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Why do Audiophiles hate Bose so much?
Follow Ups:
Technical details and secret squirrel information is only available to those who register. Shhhhhh! It is very hard to gain access to the Bose Forum. Takes years. Patience, Grasshopper.
Just got my decoder slide rule in the mail today. We really do need to keep answers like this to ourselves......you know there's only so much a Search can do around here.They're called Asylums for a reason....
"Just got my decoder slide rule in the mail today."U have got your "slide rule decoder" but that will only unlock the first level of decoding.
One must attend a secret ritual, complete with robes and incense, by invitation only from Bose, to attain the unbeknownst "secret decoder ring" which will unlock levels 2 and........oh @#$%, I might have said too much.
Cheaply made in China for less than $20 and sold for thousands, great marketing, inferior product line PERIOD! If you just want noise take the plunge but if you want a musical experience 2 channel is the way to go and with the beauty of tube to.
some will undoubtedly post how they're made of cheap paper cones and inexpensive parts. But you know what, the Magnepan's I own are made of MDF, magnets and perhaps pocket change worth of mylar. But they kick ass; apparently to thousands of others too.If you like Bose then God bless you. I owned em' for years but they never really convinced me they were worth the cost. And speaking of cost, Bose's ad campaign is perhaps the biggest in audio history. Guess who's paying for all that Madison ave scratch?
Magnepan's approach is a bit different; word of mouth and customer loyalty. We KNOW when we have a good thing; no one forces it down out throats
____________ // ________________
...... I'd buy it for about $499.Smile
It's funny.The issue with Bose is not their product. They have a very traditional sounding vintage-style speaker for the bookshelves/monitors. Their cubes fit 99% of most consumers needs, and their ease of use is 2nd to none.
Where the issue lies with "Audiophiles" is their presentation. Since most Audiophiles are very passionate about their music and feel a company should reasonably represent their product. Most feel Bose does not offer a good value.
Also, it is frustrating to the "audiophile" because the know for the money, there may be better if only the regular consumer was willing to get over the name. There are may products from many manufacturers that offer a better VALUE from their product. That is important too.
Personally, I think they could sell a lot more product if they drop their price by 20-30%. They are certainly not the worst I have heard, and as I stated before, they are very appealing to the average consumer. My $0.02.
Mike z
www.geocities.com/mzisserson
...Bose recently released an in-ear headphone, saying they hadn't released one earlier because in-ear headphones were no good before theirs came out. BUT...Just a couple months before that I was on a plane with a colleague who had Bose noise-canceling headphones. I did a same player/same music one-to-one comparison between his Bose and my Shure e3c; the Bose were more expensive than my in-ear phones.
Bottom line: my headphones blocked unwanted noise MUCH better than the Bose noise-canceling phones AND the fidelity was also MUCH, MUCH better. So when I see Bose announce they'd finally raised in-ear phone performance to their level of expectation it was clearly a crock.
To me this a very concrete indication of the degree to which Bose is a marketing, rather than an audio machine. Certainly there are scads of true hi-end companies that claim their line to be "the world's finest." But Bose far outhypes the other manufacturers I know of.
There may well be some Bose products that sound really good. But I'd always be afraid I'd be getting one of their products that are oversold though the use of technobabble.
Guy next to me in the plane had the Bose phones. He let me try them out and compare them to my E3s. Dull on top and inefficient as heck. I use mine with a laptop, so I'm concerned about battery life.
Highly overpriced gear + Deceptive claims = Suck
It's more a case of getting tired of meeting people who say things like "Bose is the best, right?"
It serves it's purpose nicely, but you can have so much better sound for the money of you know where to look.The sad thing is, someday, Bose may well be the best out there. Every new technology seems to take a step backwards in sound quality which will probably result in all roads leading to Bose.
Posting under two monikers is pointless to start. Keep to one name if possible (or register, even better).
As for Bose....
Imagine "X" car manufacturer comes out with a new car and advertises that it out handles a BMW, out powers the new Corvette, etc. The price is $10K more than either vehicle....
Do you take it for a test drive, or do you just buy the car?
So now you buy the car, your last car was a Festiva, you've never driven a decent car before and don't know the difference perhaps.
Bose is only thought lowly of because some feel their products are (way) overpriced for what they offer and that they make claims that their stuff is the best available.
Since its inception in the 1970s, Bose has had absolutely the best marketing in the audio business. Most consumers would identify Bose as making the best audio equipment in the industry.Their model is to engineer for the lowest possible build cost, do what they can on the cheap to compensate for the poor quality of the components, market creatively and aggressively, and sell at a huge markup. It is a highly successful model.
Evidence: The flagship 901s use cheap 5-inch drivers in a small wood-and-plastic enclosure. The mess in inherently highly nonlinear. They then use an equalizer box that mostly inverts the distortion that the speakers have. The overall result is a more-or-less linear speaker (with nonexistent imaging). The "amazing" home theatre system, which I can't remember the name of, uses tiny ($.25?) drivers and a "subwoofer" that whistles and probably can't go below 70 Hz at less than 50% harmonic distortion. But the marketing--dramtically removing large screens to reveal tiny speakers--is dramatic and effective.
They market cheap crap exceptionally well. Do I hate them? No. Do I buy Bose? No. Bose sounds bad.
I agree totally, as an ex Bose dealer. They make crap sounding gear that is sold at a huge price. Every single customer that ask to listen a different system always didn't buy Bose. But are so small that you cannot compare with nothing else, and most of the women don't want to see the speakers (until they recognize the subwoofer, then start the problems). The best marketing in the world, can sell cheap gear at big price.
HiRegardless of the market area, from waterproofing solution to fashion, Pro-sound to mass market “hifi”, it is a grim fact that a dollar spent marketing an image of technology produces far more sales than spending the money doing R&D does..
Most of the time, it is the small company or individuals who come up with the ”new” stuff, as they say desperation IS the mother of invention, no one feels like its up to them to “save the day” at a big company.
So, think about what it takes to be the best selling brand, think of them in any area, they are essentially NEVER above average in performance.
I read a comparison of waterproofing coatings for wood a few years ago, the Brand with the largest sales, that was most well known, that I used, was near the bottom in its ability to protect wood, had a very poor cost to performance.
When dealing with discretionary income, for any market, you look at who is the biggest in sales or most well known, they are nearly always an “emperor with no cloths” so far as actual substance. This is simply the most cost effective strategy, honed to a literal science with focus groups, blind testing and all manner of scientific refinement.
Only when a person chooses to find out more than the mfr tells that it starts to look like there is some guy standing behind the curtain running OZ or, a naked fat guy on parade.It does get kind of creepy when you recall it’s not just the constant flow of Madison Avenue media that creates these opinions about “what is good”, they also shape our political opinions, our knowledge of world events, about what to expect and tolerate, or “morals” as a country. Our media doesn’t so much lie outright, it’s more like by leaving out some things, one draws a different conclusion than one might with the whole story.
Oh, well, what can you do, its not PC to realistically discuss what is going on, I suppose that is the point of that as well. “PC”, Sort of a proposition that “for the betterment of all” one can pick up a dog turd and by force of will, smoke it and enjoy it like a fine cigar and then self-righteously condemn those who don’t as backwards, un-enlightened fools.
Best,
Tom
Guess I'm an old duffer as I remember listening to the original 901's when they first came out. I rather liked the dispersion but didn't care for the sound quality. Nowadays I actually suspect the equalizer may have been the culprit since as acoustic suspension "sweet eights", they should have been fairly good. As my dealer said after I listened, "they sound interesting but sort of artificial". He nailed it.What really got me was when Consumer Reports later reviewed them. I was then a subscriber and thought that they accurately described the product's strength's and weaknesses. Lo and behold, Bose sued them, and won! As I recall the case involved whether CU was intended to be factual or entertaining, something like that, and they had the gall to say that the product wasn't perfect. This was the point where I decided that I'd never deal with the company.
It certainly hasn't been a hardship as since then I've only heard one product of their's that I liked, it was a small bookshelf speaker with a lopped off corner.
So, I for one don't hate them, but I do avoid them and don't recommend them.
It was a landmark First Amendment decision by the Supreme Court, and Bose lost. Here's a description of the case from an article in National Law Journal :
Bose complained that a 1970 article comparing stereo speakers said Bose's speakers reproduced the music so that "individual instruments seemed to grow to gigantic proportions and tended to wander about the room." At trial, the tester who first wrote those words said he really meant that the sound tended to wander along the wall between the speakers. The trial judge found actual malice-a reckless disregard for the story's truth. Reversing, the Supreme Court said appeals courts must give more scrutiny to libel verdicts than any others, to ensure that speech deserving of constitutional protection was getting it.C.U.'s Bose story was opinion speech, six of the nine justices held, even if that opinion was flawed. Citing the court's own precedent in New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that error "is inevitable in free debate, and . . . must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to have the 'breathing space' that they need to survive." With that, the high court ended the 14-year-old Bose case.
Rob,Thanks for the update, I was only aware of the initial judgment. Didn't know the gears of justice were still grinding. Fourteen years, that's quite a grind.
I remember being surprised that they prevailed (initially as it turned out) since the report seemed reasonable from my experience.
Very interesting, it's neat knowing "the rest of the story".
Rick
...a similar question was asked on the Speaker Asylum last month.Please do a search next time, as this is a topic which is repeated every couple of months.
I actually enjoy the music on my Bose car stereo in my 2002 Acura TL-S. But it's way overpriced for what you get and the sound is fair. See link for a detailed analysis of just one Bose system. It's representative of all their stuff, incl. headphones and Wave radio/etc.
- http://db.audioasylum.com/cgi/m.mpl?forum=speakers&n=243828&highlight=docw+bose&r=&session= (Open in New Window)
I once attended a free demonstration of the then-new Bose Wave Radio where the come-on was a free CD of the music used in the demonstration.The venue was a hotel conference room. The demonstrator had curtained booth on a stand, that resembled a trade-show fold-up arrangement. Once the crowd was seated, he played some orchestral music at a fairly high level, then opened the curtains with a flourish to reveal the little radio located in the center of the booth.
The demonstration proceeded, then he moved to a table at the side of the room to sign up the customers. As the crowd milled around, I looked carefully at the booth and was surprised to find that it was made of heavy materials. It was certainly not a fold-up, easily portable trade-show presentation device. I then noticed that the radio was firmly fixed on a pedestal, and the booth walls were angled to function as a horn, with the radio at the focus of the horn.
I wonder if any of the folks who bought the radio ever wondered why they did not get the full, rich, room-filling sound they heard at the demonstration.
...has her CD player connected to a Bose Wave Radio and it doesn't sound bad.Of course, for the money, she could have done much better.
... my folks have a Bose Wave radio/cd and are thrilled with it. They can move it wherever they want to, they don't hear as well as they used to, they like it so .... great!Sure, they could have done better by spec'ing seperates but they could care less and they don't want the hassle. It works for them so I'm glad they like it.
You forgot to look for any hidden speakers and/or amps. Or maybe equalization or processing equipment.....
(nt)
"Why do Audiophiles hate Bose so much?"Could you explain in technical detail why?"
It's the most-successful speaker company at the mainstream level. Its sound is at-best mediocre. It produces some interesting products (Wave Systems, Noise-Canceling Headphones, etc.). It has an interest-free payment plan. .....
Why the hate? When people have doubts over what they choose to get, the best defense is to bash something they know others will accept as being worse. So Bose is an easy target.
Sales deception? Maybe. But Bose is not the only company doing this. And it doesn't wreak like digital upsampling, if you get the gist.
I personally have no problem with Bose, or if people choose to get Bose. Heck, I don't even have a problem when someone claims his "Bose system" is better than mine. It actually happened.
And can be had for cheap. I thought they were very clear at very loud levels. The eq is a pain in the rear though. There is also a $300 something bookshelf that did not sound to bad. As for the rest , way overpriced.
BOSE is Blatantly Offensive Sound Equipment and you Better Order Something Else Before Our Senses Explode....
I myself don't hate it. I don't lie it or own any. It's not audiophile quality. I am bothered that the public seems to think its at least very good. The public is just not aware of the audiophile market and its products.
ET
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