
There is plenty more to say, I'll just stop at one more: they were contracted by the US Navy to provide noise-cancelling headphones for pilots.
The product they delivered was so poor the Navy sued them for non-compliance of the contract, the first and only time the military has resorted to the courts for a procurement.
Bose re-engineered the product to (barely) meet the spec and avoid huge penalties.
But they also released the product that your tax dollars paid for (Cost-Plus contracts are the norm for military procurement. That means Bose's cost to develop the product, manufacture the product, plus a guaranteed 25% profit allowance). Ever heard that headphone? Sure you have. That was the original Bose noise-cancelling retail headphone.
Is this the kind of company you want to enrich?
I hope you understand that I don't "hate" Bose. I don't respect them as a company, but their products have a place, it's just not "at my place" in my primary sound system.
