CrunchGear

Not a fan, but it’s simply about quality. Almost everything they deliver is priced medium to high and quality is marginal. They have fantastic marketing and given most casual listeners aren’t audiophiles (myself included), we can’t tell the difference but think we can.

There’s a saying… “Friends don’t let Friends buy Bose” :)

There are a few exceptions to this. I’ll have to give it to Bose as they still probably have the simplest home theater in a box HTIB solution out there. Their remotes are RF so they work without having to point it at the damn stereo, and it’s pretty much idiot proof since there aren’t many settings other than volume and source.

Their wave clock radios do sound pretty good for a small clock radio for your bedroom, but the prices are pretty outrageous.

That being said, for the price it makes me cringe that friends buy this and think it actually qualifies for Home Theater. The subwoofers are a joke, that isn’t bass. I think to the person who only has ever heard television speakers, it definitely sounds great, but if you’ve heard a real home theater it’s a night and day experience.

The big exception here is their noise cancelling headphone. For $300 yes, they are expensive, but wowzer do they work. I can’t fly without them. It completely kills that engine noise drone, and with an ipod, even with a screaming baby next to you, you are in silent bliss listening to your music. You can do an LAX-NY flight and land relatively fresh without that constant engine noise wearing you down. I have the QC2, which are the over the ear ones, they just came out with a slightly smaller, less dorky on ear for $350. Bottom line is this is definitely the only thing that Bose has done in a class of it’s own.

If it’s speakers and stereo system you are looking for, and want true high fidelity and quality subwoofers you are better off buying other brands. Albeit usually a bit more comlplicated. Denon has done a pretty good job lately with their receivers where it actually has a self configuring microphone you place at where you sit, and it sets all the appropriate speaker levels and latency.

I personally have these bad boys http://www.av123.com/products_category_brand.php?section=speakers&brand=3

Which are gorgeous and their 1,000 watt subwoofer :) They have ok WAF factor, (Wife Acceptance Factor) given the size, since the finishes are so nice.

Bose, usually have very good WAF factor given how small they are and don’t take away from the decor of a room. Another plus.

Can you hear me hedging on my comments? I don’t like the sound quality, but for some people that want small, discreet and better than tv sound qualiy, that is bonehead simple to operate, it’s the right call.

Cheers,

Peter

Blows appeals to older people with a lot of cash. The designs are horrid and dull…just like Hillary. Sure the sounds is ok, but you can get better cheaper. It has gotten to the point that the name just turns me off.

My Bose story brings back memories too horrible to recount. All I can say is that it involved a much older woman with a propensity for pork products and edible lingerie all while listening to Lionel Richie….All Night Long…. All Night.. Yeah.. All night long - oh no..

I am unclean.

meh
as the others have said, there are better choices at cheaper prices
my experience with bose was a bad one. Years and years ago , i visited my uncles house and was throwing a tennis ball inside. You can guess what hapened next, it hit a speaker and it fell from the ceiling and brought the other speakers with it. They all smashed on the floor. My butt has never been the same.
On a completly unrelated note, i read a few years ago, the company bose invented airless tires. I wonder what happened to them…

I’m impressed with the degree under which they control the listening environment in stores like Frys. In a place where there is a lot of ambient noise and speakers blaring, BOSE has their own section where they do a good job of sound isolation. This leads to a lot of sales, but I bet they pay a premium on the space.

Even about 10+ years ago, they would take the effort to put a elliptical dome to show of their home theatre systems in Sam’s Club.

Their way of handling bass is very clever too. By pumping up the secondary harmonics they give an auditory illusion that tricks your brain into thinking you are hearing a much larger bass than you are.

The combination fooled me enough that my first home theatre system is a BOSE. I gave it to my father where it is being used today. As usual, it was overpriced and with poor bass response.

I also have a set of Quiet Comforts which work well in very high noise environments. There is a problem when the noise level gets really low and I end up with a little feedback. Also, I wonder how much of its fabled performance is because their system has a large gap between the pickup mics and the ear, and how much is because they’re good headphones?

For the price, I’m pretty certain there are better things out there. But if we are going to bitch about price and marketing, then why not bring up Bang and Olufson? BOSE has its niche, but I’ve moved on.

I have a boss that I have followed for the past few jobs and his philosophy is simple there is no such thing a bad product just a bad price.

Bose is fine, the quality okay, but not for the money. I would noy buy them for myself but find use them. I do fee that they have better sound then the average speaker. However with my hearing buying Bose, would be like buy an 80,000 dollar car for a 2 mile daily commute.

I used to have a pair of the Bose QC2 headphones, the over-the-ear kind…until I spoke with the manager of a Bose store in the Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He said that if my QC2’s had a ‘defect’ - wink, wink, nudge, nudge - I could trade them in for a new pair or pay $50 to upgrade to the new QC3’s.
Needless to say, my QC2’s just happened to have a ‘defect’ the next day…a ripped ear pad…and sure enough, I traded them in and paid the money for the new QC3’s.
It’s likely that each Bose store gets some sort of bonus for the number of QC3’s they move each month/year so I’m sure they’re getting something out of it too.
With that said, I now have a new set of headphones that have better noise reduction and I only had to pay $50. I had the QC2’s for over a year! If you have QC2’s and want the new QC3’s, it’s worth a call to your local Bose provider, or call Bose directly, to ask about the ‘defect’ policy. :)

I thought Boss was pronounced -who’s the boss- as a child. This has done terrible things for the brand recognize in my head, to which I’ll never recover.

You make no sence

I used to sell TVs and audio equipment for a major department store. The usual commission rates were between 2 and 6.5 %. There were only two brands that paid 10.5 %: one was Bose, and the other? Well, Monster Cable, of course.
Sometimes when business was slow, we would take apart the $2-3,500 Bose stuff and bet on who can guess the value of the sum of all the parts in them using the Newark catalogue. I don’t think we ever found anything by Bose made with more than a $300 worth of parts…

Big box store and uninformed customers.

Several years ago, I worked for a local big box. I know this is shocking, but this big box was very interested in profit. Our district was having a rough month in terms of overall revenue and profit and was running a contest. The store with the highest amount of profit by the end of the month won a large store-wide party and some extra bonus prizes, such as Hi-Def TVs, etc.

The month was almost over and several stores were neck-to-neck. Our GM decided that it was time for us to do everything we could to win, so we should steer all customers to high-margin products. We all began selling the items in our departments with the highest dollar amounts of margin. The motto was ‘ATTACH ATTACH ATTACH!’ and the goal was to attach high margin goods to anything that was low margin in order to keep our margin percentages and dollars high. People began to compete within the store to see who could attach the most extreme margin items to the lowest margin items. People were trying to sell vacuum cleaners to people who bought a usb cable, people who bought a cd were taken to the Car Audio department for an attempt at selling a Subwoofer and car stereo, but I saw one particular customer make the most extreme purchase.

An older Asian couple, with a bit of a language deficit, came in and looked at buying a computer. The associate who started to help them also happened to be a former used-car salesman and he definitely used the ‘tricks of the trade’. The customers purchased one of out least expensive computers, they were taken to appliances and sold a Dyson, and finally, the salesperson took them to home theater and sold them two, 3-2-1 systems ( about $1000 each and VERY HIGH MARGIN ). He was rewarded with balloons and a store-wide round of applause.

Later, I asked this person how they sold them the Bose systems. He said, well they had a second computer at home and wanted some decent computer speakers for both machines. He sold them $1000 computer speakers.

They don’t make $1000 computer speakers

Well, I did end up with the Bose companion 3 speakers and I have to say for the cost - they arn’t all that bad at all.

What a lot of people forget about the lifestyle systems is the fact that they have some intelligent features for sound newbies… think of another under $3500 sound system… that has Umusic (music storage system), Adaptiq (sound callibration), Bose link (links all Bose systems together), wireless speaker links…

And, does it in a small elegent package with ‘reasonable’ sound… and for movies I dont think the Lifestyle systems perform different than my local so called ‘high-bracket’ cinema.

Noise cancelling, well yeah those sets are expensive.. but pilots have acclaimed the Aviation X so I guess Bose is building on it’s reputation there.

The 301s, reasonable speakers if you try and get your dealer down a bit on price…

901s… unconventional but realisticly fun speaker.. sound different, but I wouldnt say it was horrid.. it’s enjoyable but not accurate.

I think what audio boffins are looking for is a Studio reference speaker, Bose is the Live music speaker which tries to bring a concert hall home even when sometimes… it can sound naff…

I was once told.. a normal speaker will have 10″ bass ? 6.5″ mid? and a tweeter?

But. the bose 901 has 9 4.5″ drivers… add that up.. which has the most surface area?

But, there’s a lot of science behind that and it may not be true that using all full range drivers is best, though Bose has built a speaker mainly on that. :-s

Anyway, what makes me wonder.. is people say their products are of shoddy quality inside, parts are crap, etc… but.. I’ve yet to see my companion 3 speakers fail.. and I’ve yet to hear of anyone of my friends whom owns Bose say theirs has blown, and one guy has had his 301s for 15 years.

I guess it’s all down to each to their own…. if ya like it.. buy it. :-)

There will always be better vaule for money products… and sadly Bose isn’t value.. your paying for the design and brand.. and of course their engineers which would out-smart any other!

What is interesting here is the number of people considering themselves to be “audiophiles” but not willing to give Bose credit for everything they do well. Bose is indeed the masters of marketing, so you have to set that point aside and not come back to it everytime. We hired an electrical engineer who spent 22 years with Bose. I picked his brain all the time. I wanted to know if what I had heard about their quality was true. He always pointed us to several “parts sites” and would show us the parts they used for their basic packages. Everything else was a “trade secret” he said. He said that they did more in house thatn outsourcing and that you would be surprised at the testing these systems underwent. I have a Bose system based on his recommendation and I can tell you it is not paper. And for clarification, their bass modules are supposed to trick your mind, that is by design. By providing more surface area through smaller subs, they can provide a response that rivals larger setups with less power and distortion.
All that being said, can you get a better setup by forking out $4000 on a compent system? Absolutely. Are you going to find a system for $700 that is going to provide you with the ease of setup, use, small size and sound as the 3 2 1 systems, probably not. I also have an Infintiy system in our living room, and an Onkyo system in our “play room” that were equally as expensive, much larger, and required another amp. Guess what? The Bose blows them all away. You have to buy for taste. Bose isn’t the best, you have to know that going in. But they are good.

BOSE is crap and anyone who says otherwise has obviously never listened to a pair of B&W Matrix or Dynaudio Contour speakers. I will hand it to them on one thing though. They have an excellent public relations/marketing department.

i simply love bose…
because of it’s sound quality and because of the story behind it’s invention…..
it’s simply marvellous and ammazing…

hei i am planning to buy bose acostimass 5 series speaker systems
i know it is expencive i stay in india, i heard lot about bose audio, and its noise reduction sound system.

i got impressed with its innovative sound quality in produsing plesent music.

pls do suggest me about purchasing bose,

if not bose any other best product which gives best music.

have a 03 gmc with the best sound system that gm has to offer the bose. I have had two speakers blow with out high sound levels. both speaker were on the drivers side (4 door crew). It appears that the name is there but not the quality that you would expect from bose. I believe that the had to cut quality control to meet the prices of gm.
System sounds great when the speakers are new.

both love and hate bose. love their older products, 901 , 1801, 4401.901 is still a good loudspeaker with spacious sound, but very picky about room settings and amplifier. many of their other products are a combination of very high price and trendy design. a exampel of a good product in todays world is their noise cancelling headphones, but still to pricy.

I had many stereo systems before and no speaker offered me the “non fatique” sound that Bose does. I have the 301/161 setup in my house. The bass could be lower but I think it has to do with the room their in. Once cranked the bass comes alive as hell and I can simply not get them to distort or die. Room filling sound is incredible….imaging is sligtly lost to this but you cant win both.

“Bose” to me is synonymous with “quality.” Whilst there may be controversy over the ‘best’ speakers, personally my experience with Bose has been a satisfying one, may I say, it exceded my expectations. From the moment you open the box, you’ll be happier for its purchase. Customer satisfaction seems their moto, from the ‘welcome’ note as one opens the box, to the very screws that fit it together, all testify to the quality of a well-designed and built product. Then as you turn the throttles of volumes up, cristal clear sound radiates from the speakers, completely free from distortion. Yes, I’m a satisfied customer, and would recommend Bose to anyone wanting to buy a product that will give lasting service and quality sound. One word sums it up……perfection.

Utter garbage!!! People who buy Bose usually get “steered” into them by sales people. Whose who know, don’t do Bose. Like my grand pappy used to say” No highs, no lows… must be Bose.”

BOSE=Buy Other Stereo Equipment
If you install a BOSE system in a 6″x6″ closet then you will be pleasantly surprised. But in a 12″ x 20″ room they can’t compete with similarly priced products. I’m just glad a friend steered me away from Bose.

PS: Who won the contest? It’s been over a year. What was the prize?

I bought a Bose radio about a month ago and just love the sound. I bought an external antennae to try and get my favourite station in -about a hundred miles away - and while I can get the station in it is still scratchy. So, for the high price I am disappointed and will probably have to buy something else to improve reception.

L love my bose radio and speakers. My radio is not working and I need to know where I can take it to be repaired. We live in De Soto, Mo. which is just south of St. Louis. Is there a repair place in St. Louis? It was manufactured in May of 1995 and Life style 5 the only numbers I can find or 01701-9168. I like it very much and I miss the radio. Please help me.

1-800-367-4008,
Monday - Friday: 8:30 AM - 9:00 PM ET
Saturday: 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM ET
Sunday: 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM ET

I had heard about bose speakers , very recently i experienced bose sound in a bose store and when the demonstrator asked my opinion about my bose experience i simply had no words to say , because for the first time in my life i heard “SOUND” yes sound . I had never experienced such crystal clear sound which soothed me.Its a qualitywhich was not available in INDIA before.In INDIA we have “sony” ,”philips” , etc, but comparing others with bose is simply funny.Now i have fallen in love with bose speakers and whenever i wish to hear music i used to take one of my friend to a bose store and enjoy music.The only thing is it is to much costly for me but i appreciate its costing because of its quality.Thanks to MR. AMAR KR. BOSE . I wish someday i will also have a bose speakers system .

I love poeple who say Bose sound is garbage. They say, “you can’t hear the highs nor the lows…and their bass isn’t blowing you away”. There is a reason for that. Good sound…high quality even does all of these equally well. If you hear a speaker and your reaction is “wow listen to those highs” then that means it does highs better than lows. If you say “feel that bass” that means it is over emphasizing the Lows. If it sounds like nice fluid sound, then it is perfect. People argue that “you can’t change the bass level or touch the equalizers on thier products.” There is a reason. Bose knows that if you touch your EQ (every True audiophile has a bunch of different EQ settings they like for each genre….) you are changing the way the sound is supposed to sound. Who wants to change a million different EQ sliders in each sound? I know I don’t. Also, I never once…never ONCE heard any sort of Distortion at high volumes from a Bose speaker. Anyone who claims Bose is a terrible product obviously is a wanna be Audiophile.

I am not an audiophile. I am a musician. I like speakers that make recordings sound like live music - horns, strings, drums, piano - etc. Bose never did that for me - they never seemed to have the dynamic range required to make anything other than elevator music sound right.

For comparable money, I’ll take a Klipsch setup over Bose any day of the week.

love

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE WITH THE FIRST GENERATION LIFESTYLES48 AND THE PRESENT ONE. ARE THE NEW CUBES PAPER CONED .

After reading alot of negitives about Bose - I went home and re-evaluated my Acoustmass 10 system. I have had many audio systems/speaker systems and I really like the Bose. It has a small footprint and sounds great. IMHO you need a good amp to drive the speakers(I’m using an 85W Yamaha). Are they expensive - YES!!!!
I’m not shy about returing products(computers, cameras, new car),
I would have taken them back and still could - I think their fine.
There is a differance between just being LOUD and rattlin’ the windows and rich even sound. People really need to relax - it’s just speakers…….

Bose is not one of the best speaker in the World. it is the only speaker which is leading in todays market the Quality of sound is ossam we can’t even think to compare this speaker with other existing speaker in market. the one thing i like in this speaker is that the size of the speaker is soo small but the sound quality is tooooo loud. and it is one of the best home theater. Good Job

my Bose radio was very good the first few years..I’ve had it quite a while now…was impressed with the radio a friend had…music quality has been going down slowly, and I can’t find anyone to try fixing it…it’s my only radio (except for Amateur transceivers), and my car…don’t even want to consider sending it back to Bose for repair, and so, I will not buy another…just toss this one when the sound gets worse…other Amateur operators tell me similar stories…sorry, Bose….Herb Wreden

My Bose radio wasn’t durable. The hand remote stoped working after 6 months. You can no longer set the time etc. either. It has been on the same table for a year and is never bumped. We have changed the battery on the remote 2 times. We brought it for service and they said unplug it and wait a minute. THAT helped the remote twice but that is about it. WE now have a laugh moving the remote all over the room and up close and far away etc. and once in awhile the sensor will adjust the volumn for 3 seconds then you have to start all over. To set the time we unplug it until the time stuck on Bose matches the real time. This product was great for 6 months but now we use it as a clock when the clock is working.

I am a professional film sound mixer. Trust me, BOSE is a joke! It’s low quality inaccurate components with fantastic marketing and good looks. It’s not that the average user can’t tell the difference; people are so foolish and uneducated in this country that they will judge a sound system on how it looks. The price is so unbelievably high people think it must be good.

As a person with a lot of experience with different brands, I must say I like Bose a lot, and I am mostly pleased with the systems I have bought from them. Not all their systems are perfect, and not all of them are made from the same materials or sound the same way at all, but they are all good in their unique way, with minor exceptions. These are standards that all Bose systems I have heard or own meet:

1) Clear sound: many of them go crystal clear, while other speakers are a little lacking, such as the Cinemate, or have a little too much treble for certain songs or movie scenes, such as the Companion 5. But overall, they reveal a lot of detail you can hardly hear in other speakers among the highs, especially with their headphones.

2) Little or no distortion: It is VERY hard, even using unconventional methods such as connecting Bose computer speakers to the headphone-out of a receiver and pushing the treble, bass and volume to insane levels, to get distorsion out of a Bose system. The only systems I have heard distort (and just a tiny bit) are the Companion 2 and the iPod sound dock, and obviously at the highest volume settings.

3) Very good tolerance to EQ modifications: If you are an “audiophile” at all, you would know how to make Bose speakers sound more like the taste you like, regardless of the “default” or standard sound Bose intended you to hear. If you are an audiophile you should know how to get bass levels out of their acoustimass modules beyond what anyone could imagine, with proper placement, and the right hardware to push them as far as possible. Every little change to any of the EQs is clearly noticed, and personally, I might once in a while, if I am bringing the speakers to a party, boost the bass response of the systems, or push the volume further with a bolume booster, but for personal listening, I like them the way they sound by default.

4) Proper amounts of bass and well-balanced, full and complete sound, in many cases vibrant, deep and resonant: If you believe a subwoofer is there always to rattle your house, shake your desk and make your clothes vibrate, you are wrong. In real life, when live music is played in front of you, or when something explodes or a random loud noise is made, you dont always feel the low part of the noise, sometimes you just hear it. This is why I like bass response from Bose (especially the one from the Companion 3 and the 321GSX). I got to admit it is not always accurate to what the artist, director or game developer heard back in his studio when he or she was working on the sound, but that is not what matters. What matters is that even if different in some cases, all the details are there, audible. To me actually, Bose speakers have enhanced sound when compared to THX Certified speakers.

…Which leads to two negative aspects of Bose speakers:

1) They are not good for composers, artists, developers, directors, etc. For that there is the Bose professional-audio line or the THX certified speaker brands. And why do I say they are not? Because Bose speakers, as you know and can see, are mostly tiny or they don’t have all drivers regular speakers have: Tweeters, Mid-Range drivers and Huge subwoofers, therefore to deliver the excellent, full and complete sound experiences with their smaller drivers, which is almost always enhanced above “accurate” sound, they rely on “tricks”, and when comparing the original recording to the way it sounds on Bose, which is much better most of the time, it is clear then that if you were to make music on a Bose system, it would not sound the same way in those unenhanced speakers. Therefore you should avoid using them for this.

2) Some of their systems, or should I say, only the Companion 3 and 5, offer excellent sound at low and medium volumes, but when you start going to the maximum or try to push it beyond the limit, the bass seems to stay behind. It doesn’t disappear, but it just doesn’t go up any further, and it would be better if they did, then these speakers would be perfect. Apart from that the only criticism from me is directed in general to many of their systems, which don’t go as loud as others within the same category, but hey, maybe I would be deaf by now. Who the heck needs volume levels as high as 105dB?

I own Klipsch speakers, and I have toroughy tested Logitech, JBL, Boston Acoustics, Sony, Wharferdale, Onkyo, Denon and Polk speakers. I can tell you Bose speakers are pricier than some of these brands, but also cheaper than others such as B&W and the higher end models of some of the mentioned brands. However, I can tell you one thing, with proper placement and with the right hardware, Bose will nearly always outperform the other brands most of the time, with smaller speakers. You can always buy and return them within 30 days if you don’t like them.

In the headphones department I have heard Sennheiser, Koss, Sony, among others, and I can tell you: Bose In Ear headphones might be pricey ($100) but they have great bass response as well as amazing comfort and very well balanced sound. I have seen Sony in ear headphones as high as $80, and noise cancelling In Ear headphones as high as $400, which the Bose in ear headphones lack, but they sound great for their price and size, better than the cheaper headphones of the same category. Sony in ears tend to reach louder volumes, but it is not good for your hearing and louder doesnt equal better sound quality. The noise cancelling QC2 are excellent, great sound quality, deep bass response, and excellent sound isolation.

If you dont want to believe any of what I have written, that is okay. But for now and years to come I will always trust Bose. I’ve had some of them for years and they don’t break, they are made of quality parts. To those who said their drivers are all made of paper or carton, you are wrong as well. I have seen metal and plastic drivers as well on their speakers.

Who are you going to believe? The one who owns Bose systems and compares them to other brands? Or the one who blindlessly attacks all Bose systems released without even hearing them? If you have eyes, see. If you have ears, listen. Don’t listen to people who don’t make up their mind about something by theirselves, and instead repeat blindlessly what someone else said, without even knowing if its true or not.

Where are you getting your cool-aid?