For the record, Bose is great and always has been in my book. There are a group that constantly ride the hater wave ever since they released their sub-par cube speakers. We get it, they were a flop. Besides that Bose makes some great full range speakers. There are a lot of good speaker manufactures but Bose doesn't deserve a lot of the criticism they get. I have a pair of their direct reflecting speakers from 1997. They sound just as great as the day I bought them.
Bose
has made some great speakers in the past. They don't currently manufacture a proper loudspeaker.
Bose "Appled" for quite some time; focusing on industrial design and branding/marketing. They hit the ball out of the park with those Lifestyle cubes and "acoustimass" units. They sucked, but the genius was positioning them right at the limit of what a McMansion owner could afford, packaged in a manner "his wife" would tolerate.
Turned out even more terrible in the end; as most of those stupid things ended up in open floor-plans with hardwood floors, kitchens, and multi-faceted vaulted ceilings; a nightmare environment for even the largest loudspeakers. That's what happens when you design something for a yuppie: It ends up in his house.
The reason people hate Bose with a passion is the constant marketing, poor performance, and the ignorant, marketing-blinded owners that just
won't shut the fuck up about them. Stuffy little pretentious fucks. Remind you of another tech company? :rofl:
Another reason for the hate was the disruption of the home theater industry which naturally resulted in otherwise decent, budget-minded manufacturers moving from stuff that worked well enough to crap that looked like it would sell beside the tiny Bose crap. Make no mistake: Bose hamstrung the lower end of the industry. $3,500 worth of speakers that couldn't outperform a $1,000 budget 5.1 setup damned near killed off any decent sound from $150-$2,000.
Right now it costs $3,500 to buy their cutesy little 5.1 setup. That's no small amount when it comes to home theater. Hell, you're right in the price to performance sweet spot. Why spend it on Bose? Where is the advantage? Bose was the best of the cheap shit, but they weren't even
remotely cheap; damned expensive, actually. So, you were left with nothing in the most important (to the consumer) price bracket in home cinema.
They made some good speakers over the years, but for a while they devolved into what amounts to arrays of small, full-range drivers with a ported mid-bass solution; basically cheap computer speakers with a fancy cabinet and priced up 10,000%. They became hyper-focused on design and packaging, and drank their own Kool-Aid.
All that said, that focus on packaging lead them to produce some incredibly good in-ear headphones, Bluetooth earpieces, MP3 player docks, and Bluetooth speakers. Their multimedia speakers were good enough for most people; not great, but I can absolutely understand the appeal of tiny speakers for desktop use. It's not my thing, but I get it.
Looks like now they've figured out how to apply their ideas to a product that will actually use them effectively; which is good, because Bose hasn't offered a proper speaker in some time. Even their portable PA gear falls into the same trap. It's bad design. Most of their products over the years have been. For every one thing they did right, they found a way to do five more things wrong.
...and nobody would have cared if they hadn't disrupted the industry right when yuppies were gaining power. That era of suck isn't limited to Bose. We lost a lot of good products to manufacturers trying to please those style-centric, perpetually connected hippies.
We can't even have decent GPS units anymore because of them. There is an argument to be made that nobody really hates Bose; what they
do hate is the market that fanned the flames of attempted miniaturization in the name of style. Kind of like me not having an issue with Walmart, but wanting to beat the people who shop there with a pool noodle full of ball bearings.
The Soundtouch 300, however, is
not bad design. I hope it's a sign of things to come, because if that's the case, people who are stuck with smaller environments may actually have another legitimate option if Bose sucks it up, ditches the failures, and goes just a bit bigger to get this driver array in a stereo or surround cabinet. :applause:
I think about the only thing wrong with it is the lack of any kind of intelligent switching. It only seems to be able to manage one wireless connection at a time, and there is only one HDMI input, which rather buggers up the simplicity of the ARC.
They know their shit. The question is, will they use that knowledge to best effect, or devolve into what they have been for a very long time? I hope they use it to actually improve performance, because good options on store shelves are a wonderful thing.
Cheers,
Kennith
