Bose founder, Amar Bose, has died at 83
web.mit.edu
web.mit.edu
When he arrived he was clearly still recovering (he had difficult walking and needed time to collect his thoughts before speaking), but he was still able to make a barn-burner of an acceptance speech. Afterwords, he took the time to speak to anyone who wanted to talk to him, including me.
I know audiophiles and enthusiasts have a low opinion of Bose products and their litigation strategies (some of which I share), but I had Dr. Bose as a professor in college and he was a fantastic instructor (even without the free ice cream during tests!). Students would often challenge him based on audiophile beliefs, and he would always use sound engineering arguments to refute them. And he was the only MIT prof I have saw who regularly ate meals at the Lobdell Food Court.
RIP Dr. Bose.
camera-phone picture of James Barger, Dr. Bose, Christopher Jaffe and Eric Unger at the aforementioned reception: http://twitpic.com/d2amd3
edit: bose.com has a memorial up: http://www.bose.com/remember/index.html
> but I had Dr. Bose as a professor in college and he was a fantastic instructor
Most folks knew him from the audio course. Less known was how long his history of teaching, eg his network theory book in the late sixties. That book was how I learned some of the more exotic transformations. (Most folks know parallel and series. It turns out that there are things like pi-delta/wye-delta and friends.)
RIP.
http://www.amazon.com/Introductory-Network-Theory-Amar-Bose/...
Wow. Respect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_suspension
And in this article, Bose says they won't license the tech:
Bose is seeking a partner to help in these areas and take the product to market, but the company doesn't want to just license its technology to a suspension supplier or car company. Bose wants to stay in this business for the long term as the supplier of its system.
http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/a-surprising-new-active-...
In the 80's, everyone agreed Bose products were pretty but overpriced. Unfortunately that reputation stuck.
These days, we all gladly pay extra for good aesthetic design (see: Apple, and almost every electronic gizmo on Kickstarter).
Bose was ahead of their time.
Except for Braun, Sony, B&O, and other high-end electronic manufacturers...
2. Not all electronics were ugly in the 80s. Bang & Olufsen and Quad would completely blew Bose away as far as style.
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.
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.
The PSB is nicely designed, too -- for instance, the cord unplugs at both ends, and can be plugged into either side of the headphone.
I've never liked the Bose sound, but I recognize that they do some things well; those just aren't the things I care about the most. I wouldn't say they're overpriced, though -- it's hard to argue that when their products sell so well. Maybe some of the others are underpriced ;-}
BUT, they are the most comfortable on-ears I have ever owned and possibly the most durable headphones I've owned. The model was recently updated, and I think the changes are improvements.
In that light, if you want a really comfortable, quite durable pair of portables, They are a reasonable choice.
You have to stand in awe of their excellent capability to convince so many that their cheaply made 1000% markup junk is worth the money.
Bose is completely overpriced. As is Apple, Monster and a ton of other "high end" electronic brands. But there is no better audio equipment for the average person than Bose. For a home theater or headphones or bedside radio, Bose wins every time....if you're willing to pay. And like I said, I worked in the store, A LOT of people are willing to pay for that quality.
In fact I don't know anyone that has bought Bose (apart from coming in their car or for headphones in noisy environments) that has done serious listening to other systems.
So, if "anything half the price" is supposed to outperform Bose, would you be willing to point out something half the price of an equivalent Bose product and show me some kind of unbiased test that demonstrates it?
I feel like I hear this kind of sentiment a lot, but I almost never see any evidence to back it up.
Bose doesn't cater to the high-end audiophile market. They don't sell big, bulky, expensive equipment that audiophiles go for. Instead, they sell small stuff that's expensive for it's size but cheap compared to audiophile equipment. And I think that it it does pretty well for its size and price. Sure, you can get better sound quality out of bigger, bulkier, more expensive equipment. And you can get reasonable audio quality out of other small, cheaper gear. But I'm wondering if you can get gear that beats it in every way; smaller, cheaper, and better?
I have never done any kind of blinded experiments, or measurements of frequency responses, or other such scientific comparisons, so I can't say for sure. And that's why I'm asking if you know better. Is there something out there, at a similar size and price point, that is better than what Bose offers? Do you have good evidence for this?
I would maybe agree that Bose has cultivated a reputation among ordinary consumers as "the best" which is not accurate. There are other equally good brands with a similar price point that don't get as much attention. There's also audiophile gear which is much better, but also much more expensive. What does not exist, though, are products superior to Bose as half the price. (Assuming you're not factoring in used gear or some kind of blowout sale) That goes for any brand, though.
Those Sonys are great phones designed to be tough. They're mean to be used in a studio, get sat on from time to time. Have the cables yanked, etc. They don't have noise canceling and they don't run on batteries, so I consider them a different piece of gear from the Bose noise canceling phones. But I have no doubt they're probably tougher than most phones, Bose included.
An audiophile tube amp is not going to take abuse either - it's meant to be treated in a delicate way. The tradeoff for that is that it will deliver pristine quality. The Bose stuff is not quite that fragile, not quite that good either. But the point is that all gear is designed for a certain purpose and comes with certain tradeoffs.
My bose QC's lasted 6 months of mild air travel and then the headband broke in half. Only way to fix em was buy a new pair. Also I could wear my QC's for about 4 hours and then my ear would hurt. I can wear the sonys for 12+ hours no issue. But that's just my freakish shaped head so it's personal.
That said I don't really give a crap about the sound quality. They sound good to me and they're a good price. My previous pair lasted 10 years.
All the audio engineers I've ever asked have a set of the sonys because they're supposed to be a good representation of a middle of the road system that everyone has. They're good but not amazing. But that's what you want when mixing. A representation of the middle and one of the high end. Most people will be listening on the crap to good stuff.
Bose in-car and Bose noise cancelling headphones are a different matter, as their noise cancelling is first rate.
There is plenty of evidence.
> There is plenty of evidence.
What are good sources for this kind of evidence? I'm actually interested; I find it hard to find good information on audio quality, because there's so much audiophile garbage out there.
As others in this thread have stated, their reputation online seems to be much less positive. There seem to be two main groups of people who contribute to that less positive reputation: (1) those with expertise in audio equipment who state things like Bose doesn't have nearly as good range of sound as professional equipment and (2) those who don't provide an explanation beyond "Bose sucks" (analogous to the anti-Mac vitriol that was widely seen until the late 2000s).
stonemetal presumably labeled the latter group as "audiophile hipsters" because their behavior appears to be the result of thinking it's cool to criticize products that are popular among mainstream consumers but which they believe to be deemed inferior by experts.
It's not about "range of sound", it's about producing sound accurately. A more accurate frequency response won't sound exciting, but you'll hear slightly more of your music because nothing is hyped. It's a matter of personal taste and suitability to the task. I wouldn't mix a song on any Bose equipment, but I wouldn't be frothing at the mouth if I went to a friend's and they had a Bose system. I'd still prefer a £300 pair of studio monitors over an equivalent Bose setup, but that's my opinion.
When it comes to Bose I have only come across two opinions pretty good but expensive or utter crap let me tell you how my hand built tube setup is so much better.
To my (granted mostly non-audiophile...though I am the type who insists that vinyl sounds better...) ears, they've always sounded pretty good and aren't that expensive compared to most high end offerings.
Of course, these are all audiophile nitpickings that a casual user would almost never consider.
So does the use of a jet engine a few meters away. ;)
I don't use headphones with noise canceling but I semi-regularly wish I did.
In my experience every thread which criticizes Bose offers better alternatives. This is true at least for reddit's r/audiophile.
There's a boutique audio store down the street from me that sells RCA cables which are more expensive than a Bose iPhone dock. An entire "audiophile" system is easily in the 6 figure range. If you're into that kind of gear then obviously Bose must be low end equipment for you.
For the rest of us, though, I think you pay a little more for Bose and, for that, you get a little bit better sound. It's one step above consumer gear, but still well below audiophile gear. I think it's priced appropriately.
i was surprised when i saw the (low) price of some of their stuff (i have never bought bose, but i looked on amazon to see what people were comparing to). but, at least in the uk, there's quite an industry of small firms producing "budget audiophile" gear that is comparable to more expensive equipment. eg mission, creek, music fidelity value series. and there are new chinese builders like audio-gd who are trying to get in on the market too.
also, they are most famous for their headphones, i think, and those tend to be more mainstream (there are not so many boutique headphone manufacturers - i guess you could call grado one, but otherwise sennheiser, beyer etc are pretty mainstream). headphones are common and easy to compare - when you do, bose headphones appear expensive, poorly made (maybe that's not the right description, but they seem "delicate" compared to the sennheiser HD25s i use for travelling) and not that great-sounding. but then their noise cancelling is good, which is what they are charging for. so it's true when people say the sound quality is relatively poor, but also true when people say they are hard to beat for noise cancelling.
finally, their music systems seemed to be aimed at "home theatre" (ie tv) while much of the audiophile scene is music-oriented, and the sounds are quite different (especially at lower prices). audiophiles typically care most about mid-range detail, while home theatre is all about the bass.
so it seems largely to be comparing apples to oranges and / or people with specialised knowledge being able to find better (but relatively obscure) value, which is often true.
[edit: listening to good music on good equipment is a real pleasure. as i said above, you can find this kind of thing at bose prices, if you look around. try asking at audiophile shops - they're not idiots, they know that the top end stuff is not for everyone, and they may well have some lower priced kit too (which they probably sell to their friends, since people who work in retail typically can't afford high end audiophile gear anyway....)]
Now if you want to debate about sound quality, yes Bose has a very distinct sound that may or may not be desirable. Particularly audiophiles do not want the signal processing that Bose stuff tends to give you.
I can't remember what magazine it was, but a couple of years ago competing against very expensive gear, a ~300$ NAD amplifier beat out other 5 figure amps for sound quality. and 2000$ speakers were the runner up up 40.000$ speakers.
$5K-ish, spent the right way and set up properly, will give you a system that will let you imagine you can tell whether or not the stand-up bass player had a beard. But to really get to that level, even with an unlimited budget, you really have to care about the system as much as the music it plays. Placement matters. The room matters. And I'm as willing to play that game as anybody (nobody who isn't would ever have bought a Basis Debut Gold Standard turntable with a Wheaton Triplanar tonearm mounting a Koetsu cartridge back when it mattered), but I understand that arranging your speakers, your furniture and your life around the requirements of a stereo system isn't for everybody. Frankly, a Bose box (or, in a time long past, a set of 901s instead of "real" speakers) gives better results in most cases when placement is an afterthought (if it's ever a thought at all). Does it cost more than it "should"? The markup over materials may be high, but it sells well enough at the price that nobody's been inclined to reduce prices, so I'd say not.
Bose sucks...because they suck. I'm not an audiophile, but Bose makes some seriously bad sounding products.
Yamaha makes some seriously good sounding kit at a good price.
Bose is the only high quality audio company I can think of.
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.
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.
No, the bottom, entry level of their line up is accessible at the prosumer level.
Sennheiser? Personally I'd never heard of Bose until recently, when they started advertising in UK cinemas.
They also have a great reputation for car audio, where everything is essentially custom designed to the vehicle.
Man, some of the s* setups I have heard in my time.
(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.
This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Just because you make products that you wouldn't necessarily choose yourself doesn't mean you aren't an excellent audio engineer. This same principle applies to the brewmasters at macro breweries. The fact that they make a difficult to brew beer extremely consistently shows how good they are, but they still wouldn't choose to drink it.
Light beer may be easy to drink, but it's hard to make. Here's why the weakest brews deserve more applause.
It's common to disparage light beers. As craft beers have elbowed their way into American refrigerators and taps, light beers have become punch lines. What few drinkers know, however, is that quality light beers are incredibly difficult to brew. The thin flavor means there's little to mask defects in the more than 800 chemical compounds within. As Kyler Serfass, manager of the home-brew supply shop Brooklyn Homebrew, told me, "Light beer is a brewer's beer. It may be bland, but it's really tough to do." Belgian monks and master brewers around the world marvel at how macro-breweries like Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors have perfected the process in hundreds of factories, ensuring that every pour from every brewery tastes exactly the same.
http://www.mentalfloss.com/article/12940/scientific-reasons-...
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
Tufte actually consulted for Bose and has said it was a great experience. He still uses Bose gear for all his tour stops.
Also, in New Orleans, if you're smart, go to the Marginy. Frenchman St. Find the places where the players just play. No amplification at all. That city produces enough fresh music to supply three local stations 24 hours a day.
I'd tell you some exact spots, but no. No I won't. Sorry.
I know a fair number of speakers who bring their own mics (either to a recording studio or a live venue). Bringing the whole kit is pretty serious though.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
Thankfully, most car manufacturers have stopped using Bose.
It is obnoxious that it's a 2ohm system where everyone else uses 4ohm, so you can't add/upgrade/modify easily.
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...
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.
Here's what the wirecutter says about it: http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-noise-canceling-headph...
At home I also have the Sennheiser HD 600. I usually use the Bose -- the noise cancelling is nice even if you're not in a plane.
I'd be upset if my home environment were loud enough to warrant noise canceling, though.
The e5c's main problem is they are SO sensitive they are completely unforgiving about the amplifier used - almost anything with a gain block after a volume control is going to have too high an intrinsic noise floor for them to not show it up.
In terms of pure isolation, Etymotic makes some of the best out there (>30dB isolation), and I think they sound absolutely brilliant.
Bought some QC15s at 2 am in the Atlanta airport on a cross-country-twice-in-48-hours trip. Probably the best $300 ever spent. Slept like the dead. No one bothers you with those headphones, and they aren't nearly as heavy as a lot of fancier stuff, or as insulated, so your ears don't sweat.
Those are my go-to ears at all times. I even got a carabiner so I can clip them to my bag (also a superb product: http://www.saddlebackleather.com/Classic-Briefcase-Thin)
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.
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.
I'd like to expand on this. The tradeoff has three variables: enclosure size, amplifier power output, and low frequency response. The reason is because as the audio frequency goes below the resonant frequency, the speaker efficiency drops (and eventually you run into Xmax limitations too). Resonant frequency scales with enclosure size.
Low frequency noise sounds good so a lot of speakers have deep resonances that exaggerate a specific low frequency at the expense of accuracy. Cheap, and impressive in the showroom, as long as you don't listen too carefully.
One speaker designer took the tradeoff in a completely different direction: mount a 10" speaker in a small cube, and use a very high-power amplifier to drive it below its resonant frequency. The speaker had to be specially designed with extremely high excursion (Xmax) and a voice coil that won't melt. The amplifer had to be specially designed to absorb a powerful back EMF as the moving speaker sent current back to the amplifier.
Apparently, the result was a subwoofer that satisfied not only the designer but his wife, who didn't want more "furniture".
On the premise of Bose equipment being "good enough" it should be measurable (in real units, not "audiophile unicorn units"
Makes me wonder if it would be possible to have a better bass response exploiting non-linear effects and doing some "magic" (that is, some heavy signal processing and feedback loop including a mic)
Non-linear effects of what? Speakers? Air? What would the microphone do? (Keep in mind that sound has to travel through air, which takes time, before it reaches the mic.)
You can already get better bass response by equalizing the signal fed to the amplifier, but the trade-off here is that it requires a bigger amplifier (and a speaker with higher Xmax).
Air. Like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_from_ultrasound
(yes, the article is not very good)
See how big automotive amplifiers are for a given power. What makes home appliances big is usually a huge transformer inside (which for audio quality is good, even though switched power sources are getting better) AND the feeling that light/small is not good
A modern consumer audio system is around 80% empty space inside.
Clearly people saw some kind of value in the products yes?
It's akin to Beats by Dre. People value aesthetics and Beats are the best looking headphones out there so people are willing to pay a premium for that.
It's not overpriced if that's the price that people value the product at. It's certainly not inexpensive, and we can have a discussion about the sound quality, but "overpriced" is a term that I think is thrown around too loosely.
The real question here is whether customer satisfaction is a fully sufficient criterion to determine whether or not something is a "ripoff".
For medical goods the answer is a fairly universal "no". For everything else it's more controversial. Is it correct to shortchange your customers as long as they don't know about it and are happy with their purchase? Are Bose's products actually shortchanging their customers, or is it simply satisfying a different set of priorities?
I don't think we'll ever come to anything resembling consensus on the above.
That's a very good way to put it, now that you mention it. I think Apple fits this category pretty well too.
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.
RIP Dr. Bose
So basically all your words are meaningless.
--
I should leave it there, but since everyone is talking about headphones, I'll play too...
I love the QuietComfort headphones. This is true, even though they are expensive and I've broken a number of them. They are simple, so my bluetooth Sennheiser headset remains on the shelf. They are light and comfortable: I often wear them for 12 hours in a day. They have good sound. They have contributed to so many coding and writing zones over the past ten years I've lost count. They're probably the single most important productivity tool I own. They don't leak sound (unlike open headphones -- I had a pair of really great Sennheiser headphones that made my cubicle neighbours crazy years ago, as Portishead apparently sounds like torturing cats when listened to on open headphones). They are great for air travel. Hell, when you combine them with earplugs they even make float plane trips passable.
So, thanks Dr. Bose for one of your company's products.
Are there any other faculty members (not necessarily at MIT) who have managed to start their own companies which became successful, and yet have stayed on as a faculty member? That itself seems to be a rare achievement.
I remember when CK Prahalad took a leave from Michigan to start Praja, but I don't think it was very successful.
It had 8 smaller drivers facing towards the wall, angled to reflect off it and produce a more ambient sound. And one driver facing towards the listener to provide the direct sound needed for vocals. The speakers (heavy, heavy speakers, btw) had an earlier version of their waveguide technology, which channeled the back pressure of all the small drivers and combined them to provide the bass that a larger driver would have produced.
In order to correct some of the bad behavior of the small drivers & enclosure, there was an external electronics box that you inserted between your preamp and amp, or in a tape loop if you had a receiver (it had pass-thru capability) to get the speakers to sound right. Once DSPs became affordable, they changed over to them, instead of the analog components the series of 901 that I had used.
I think I paid $1300 at the military exchange for the pair, and the (essentially required) Bose stands were another $200 or so. Which was a lot of money at the time (CD players were still $500). But I had bragging rights until I got written-up by playing them too loudly. The 901s definitely preferred a high-current amp -- I used a Hafler 200 watt MOSFET amp. A Sony integrated-circuit based receiver went into shutdown trying to drive them.
Many of the great engineers of their day worked in audio, and I find myself continually attracted to their creations. Many who work in software today, may have been building amplifiers and speakers in the 60s.
The signal processing they add to create the "spacy"effect destroys the mix, the balances of the instruments, the placement, it's all lost in a hazy phase fog of sound. I don't get it.
To my ear, even many of the cheap desktop systems from companies like Logictech sound better.
If you're looking for decent sound at a low price, there are many low cost powered studio monitors that sound pretty good, like these from M-Audio:
http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.family&ID=studi...
I don't think they are good as professional monitors, but for everyday listening pretty damn nice.
Full disclosure - We created a web app that plays audio in sync across multiple Internet devices (http://SpeakerBlast.com) & are curious about the advances being made in this field.
Could our IP devices used alone or in harmony ever produce the same sound quality of a Bose or Sonos speaker?
Most audiophiles buy stuff very few people have heard off, and Bose products themselves are on the fence of trying to be audiophile, yet popular ... a tricky space to be in.
Video of active suspension: http://youtu.be/q8sVDenpPOE
Incredible company. He'll be missed.
Kudos to Dr. Bose.
A short biographical sketch: http://flic.kr/p/f8wZ6R
Another write-up: http://flic.kr/p/f8wZee
I hope Hacker News black lines today out of respect for this man.