All Things Audio

Bose home theater speakers are widely known as the best you can buy. This is a true statement. Bose home theater speakers are overpriced ripoffs. I also believe this to be a true statement. Sadly, the first statement is true because of Bose’s amazing advertising and not because of any truth in the actual belief. It seems to me that almost everyone who doesn’t know much about audio, but buys their home theater stuff based on what they’ve heard, thinks that Bose systems are absolutely the best, even if they have done zero comparison with better systems. I used to think this way too, a long time ago. In recent years they’ve had a bit of a lashback as the geek crowd who are a bit more “in the know” gained voice along with the rise of the Internet, but the misconception (in my opinion) still remains quite prevalent. Hopefully if you’re interested in Bose, by reading this post you’ll at least gain a healthy dose of skepticism enough to go and do your own listening (which is always good to do when buying speakers anyway) before taking the plunge.

I actually went into a Bose store once in some outlet in Oregon (Tanglewood I think?), and sat through one of their product demos in their auditioning room that was completely custom built (I think they must do this in many Bose stores). It was terrible. Several things to keep in mind: I am biased against Bose. I think they’re overpriced ripoff speakers. However, this was an auditioning room tuned for their speakers, with music that I’m sure was carefully selected for both the room and speakers. I went in there not expecting to be wow’ed, but I did expect that they’d sound ok all things considering. Again, I was shocked with how bad they sounded. Not to say they were the worst speakers I’ve ever heard–they certainly weren’t–but some of the highs were so unpleasantly strident that I was quite annoyed. Now if these were $200 speakers, I wouldn’t bat an eye. I probably still wouldn’t have bought them, but I wouldn’t say they were terrible I guess. However, this was a $2500 system… That’s absolutely ridiculous. If you can’t get a $2500 system in an absolutely controlled environment with your own selection of source material to sound good, then there’s something terribly wrong.

Let me reiterate, you should definitely keep in mind that I’m biased against Bose. Still, I don’t hate everything that they make. Interestingly enough, I also tested out their headphones there. There was a listening station with the TriPorts setup. I’d listened to them briefly at an Apple store before on an iPod, but didn’t listen seriously that previous time for some reason. Other than that the other experience I’d had with Bose headphones was that I’d actually already heard a pair of the even more expensive Quiet Comfort 3’s that one of my co-workers had bought. I was curious as to how they sounded, so I did an A/B comparison with my Shure E4’s. I found the Quiet Comforts to be muddled, completely lacking clarity.

Anyhow, back to my Bose store story. I listened to them at the store and was actually pleasantly surprised. There was only a single sample to listen to, but the bass was quite punchy. Now the sample didn’t have much going on, it was only maybe 3 parts going or so in rather separated frequency ranges, but it definitely sounded good. Upon further inspection however, I found that the pillar of the listening station was vibrating along with the bass… That’s just wrong. Gives people a false impression. Even if it sounded great the unethical station vibration just makes me angry. Plus, strangely enough, I think I found the TriPorts sounded better than the roughly $100 more expensive QC3’s. Active noise cancellation is bound to incur some cost I’m sure, but even if you say that it’d cost an extra $100 to add that technology in, the QC3’s should still sound at least as good as the TriPorts… They don’t.

Another practice which I find repulsive is that when sold in retail stores such as Best Buy or the like, Bose tries its hardest to “convince” the store to place their speakers far away from the rest. This prevents easy direct comparison, allowing its marketing to take full effect where auditory comparison is not available. This alone should set off warning lights and sirens in your head.

To be fair, it used to be that in order to get a speaker that didn’t sound like utter crap and wasn’t a gigantic box, you’d have to buy Bose. Although I don’t like many of their products now, I have to admit that they do some interesting research once in a while. Bose speakers are small, stealthy, and pleasing to the eye (when you even notice them). They’re also relatively easy to setup and hey, even if it is that easy, Bose will still send someone out to install them in your house for you if you don’t want to do it yourself.

Nowadays though, there are way more home theater speaker manufacturers that target the stylish/slim/sexy speakers crowd, and in recent years Bose has done nothing significant in speaker R&D. An excellent alternative if you want a small speaker system is the Energy Take 5 series. It’s been through a few iterations, and I believe the latest is aptly named Energy Take 5.2. These are a much better set of speakers than any of the Bose speakers, they can be found for a much lower price. In fact, nowadays the upper echelon of computer speakers are roughly the size of Bose speakers and sound better. If you look at the upper end lines of any of the top computer speaker manufacturers like Cambridge Soundworks, Klipsch, or Logitech, you’ll find speakers that sound better than Bose.

If you are willing to broaden your horizons beyond diminuitive speakers though, you’ll quickly find that larger speakers just sound better, and there are plenty of them out there. If you’re on a budget, Athena and Mission have some great value speakers, or if you’re willing to spend a bit more (which I’m sure you are if you considered Bose) Energy again makes some great speakers. I’ve heard some good things about Paradigm too, though I have no first hand experience with those speakers. There are plenty of other good manufacturers, but really it’s too much to list them all.

Anyway, it’s really a limitation of physics, you can’t recreate the lower frequencies as well with such small speakers (at least with the regular cone technology which Bose along with 99% of the rest of the market uses). I can hear the protests already… “but Bose has their Acoustimass bass module!” Yes, they do. Sadly this means that audio in the lower-mid range is relegated to the bass module–what the rest of the world calls a subwoofer (not that I think Bose can validly call the bass module a subwoofer, but that’s the role it was designed to fit into). The problem with this is two-fold. Just as small drivers don’t reproduce low frequencies all that well, large drivers don’t reproduce high frequencies too well. What Bose does is to put a smaller driver into the Acoustimass module to be able to handle the mid-range. This unfortunately has the effect of not reproducing truly low frequencies as well. The correct solution that virtually all quality speaker manufacturers use is to provider a driver (or more) for each frequency range. Commonly, this means a 1″ tweeter for the highs, and 4 or 5″ driver for the mids (although this may span a larger range, perhaps 3″ though that’s on the low side and up to 7″) and a larger driver dedicated to low frequencies. This larger driver is usually in a separate speaker which we all know as the subwoofer, but is occasionally builtin to floor-standing tower speakers. For good systems, this driver is usually 8″ or larger, 12″ being the largest that is commonly used in home theater systems though if you look, you can certainly find larger. 15″ isn’t hard to find. Compare this to Bose’s drivers. The satellites use 2.5″ drivers, too large to be great tweeters, but too small for good midrange drivers. The Acoustimass module uses 5.5″ drivers. The lower end ones use two of these, and the higher end ones just add another driver for more output–volume over quality.

Sorry, I got a bit excited there. As I was saying, the problem is two-fold. The other half the problem is that since much of the mids are now coming from the bass module and not the satellites, you lose a lot of directionality. Normally people don’t hear direction with bass frequencies very well, so a single subwoofer as opposed to the 5 satellites that you have is usually plenty. The problem is that the bass module now handles more than just hte low frequencies–it’s supposed to deal with the mids too. So now your mids all emanate from one place!

There are plenty of other issues I have with Bose including poor build quality, but I’ll leave that to you to read up on it elsewhere. I’m sure you’re tired of me ranting. There are plenty of other places which have great information about the Bose Myth. I really hope if you’ve considered Bose, that you’ll at least consider your options and not just follow what their marketing has ingrained in you so well.