Every audio enthusiast I know would scoff at that assessment of Bose. They have a reputation for commanding a premium for cheaply made, mediocre products using fancy marketing and gimmickry. They're no different from Beats in that regard.
I'm not an audiophile by any means, but I also get the sense that many around me seem to have disdain for Bose. I also stumbled into possession of QC headphones and some Bose speakers for my house and think they're great. So I've always wondered at what the precisely stated and justified beef is.
There's no need (and no way) for double-blind studies here. We're not talking magic cables. Objectively you can plot frequency results with actual science and measure a difference. Subjectively you can experience it, and of course there is the look, smell, weight, clamping pressure, earpiece comfort and texture of the things as they sit on your head (hence no blind testing possible).
I have disdain for Bose because of their breathless hype, misleading sales practises, high cost and (subjectively speaking) mediocre performance. Lots of people disagree with me and like Bose a lot. And that's just fine.
This comes out in every possible review, subjective ones [0] where Bose headphones are best at noise cancelling and bad at sound quality; or you can try to compare for yourself the frequency response or distortion [1] against a Sony MDR v6 for instance, which retails at 100$ and represent pretty well average quality headphones I think.
[0] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-noise-canceling-headph... [1] http://www.headphone.com/pages/build-a-graph
In home theater, they've targeted the best performance per unit of "unsightliness", so people who are willing to have 10 cubic foot floorstanding speakers scoff at their performance. But nobody can really touch them in price per unit of speaker volume, which is an important aesthetic parameter for Bose's customer base.