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Vintage Asylum Classic gear from yesteryear; vintage audio standing the test of time. |
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Vintage Asylum Classic gear from yesteryear; vintage audio standing the test of time. |
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In Reply to: What Bose is all about (long) posted by elto on March 9, 2007 at 09:34:24:
..Amar Bose was and is a serious acoustical engineer with a serious interest in improving sound. He had his own ideas of how this should be done, just as the other greats in the industry such as Villchur, Kloss etc. did. One of thise ideas was the 901, which presented a huge soundstage and used nine tiny 4 inch woofers and an active equalization module,..pioneering ideas at the time, every bit as pioneering in its own way as acoustic suspension boxes etc.
For a time there were other manufacturers that tried to do some of the same things Bose did--the Design Acoustics D-12 is an interesting example of a speaker hung by chains and designed to be omnidirectional too using a lot of reflected sound while avoiding using the Bose patents.Another pioneering effort by Bose was in the development of the three piece system that simplified room placement relative to the massive walnut veneer boxes of the day. We can quibble over whether Bose ran the bass module up too high (he did and does by modern subwoofer standards) and thus the placement of the module in the room became more critical than Bose advertized, but in my mind improvements on the 3-piece idea begat the whole round of design involving small MT units with big subs--essential to nearly all Home Theater setups nowadays. And Amar Bose came up with the first practical and popular 3-piece design. Interestingly, when Kloss founded Cambridge Soundworks after the Advent years, his first product was a three-piece unit designed to work around some of the problems the Bose units faced--in much the analogous way the Large Advent was seen as an improvement on the original AR-3 design.
Besides, AR, KLH, Advent et al, despite their popularity as vintage designs, are all but no longer with us. Bose had the business sense to keep his business going even as the serious competition from the 70s fell one by one. Obviously, selling walnut-veneer wood boxes is not sufficient to keep a large business going any more (as much as some of us would like to believe it sould be). The public, in terms of popular tastes in speakers by and large has moved on. I too find this not only annoying and sad, but that doesnt mean it hasn't happened.
But the last thing I want to do is bash Amar Bose and his company for continuing to be successful by figuring out how to design and market a series of products that continue to be purchased by a very large number of consumers, as well as adapting the business on a continuing basis to the times.
Sure the stuff is overpriced. But that's true of a lot of gear marketed primarily to high-end consumers. Let's instead give credit to Bose for maintaining the image of the company of exclusivity such that he can continue to design stuff that fetchs premium prices and sell it at high gross margins. That in part is the reason Bose is profitable and very much with us as a company today whereas Advent, KLH and AR are not.
At the end of the day, I very much admire Amar Bose. He figured out a lot of puzzles from an engineering and business perspective in acoustical engineering that befuddled a lot of equally bright people, and he clearly knew what he needed to do to keep his business going.
The facts that his engineering approach doesnt appeal to everyone, and that the products are sold at high profit margins is not the core of the issue here. The core is developing and maintaining a business in a cut-throat area that continues to attract customers, many of whome are quite satisfied with the product they purchased.
Despite selling a gazillion speakers, Kloss and Advent were doomed almost from day 1, because gross margins on the products were never high enough to sustain the business long term. That's why Kloss was forced out of the publically-traded company he founded just before the 2nd gen Advent appeared. The customer always got a heck of a deal from Advent value wise, but Advent the business was doomed. By about 1976, the board and shareholders knew that changes were essential to survive. But nothing they tried post-Kloss was able to save the company either. It's tough to reverse course and price products at high gross margins when the company had initially staked its reputation on value for the dollar. Bose was shrewd enough a business person to not make the same mistakes (he surrounded ihimself with marketing people who always knew how to market a brand and sell it at high gross margins--the premium product not the high-value product) and his company very much is still with us.
David
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- In my mind - DavidLD 05:01:44 03/10/07 (0)
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