Comment by bartread
2 days ago
Exactly this.
"Bose blows" is a popular comment amongst the audiophile community but, to me, it seems like they don't blow at all[0]. In fact quite the opposite: this is a fantastic example for other companies to follow. Top marks, Bose!
[0] What is actually true is that they are opinionated about sound reproduction in ways that a bunch of people don't agree with but which in the right context are often effective and enjoyable to listen to.
> "Bose blows" is a popular comment amongst the audiophile community but, to me, it seems like they don't blow at all[0]
That comment is not wrong, you are imo just not making an important distinction that the criteria on which audiophiles judge Bose as “blowing” (which is almost purely the sound profile + a few other smaller things like physical comfort/connectivity/price/etc.) vs. what you judge it on (which is more in the long-term technical user/community product support, idk how to describe that area much better) are almost entirely disjoint.
It is perfectly fine and valid for an audio product to “blow” from an opinionated audiophile perspective, while being exceptionally great from the long-term product/user/community product support perspective.
I heavily agree with you btw, Bose should be heavily lauded for making a decision to open-up their speaker firmware after it reaches the official end of support deadline. The fact that this is an exceptional practice is imo, a little bit sad, because I believe that it should be way more common.
Build quality of Bose products is good in my opinion. The headphones are alright but so are Sony, Plantronics and Apple. I love the sound of Airpods Pro in particular even if they don't want to stay in my ears [1] and the pairing experience even with the iPhone isn't what I expect of >$100 headphones in 2016.
If you want really good stereo or 5.1 sound there is no substitute for big speakers that can move a lot of air.
[1] maybe it is that gene polymorphism that makes my ears overflow with wax and has my doctor warning they will plug up one of these days
Agreed on pretty much all points. There is no "ultimate audio equipment piece" that is just perfect in all aspects, and the choice criteria are spread across both user preferences and specific use-cases as well.
I love the new airpods pro for my daily commute (subway, not a car; just clarifying before I get hammered down in replies for driving and using airpods at the same time), doubly so given their compactness+heavily improved ANC.
For home, I love my open-back Beyerdynamic DT1990Pro pair, due to the audio profile + insanely good physical comfort when worn for prolonged periods of time.
For gatherings with friends for when I need a somewhat-portable bluetooth speaker (that also happen to look good when sitting on a bookshelf outside of active use), I have a TE-OB4.
If I had a larger living space, I would consider getting a pair of high-quality speakers again too.
But there is not a single "this is it" piece of audio equipment that would just replace everything, so you gotta pick and choose your poison.
Build quality is trash consumer with a hefty markup. The older CD player era equipment has the cheapest CD mechanisms I've ever seen for the era. The audio pathway is the same hybrids that everyone else uses. Bose is 100% mass marketing. I'm old enough to remember the endless ads in the back of magazines.
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Bose is fine for what it is, but it is overpriced for what it is. IMO the main point the audiophiles make is that you can get a superior product for the same cost.
If you haven't tried foam replacement tips, they make a world of difference for me. I couldn't use the airpods (non-pro) at all. I could barely use the silicon tipped pros. But when I put a foam tip on them it not only blocks out ambient sound better, they stay in place. Unfortunately the foam wears out rather quickly and I replace them around three times a year.
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The audiophile community usually are people with more money than ears, their opinion on the quality of particular brands is easy to discard, it is usually correlated more with expense than actual measured performance.
Except from what I remember Bose audio stuff is measurable bad by any standards (its been a while since I even took note). Their noise cancelling was good in the past though.
My personal experience of Bose PA and HiFi equipment is that is belongs in the trash.
Came here to say exactly this. I consider myself an audiophile (the sane kind) and, if I want “that sound” and have time, I use my HiFi, but if I want to enjoy music and just relax, I use my Bose headphones with whatever thing I have close.
I like how they color sound, and how they use psychoacoustics to do what they do.
Audiophiles using music to listen their systems are missing the point.
> The fact that this is an exceptional practice is imo, a little bit sad, because I believe that it should be way more common.
If we gave tax breaks for open sourcing EOL products, we'd see a lot more of it. Code escrow companies might not like it, though.
In a previous life, I was the platform architect for the Bluetooth headphones at Bowers & Wilkins. We, naturally, did tons of competitive analysis, and I tend to agree Bose blows sound quality-wise, but their active noise cancelling is hands-down the best in the biz, and they have the weight and comfort extremely dialed-in.
Glad to see them setting a great example here instead of letting these speakers become expensive paperweights.
> "Bose blows" is a popular comment amongst the audiophile community
I have a 15 years old Bose system. Is it audio-transparent ? Absolutely not, its frequency response is well documented. But the sound is very pleasing, it's reliable and nearly invisble in my living room.
I'm not an audiophile though, just a music lover.
We have some really old Bose speakers my brothers and I bought 30+ years ago at my Moms place. Just listened to them over the recent holidays. Not ann audiofile but they sounded pretty good even now.
"Bose blows" is typically in regards to their price/performance, and especially with how they marketed themselves throughout the 90s and early 2000s.
Bose used to advertise that they were the best sounding speaker out there, while also running advertisements that made claims which violated the laws of physics.
For the same price as a Bose system you could get something much higher quality. Bose was selling at luxury prices w/o luxury quality. They got away with it because compared to the cheap garbage most people listened to, Bose's stuff was nicer. Their quality was mid to upper mid tier, and the build quality was generally good.
But people got irritated by a decade ads saying a tiny speaker is more powerful than a proper speaker setup.
Now days Bose makes good quality noise cancelling headphones (and I suspect they made more revenue selling NC headphones during the open office and then COVID era than they ever did selling speakers in the 90s!) and they brand car stereo systems.
Their noise cancelling headphones are good, even if the ear pads wear our way too fast.
Pretty much no one has a home hi-fi setup anymore, everyone just has a sound bar. I do have a hi-fi music setup, people are rather shocked when they come over that I even bothered. I got it for $2k on Craigslist years ago, the setup cost someone a small fortune when they were brand new. IMHO buying new hi-fi gear is pointless, Speakers made in 2005 sound just as good as speakers made in 2025, the laws of physics haven't changed any!
Speakers often use materials that degrade over time unfortunately. For example electronics in the crossover, foam, glue, and depending on the environment paper.
Seems to me like an executive saw klipsch failures and saw an opening to kill two birds with one stone.
One, to show their support for audiophiles who supported them.
Two, make superior products to klipsch that - ummm - actually state the real ranges of the speakers and use real copper windings instead of “painted” copper.
Alternatively: Bose now provides highs! No lows.
Well, Bose has a long history of continually hyping whatever they're selling as the complete & utter pinnacle of sound reproduction technology, whether or not that's actually the case. Before the internet it was through their print media ads, starting with their Direct/Reflecting home speaker tech, continued through the 800 series PA speakers, Acoustic Wave tabletop radio, etc. Not to say there were not benefits, but that the choices they made -- single driver size, requiring certain room boundaries/geometry for optimal sound, need for active EQ/processing to get full-range response before the tech was really there to do so optimally -- did not always equal great trouble-free sound as advertised.
That said their implementation of noise-cancelling headphones/earbuds was a legit game-changer. And good on them for open-sourcing these speakers!
not an audiophile but is it possible to tease out those aspects of sound reproduction if the software is open source?
My comment about sound reproduction was more a point on Bose's longstanding philosophy in building speakers than in anything about this specific software but, to answer your question... quite possibly. Bose intentionally colour the sound and apply, at the very least, EQ and some sort of active processing to it to get what they believe is the best out of the speakers and enclosures they use.
And I'm couching this all in very neutral terms, not because I have an axe to grind with them, but because I don't want to get into a flame war with the kind of audiophiles who hate Bose.
FWIW the Bose products I've heard and used all sounded pretty good. At the end of the day they're designed for people to enjoy music within a particular target context, not necessarily to be the most accurate at reproducing the recording exactly.
(I'll say this as well: reproducing the recording exactly isn't necessarily what you want to get something to sound good. A lot of albums from the loudness war era benefit significantly from rolling off some of the higher frequencies, where clipping occurs, for example. So I have one amplifier that includes - gasp, shock, horror - tone controls that I sometimes use and, on another system where the amp doesn't have tone controls, I've hooked up a [true] stereo graphic equalizer. You also have to take the listening environment into account and when you do that some element of processing the sound before it comes out of the speakers can also prove to be beneficial. Anyway, I shall now go and brace myself for some righteous abuse from the purists.)
i always heard "no high, no lows, must be bose"
The audiophile community is so far up it's own ass it doesn't see a distinction between bose and a piezoelectric buzzer.