Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> A tiny box with tiny drivers and not a lot of power simply can't reproduce lower frequencies well.

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".

Interesting

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)

With the right room you could probably take advantage of modes to boost the bass response of smaller speakers at specific frequencies but, ultimately, to achieve a reasonably flat frequency response down to 20-30 Hz you're simply going to need the ability to move some air. There's no getting around that. What you're suggesting is a bit like trying to turn a 4-banger into a V10 by tweaking the spark-plug and fuel injection parameters.

> 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).

"Non-linear effects of what? Speakers? Air?"

Air. Like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_from_ultrasound

(yes, the article is not very good)

That requires a large amount of power, so you'd still have a big amplifier.

Well, not really.

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.

How about using the little microphones on a Google Glass like device to provide information for negative feedback distortion cancellation? That would work better for lower frequencies. For higher frequencies, have a program adjust the audio signal in response to the user's position in the room.

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.

something of an aside, but atc scm7 speakers are comparatively small, have no ports (so can be placed near walls), come in a variety of finishes, and look clean and modern. if you're looking for an "easy to live with" set of speakers we found these to be a pretty decent compromise...

Bose was ahead of his time as they sold overpriced products before Apple did. Why this is worth celebrating is questionable.

If they were overpriced then why did people buy them? Why was the market willing to bear such a price?

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.

Because the market is not a perfectly efficient discriminator of quality. In a more extreme way, why do homeopathic products exist?

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.

I think it's satisfying a different set of priorities.

That's a very good way to put it, now that you mention it. I think Apple fits this category pretty well too.

I like the way Warren Buffet explains markets: in the short term, they're a popularity contest. In the long term, they're a weighing machine.

How would you say the quote explains the context of Bose products?

What exactly is "quality", and in what sense does it exist outside of human perceptions?

Overpriced = the mark up of the price over costs is very high. Then, you can think that mark-up pricing isn't a good reference point - or even possible, for non-physical goods - but the meaning of the word in that context is clear.

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