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I'll have to disagree with your comment there. >Audiophiles rag on Bose pretty hard. >Bose simply doesn't target audiophiles. They don't make audiophile produ
by ksk 11y ago
I'll have to disagree with your comment there.
>Audiophiles rag on Bose pretty hard.
>Bose simply doesn't target audiophiles. They don't make audiophile products.
That would paint the the audiophiles as ignorant.
> Bose has somehow managed their image so that people think Bose really can cram audiophile-grade performance into precisely the kind of tiny, plastic boxes no other audio company can get halfway decent sound out of.
I don't think anyone who buys Bose products even knows what audiophile-grade means, let alone expect it. People try them on, stuff sounds good, and they buy them. The average person does not have any interest in learning the intricacies of what makes stuff sound good.
>Bose fails as hard as anyone else at that, but somehow people believe they've succeeded and line up to buy their products.
Maybe people believe it because Bose headphones actually sound better to THEM? Yes, sure maybe SOME people get swayed by the marketing (like any other product in the world), but I don't think a large segment of the population will spend hundreds of dollars unless they can get some tangible benefit. Sure, maybe its sad that they spent all their hard earned money on something that they could have gotten for a fraction of the price from some other vendor - but this applies to TONS of products out there.
And interestingly enough, even the so called audiophile-grade manufacturers are not really going to tell you, for e.g. that you're better off upgrading your source (the most important link in that chain), than your gear. All of the several thousand dollar headphones and amps and dacs, IMHO, are also one step removed from snake-oil. It reminds me of all the wine drinkers who buy all these expensive wines, and going off of memory, they have them do a double-blind trial and they pick out the cheap wines as tasting just as good.
(FWIW I don't own any Bose products, but I have invested/wasted about $5000 in audio gear over the years :))
- beloch 11y agoIt's funny, but I'd offer just the opposite advice these days. Most people don't spend enough on their speakers, both in terms of cost and in terms of devoting the space and time to set them up properly. The amount of money you should spend on your source as compared to the rest of your gear has just kept going steadily downwards. Back in the vinyl days you really had to spend a mint to get a good record player, and it didn't hurt to keep buying copies of records that got a lot of play. Spending even more would net you concrete reductions in noise, less wear on your records, etc.. These days S/PDIF out from an the on-board audio chipset of a motherboard and a decent receiver/pre-amp or DAC are overkill for 99.9% of the sound systems out there. High end CD transports are pure snake-oil.
- ksk 11y agoAh, I meant upgrading source as in making sure you have a high quality mp3/flac/etc to begin with. I was assuming that most people are not listening directly from CD and a significant amount of audio files out there are still of crappy quality.
- beloch 11y agoDo a blind ABX test of files made using popular compression settings vs FLAC or other lossless files. You may be surprised at how good low bitrates can be these days. Obviously, if you care you're going to insist on lossless, but mastering problems (e.g. the loudness wars) are a much bigger culprit of poor audio quality these days.