10 ms·

Bose got a bad rap. In the 80's, everyone agreed Bose products were pretty but overpriced. Unfortunately that reputation stuck. These days, we all gladly pay

• swinnipeg 13y ago
  Don't overlook the Braun Atelier systems. Those products are art.
• lotso 13y ago
  >all electronics, except Bose, were ugly. Except for Braun, Sony, B&O, and other high-end electronic manufacturers...
  • calinet6 13y ago
    ADS [drool]
• batbomb 13y ago
  1. Bose products in the 80s were ugly too. 2. Not all electronics were ugly in the 80s. Bang & Olufsen and Quad would completely blew Bose away as far as style.
• mrkmcknz 13y ago
  Not sure of the reputation of Bose in the US but over here in the UK 8/10 people would know Bose as a high end, high quality audio company. I'm not sure any other audio company could make such a claim in the UK. Every electronics megastore has an elegant Bose section showcasing the hardware in an Apple-esque way.
  • stonemetal 13y ago
    Same rep in the US. It is just the audiophile hipsters who can't wait to show how much they know by bashing Bose.
    • lotso 13y ago
      >It is just the audiophile hipsters who can't wait to show how much they know by bashing Bose. Are you implying that Bose headphones and speakers are a great value and quality? Otherwise you are basically trying to paint a group of people as hipsters for what is seemingly an illogical reason.
      • product50 13y ago
        Are you saying it is not?
        • eikenberry 13y ago
          I would. At least not as good as their price point would indicate. In general you can get superior products for less money for most of what they sell.
          • dsrguru 13y ago
            Could you please list those better quality and less expensive alternatives for my edification? :) Especially active noise-cancelling headphones that are better quality and cheaper than QuietComfort. The Audio Technica ATH-M50s mentioned in this thread look like a pretty good less expensive alternative if you don't need low-frequency cancellation, but I'd love an affordable pair of active cancellors for flights.
            • ScottBurson 13y ago
              They're not cheaper, but I think the PSB M4U2 ($400) sounds much better than the QuietComfort 15. The noise cancellation isn't quite as good, though. The PSB is nicely designed, too -- for instance, the cord unplugs at both ends, and can be plugged into either side of the headphone.
              • dsrguru 13y ago
                Corrective upvote since you answered half the question. XD But yeah, I wonder if Bose's consumer-level reputation of having no competitors that are both better and cheaper is deserved. Hopefully Eikenberry can answer that.
  • Buttons840 13y ago
    To give myself as a one man sample: Bose is the only high quality audio company I can think of.
    • gamache 13y ago
      Bose is what you might call "pro-sumer". Bose products to not hesitate to alter and color the sound of the output, if Bose considers the result pleasing. Audiophiles and audio professionals are generally more interested in high fidelity.
      • jedmeyers 13y ago
        Bose products are kind of like Toyota Prius. It is a car for people who do not like driving. Except that Bose products are much more overpriced than Prius.
        • RyanGWU82 13y ago
          I'd compare Bose to a full-size sedan, something like a Toyota Avalon. Toyota designed the Avalon to provide a smooth and calm ride in a luxurious package. So the Avalon's suspension/steering/engine are all tuned for a smooth ride, which is the exact opposite of what car enthusiasts want. An active driver would be happier with a BMW or a Subaru. But if my grandparents drove a Subaru WRX, they'd hate the same qualities that make it enjoyable to the enthusiast. Bose actively processes the input, which does improve the sound quality to the casual listener. It's exactly what those kind of listeners want. Audiophiles want exact reproduction of the original source, so it's not a good choice for their preferences. But by dissing Bose, audiophiles are doing a disservice to the casual listener, the same way as if I pushed my grandparents toward a WRX.
        • andrewcooke 13y ago
          this is unfair. most people don't buy cars for the pleasure of driving. bose is like most cars - trying to appeal to "normal" consumers, giving them something "special" (small speakers with big sounds, or noise cancelling, say - things that are easy to demo) within a price. audiophile equipment is more like the ariel atom - an awesome car to drive, but no-one normal would get one. where would you put the kids? or the shopping? and i say this as an "audiophile" - i love messing around seeing which dac pairs best with which speakers/amp (or hanging rugs on walls...). but i know that makes me not-normal.
  • timc3 13y ago
    B&O and Bowers and Wilkins both spring to mind, both make much better products
  • nly 13y ago
    > I'm not sure any other audio company could make such a claim in the UK. Sennheiser? Personally I'd never heard of Bose until recently, when they started advertising in UK cinemas.
• rdl 13y ago
  Bose Pro Audio (where I worked for a summer at MIT) was always awesome -- we were doing audio radiosity calculations to simulate audio systems in CAD mockups of existing or planned buildings (stadiums, etc.) with various speaker placement, from arbitrary listener positions. Their speaker arrays were rugged, well engineered, etc. -- no one worries about "audiophile" stuff for venue audio or PA. They also have a great reputation for car audio, where everything is essentially custom designed to the vehicle.
  • ioquatix 13y ago
    I for one, WISH, people would worry about audiophile stuff for "venue audio or PA". Man, some of the s* setups I have heard in my time.
    • gareim 13y ago
      I wish some of these "DJs" at colleges these days understood what distortion is. And what is with the trend where volume has to always be at 100% even when you're playing in a small room? It's nuts out there.
    • rdl 13y ago
      There's a difference between "caring about sound quality" and "audiophile 0.001% improvement". The first priority of pro audio is mechanical stuff and reliability, then sufficient coverage with adequate quality, then it becomes a tradeoff of budget (and hassle) vs. improvements in audio quality. I don't think anyone would really have a problem with "normal mid-range (~$500-1000?) home system quality sound" at a sports stadium as an upper bound of quality, which is hard to achieve for every seat. (the other funny thing about the pro group is we all had sennheiser or beyerdynamic or grado headphones at our desks, and mostly stuff like Martin Logan/Paradigm/PSB/NHT/Magnepan or (for me, since I was a poor college student) a reuse (mit dumpster-diving equivalent) Klipsch La Scala from the 1970s setup at home.) Bose Aviation headsets also rock; I like the Dave Clark for the military standardness but the Bose were the first ANC I think.
      • starky 13y ago
• gamble 13y ago
  What? Bose has long been notoriously low-quality for the price. They were the Beats by Dr. Dre of the 1980s, not Apple.
  • Nav_Panel 13y ago
    So goes the old saying: "No highs? No lows? Must be Bose!" While that saying might be a tad unjustified, I find that their products are often purchased by people who don't do adequate research into other headphones that might suit them better. I often see people wearing the "QuietComfort" brand headphones in situations where they gain no benefit from active noise cancelling, although for all I know they could be heavy travelers and only own a single pair of headphones. But honestly, a comparable pair from another brand would run them $200 less...
    • snom380 13y ago
      What would you recommend as an alternative? I tried some Sony ones but the electronics added some other noise.
      • Nav_Panel 13y ago
        No clue regarding active noise cancellation. If you're okay with passive (aka, they go on your head and keep sound out just by virtue of surrounding your ear), a few popular low-cost options include the Audio Technica ATH-M50s and Sennheiser HD280Pros. Everyone in the audio world has their own opinions on this sort of stuff, but I've owned a pair of each of those and, despite their small flaws, both are decent pairs of cans. The only time you really want the active stuff is when you're traveling and there exists a lot of low-frequency noise, such as on a train or airplane. Looking around on Hydrogenaudio confirms that the QC are okay if that's all you need, and also that alternatives exist, such as IEMs, which might have a wider range of use as they simply have very heavy passive isolation.
        • jordanthoms 13y ago
          I brought a pair of Sennheiser PXC-450s - they are nice in that you can turn off the noise cancellation and use them without batteries (and get a boost to the sound quality by doing so), but if you are on a plane or just have loud neighbors in the office I can turn it on and cut down on the outside noise. The cancellation itself isn't quite as good as the QuietComfort ones but it's close enough.
• acjohnson55 13y ago
  With all due respect to Dr. Bose, that reputation stuck because it stayed true. To be fair though, Bose gets away with their premium cost because they fill a very important market hole in home audio: they produce top-notch products backed by good design and actual science. There are a slew of companies slinging absolute crap, and a bunch of other companies selling pseudoscientific nonsense. Audio is a very difficult field for untrained people to judge product quality on the showroom floor--and in this sense, it's somewhat different from Apple's marketing task. I don't own any Bose products, but hats off to Dr. Bose for blazing his own trail, haters be damned.
• beloch 13y ago
  Nothing epitomizes Bose so well as their minicube home-theater-in-a-box systems. Somewhat expensive. Tiny and easy to live with (I believe the audiophile term is "wife-friendly"). Not very good sound quality. Good audio requires some tradeoffs. A tiny box with tiny drivers and not a lot of power simply can't reproduce lower frequencies well. There just isn't enough cone displacement. Likewise, putting those little cubes in places that are convenient to live around rarely results in placement that makes the most of what little you have! Well placed speakers are usually in the way. These minicube systems were designed for people who consider sound quality to be of secondary importance to unobtrusiveness, and they serve that market well. Bose realized that not everyone is an audiophile. Some people want to have sound that's "good enough" without huge tower speakers placed several feet away from their walls waiting for children to tip them over. Of course, these people don't want to feel like they're compromising. If you sell them cheap cubes that are marketed as being "good enough", they'll stay away in droves! If you market those "good enough" speakers as audiophile grade and charge a proportionate amount for them, people will buy them. Even more amazingly, they'll be happy with them. Audio is one of those rare sectors in which you can actually make people more satisfied by overcharging them. Bose realized this. Prioritizing convenience over sound quality and charging premium audiophile prices for compromise-making products is something Bose does indeed have in common with Apple. Mp3's are in no way a step up in sound-quality over CD's, but mp3 players were a tremendous improvement in convenience over portable CD players. There were mp3 players before the iPod, but the iPod was the first "premium" mp3 player. The first iPod's and their crappy buds cost more than a top of the line Sony discman with some rather nice cans, and people bought them in droves! So, I agree that Apple has taken a page out of Bose's playbook, but I disagree with your statement than Bose was ahead of his time. Bose's timing was perfect and his company was wildly successful as a result.
  • imissmyjuno 13y ago
    I generally agree but the iPod argument really downplays the effort apple puts into industrial design and UX. At the time of the 3rd gen iPod and being a high school studeny I could only afford one of the few of its competitors, the HDD-powered Creative Nomad, and its infuriatingly unintuitive and inconsistent UI. I'm not even talking some kind of "attractive" UI like the rather useless cover flow view introduced later. The Nomad was literally a pain to use where a little wheel had to be rotated to scroll between the many albums. in hindsight, the clickwheel UI would've been worth more than a few extra gigs of space.
• amerika 13y ago
  Funny you compare them to Apple. Their main product of the 1980s seemed to be a compact stereo that sounded like a really good boom box, but was weak on sound quality at volume.
• tossmeup 13y ago
  That rap was accurate. Better sound through marketing and douche-baggery IP / anti-competitive behavior. Bose implementations used cheap parts and cut corners, but charged premium prices by being the original MonsterCable. Bose stifled competition and innovation with pre-existing art IP. He also dicked people around with trademark because he was an asshat. He was only one step better than a patent-troll in terms of his effects on the industry (because he actually did deliver a product). Fuck him and his Beats by Dre bullshit sucker-identifying crap. Bose was drowning start-ups in the bathtub, let alone badgering any real competition. It's an affront to HN for his death to be atop the list without him being pilloried as a pariah.
  • rallison 13y ago
    Indeed. Let's not forget that Bose sued Consumer Reports in 1971 for publishing a review that described a Bose system as one that "tended to wander about the room" [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports#Bose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports#Bose
• fakeer 13y ago
  Few things I would like to add. BOSE products are actually overpriced. If there would be an overpricing scale then those will be a lot more overprices than Apple products which are themselves very much overpriced. If I take the sound quality and compare with other brands like it becomes even more pronounced. Having said that, the design aesthetic BOSE brought into its products long time ago is considered hip and innovation toady.
• steveh73 13y ago
  Bose aviation headsets are amazing.