You are right in that there are much better build of speakers in the market. BTW I had a fairly good knowledge of most American made speakers from Polks to Wilsons
Perhaps BOSE "audio reflectology" may not appeal to much more aware audio enthusiasts of today
BTW an Audiophile is one who used to be called a Audio Purist in the old days: One who not only listens to Music/ Soundtrack but who listens to the "Sound" of Music/ Soundtrack.
Polk, ha Polk! The stuff the tall man in the white lab coat sold! I took apart a few Polks too....ok I used to take apart a lot of speakers, everything from the AR 2ax to the Ken Kantor designed MGC-1 to the dbx Soundfield to Vandersteens and more. Some like the dbx, Polk, and Bose offered more room for improvement then Vandersteens or the MGC-1 or the venerable 2ax because these later models were so well designed to begin with.
For me that is the hallmark of a good speaker, can I take it apart and make it better, if I can, then why did the designer not do so in the first place? At OEM (bulk) prices for drivers, crossover components, and cabinets the difference in
cost between a good driver and a poor driver is small (please exclude RAALs, Illuminators, Revelators, Excel, Nextel, Aerogel, and all variations of AMTs etc.. from this - I am referring to simple doped paper cones and silk/metal domes).
Take for example the dynamic range limited Polk SDA 1 (A, B, C, etc.. the one with 4 6" woofers and a 12-14" Passive Radiator). Peerless (DK) made a pretty VFM 6" midbass called the TP165R (there was also a foam surround version called the 165F) that cost $2.5 or maybe $3 more (at OEM prices) to the 6" Polk used (various versions were used in the 1A, 1B, 1C - in my opinion the 1B got the best one). Now that is a total cost of $20 across a pair of speakers that retailed for well over $1000 (somewhere in the mid 1980s). Why did not care to use the 165R? Their crossover would have been a little simpler. This is but one example (since George bought up Polk) but there are 10s if not 100s of such examples.
Well designed speakers are a minority. Bose is just one proponent of speakers that easily be improved on.
Bose invested a lot of money in the science of how we listen. This was in the area of psychoacoustics. They built there home audio speakers to fit a "certain" demographic and hence it must be said that Bose did study their market well. Trouble is that for the rest of us (who do not fit this demographic) Bose speakers fall apart. Sad. They can make better speakers and even systems. They just don't feel like they need to.
For me I believe that unless one has a lot of experience with live music both Acoustic and Electric, both Indian and Western, one will never know what reproduced sound should sound like.
So go out there and listen. Listen to every live band that comes to your town, it don't matter if it is Swedish House Mafia or Dr. Lakshminarayana Subramaniam! Then maybe you can call yourself as someone who is interested in music not just in the bells and whistles that the MBAs sell.