[Otto]

So I went back to the Outlet mall to get a couple things that I hadn't been able to pick up previously. While my wife was at the no-mens-clothes Liz Claiborne store, I had a chance to go to the Bose store.

I walk in and it's totally dead (well, the whole mass is totally dead on Wednesday at 10 am). There's Bose stuff everywhere, of course -- so much as to be confusing. A young salesman greets me and asks if I'm looking for anything in particular. I say, "no, but I'll watch a demo if you don't have anything else going on." We go into a decent-sized theater room that has front projection video and some "speakers" and "components." I pretty much know the routine -- they have the mock "speakers" that are really just a bunch of speaker cloth around a frame, which are obscuring the little Bose cubes. Then, when the moment is right, they push away the "speakers" to reveal what you've really been hearing -- The Bose System!

So anyway, the demo is a DD 5.1 made-for-Bose thing showing a variety music, nature and action clips. It also has a "story line" in which a couple buy a flat panel TV, but only have a boombox below it. Too bad. They want to get "surround sound" but find that the speakers are just sooooooo big, and the components sooooooo overwhelming. What to do?!?!? Well, get the Bose stuff of course!

The sound from the system was "OK," I suppose. I can't recall if it's Bose or someone else, but there's a commercial for some type of HTIB stuff in which some respected industry insider guy states something like "compared to normal TV speakers, this system is going to sound much, much better." That's how I felt about the Bose system. It got a lot louder than TV speakers, and it had better separation. Of course, 5.1 anything that's properly set up will sound better than TV speakers.

So, it's better than nothing.

My other feelings are that the sound was somewhat compressed, especially at high volumes. It was pretty loud, probably louder than most wives would like, and I think they were approaching the limits of the system. I would not be surprised if there was clipping and distortion going on at high levels. Of course, the little speakers can only do so much in dynamics, and while big action sequences sounded OK, they were definitely lacking any real slam. They also seemed to lack sparkling, crystalline highs. To be fair, I wasn't familiar with the program material, so those types of things could be related back to that (but I doubt they would use program material that was that screwed up).

OK, on to the Acoustimass bass module. It's pretty bad. Very boomy and one-notey. I don't think they advertise it as a "sub" (hence the "bass module" moniker). I could tell that there was a lot of boom coming from one corner of the room, but it was as would be expected: disappointing after having used "real" subs.

And then it was over. The salesguy popped in from stage right and said "So what do you think? Pretty impressive, huh?" I said yeah, and kind of told him that I read a lot about audio stuff, and hadn't heard a Bose system in a long time, etc., etc. We didn't really discuss any more than that.

I did ask him the price, and he said it's $3,799. For that, you get four of the cubes, a center, the bass module and the main unit and remotes. The main unit will store CDs in some way or another (not sure if it has a hard drive, stored in a compressed format, etc.).

So that's it. I know you can get a better 5.1 audio system for that price. What you'll lose is convenience, simplicity and size. That's what they are unabashedly marketing. It's for people that don't want big speakers, that don't want a rack of audio equipment, that don't want to tweak their system for the best sound possible. We aren't those people. We want to spend excessive time and money in this hobby, and that's why we think Bose is nowhere.

So, I'm OK with Bose marketing to people that don't want any hassle. If that's what they want, then, hey, great. Even at the expensive-for-what-you-get price. The thing that gets me is that people actually think this stuff is good. I have friend at work that was telling me about his Klipsch system and all this and that. Sounded like a good setup. And then he says that "it's pretty much top of the line, until you get into Bose." So the guy has a nice system, knows what he's talking about, but still buys in to the marketing department's story...