Why People hate Bose

[denom]

Oh by the way, does Bose position itself as an audio company or lifestyle products company? Huge difference. Maybe Malvai could be induced into joining this disco. (Short for discussion)

This is a very interesting discussion(analogue vs digital) which deserves a separate thread for it.
Let the Bose thread be as-is

Whats say???

 

[Finyl Vinyl]

This is a very interesting discussion(analogue vs digital) which deserves a separate thread for it.
Let the Bose thread be as-is

Whats say???

yes Bose. Err yes boss. Err. yes whatever.

 

[SatSon]

I think this topic has been taken to a completely different level by this time. I am just a beginner in this forum and an audio enthusiast. I just started earning my money and my first investment in hi-fi was a Bose Acoustimass 3 series IV which is driven by a SONY MHC-VX-33 which I bought as a used item. But really had some auditions of various Bose s/ms starting from those thumpy ones in Music World outlets to those in Bose stores. And those sounded really cool to me, may be coz, I never had an opportunity to listen to the big brands which's often mentioned here, like Wharfedale, Polk, B&W etc.

Regarding Acoustimass, the key points which i noted are:
Clear and crisp vocal and mid range
Tight bass (though bit boomy for some songs)
Clean treble (and not sharp to disturb the ears)

Also I got this for comparatively lesser price through e-bay

 

[jaudere]

As long as one gets a Bose product at appropriate price, thats quite ok. It is about price performance ratio rather than performance.

@finyl vinyl: i would definitely love grand piano more than electronic piano. However here are not not talking about digitat sound storage but digital origin of sound(electronic piano is digital sound 'production' while CD is sound 'reproduction').

One can easily make out difference between grand piano and electronic piano even when it is played on
CD Or media player.

Secondly, I Think ( i say i think because I am not sound engineer or I have never been in recording room though i used to be guitarist for my college orchestra) catching the ambience is function of mic placement & sensitivity and not digital/analogue. If you place mic closer to the source & when it is insensitive, it will not pick up ambience. If you keep sensitive mic in middle of the room, it will catch all reflected sound is addition to other sources which will create a feel of ambience,a feeling similar to what one gets while being in a room playing live orchestra. You hear all original and reflected sound.

As some one said, let us not distract from liking or hating Bose.

 

[Finyl Vinyl]

As long as one gets a Bose product at appropriate price, thats quite ok. It is about price performance ratio rather than performance.

@finyl vinyl: i would definitely love grand piano more than electronic piano. However here are not not talking about digitat sound storage but digital origin of sound(electronic piano is digital sound 'production' while CD is sound 'reproduction').

One can easily make out difference between grand piano and electronic piano even when it is played on
CD Or media player.

Secondly, I Think ( i say i think because I am not sound engineer or I have never been in recording room though i used to be guitarist for my college orchestra) catching the ambience is function of mic placement & sensitivity and not digital/analogue. If you place mic closer to the source & when it is insensitive, it will not pick up ambience. If you keep sensitive mic in middle of the room, it will catch all reflected sound is addition to other sources which will create a feel of ambience,a feeling similar to what one gets while being in a room playing live orchestra. You hear all original and reflected sound.

As some one said, let us not distract from liking or hating Bose.

Jaudere, now we're getting somewhere. Unfortunately some of us, who're in a minority have ears and tastes that are perhaps a lot more discerning. That is exactly the point I was trying to make when I mentioned a grand vs an electric piano. Don't get me wrong. I like an electric guitar. I love a Hammond. I dislike electric drums and pianos.

And exactly (I speak collectively for us Bose-naysayers), their products are way too expensive for what they deliver. And the lack of transparency. Even for those who are not into specs and are completely just into the "Bose" brand, surely you'd like to know SOMETHING about what you forked out good money for. As an example, even a guy who buys a Bentley Arnage 5 litre engine knows that he really isn't getting too much on economy, but he does know that he's bought a 5.00 litre engine. In the retail business we use a technique called FAB to sell. Features, Advantages and Benefits. So why is it that Bose would not want the features (specs) listed?

And my point exactly again when you refer to the positioning of a mic.

Now we naively and simply extend that to digital sound and the processing it does. It's just not human enough. To open a whole new can of worms, with the advances in TV technology, I find I can watch an LED TV, but beyond a point of time my eyes cannot take too much of HD.

Again, I did not come here to bash Bose or digital, but to answer a question as to why people hate Bose. There are obvious differences between the preferences of us in the minority and those in the majority. We will obviously be drowned, quite literally, by the volume of noise the majority makes.

So my analogue loving, Bose hating friends, I retreat into a corner where I find solace in my wonderful crackles and pops. I shall follow this thread, but contribute no further

 

[gobble]

maybe I should list why my TTT are better than a woman.

1) My TTT don't mind being played with other styli as long as they are fine
2) MyTTT don't mind if I compare them with others
3) My TTT don't mind if I bring other TTTs home or get new ones
4) My TTT don't mind when I swap it for others
5) My TTT usually makes music
6) My TTT can be played anytime of day or night
7) My friends aren't shy about expressing how they like my TTT

care to add?

You forgot an important one -

8) When one gets bored, one can flip the LP and play the other side!! :licklips: hyeah: (How many women allow that? Without squealing, protesting and screeching instead of making music?!!)

You did. You said '"Fidelity" itself is lost there.' when referring to digital music reproduction. Here is the definition of 'fidelity' (Merriam-Websters):

Definition of FIDELITY
1
a : the quality or state of being faithful b : accuracy in details : exactness
2
: the degree to which an electronic device (as a record player, radio, or television) accurately reproduces its effect (as sound or picture)

I was just questioning only one point. The claim that vinyl is more accurate than digital. If you like the vinyl sound, more power to you. But when you start talking about things that can be measured, you should be more careful about making claims (Fidelity can be measured).

If you are making wild assumptions, please make them about yourself. You don't know me.

When an analog recording is converted to Digital, some amount of Dithering is added to it. Dither is actually white noise added with statistically random but deterministic probability to the sampled waveform.

Therefore the minute you process the sound digitally, the original analog signal is lost. You can have a sound that approximates the original to a DEGREE as FinylVinyl put it, but never a faithful copy of the original - no matter how good your gear is and how much you spend, because what is preserved in the digital domain is never the original!!. And the human ear perceives that difference!! Then it is the job of sampling by a DAC to attempt to replicate the original waveform with a generous sprinkling of white noise in it to mimic the original sound to human ears - but it is all make believe.

The above is true for ADD recordings or AAD recordings not for DDD recordings, which is still a vast amount of the human endeavour that we call music that is currently captured on digital medium. Maybe 100 years down the line, people will never ever hear a recording that was originally analog, except those interested in arts and history.

Edit: Actually this implies one can never have a faithful recording or copy of the disturbances in the air that is analog music, in the digital domain - (even) when the recording is DDD.

I had the pleasure of interacting with one JK Maitra who happened to be head engineering and production at Saregama and was trained at EMI and it was he who informed me that machines like the Garrard 301's and 401's were called TTT's. His attention was diverted before I could get him to elaborate.

I'm trying to persuade him to do a session for us Bangalore guys on various aspects of putting out an album. If it works out, perhaps you'd like to attend?

I am every interested in asking him about why SaReGaMa recordings are so consistently poor over the 100+ CDs I have purchased - as compared to Times Music label say. Where has the EMI training failed in his organisation? Lack of good ADCs/clocks in their gear? What is their gear and how does it compare to the best in the Industry? Why they do not know how to record a Mridangam faithfully, without one side of the drum in left speaker and the other in the right speaker? Why is the noise floor in their recordings so consistently high across all CDs? Why do their recordings give a metallic sheen when other labels do not? While are their recordings overcooked and lacking in timbre compared to other labels?

Frankly I have little respect for the collective of recording engineers of SaReGaMa Label based on their output.

Can a digital medium reproduce the ambiance of a room? Have you been to a recording studio? Have you "mic'd" a band for a live performance?

It is the state of being faithful. It is the DEGREE, yes. It is not whether it is more accurate than digital.
<snip>

We recorded a few tracks with mic'd amps and guitars that were fed directly through a DI box to the mixer. THE AMBIANCE that the mic captured encompassed the entire studio's ACOUSTICS. Which is quite different to what a DI did. The DI sounded cleaner, sharper, crisper, but just didn't capture the room.

I had linked a year back, a BBC authored PDF that described recording with the goal of preserving human art form for posterity with all its original sound intact. Recording for archival purposes where the original sound cues and ambience is preserved is an art that needs an education plus significant experience of internship under a senior who is already an expert in this. It not just about an ability to tweak knobs and dials on a sound station.

--G0bble

 

[rallynut]

You forgot an important one -

8) When one gets bored, one can flip the LP and play the other side!! :licklips: hyeah: (How many women allow that? Without squealing, protesting and screeching instead of making music?!!)

@ gobble,....:clapping:. (Been missing this humour for the many months i havent been online!!!) Hmmm, deserves a serious thought eh??

 

[thatguy]

When an analog recording is converted to Digital, some amount of Dithering is added to it. Dither is actually white noise added with statistically random but deterministic probability to the sampled waveform.

Therefore the minute you process the sound digitally, the original analog signal is lost. You can have a sound that approximates the original to a DEGREE as FinylVinyl put it, but never a faithful copy of the original - no matter how good your gear is and how much you spend, because what is preserved in the digital domain is never the original!!. And the human ear perceives that difference!! Then it is the job of sampling by a DAC to attempt to replicate the original waveform with a generous sprinkling of white noise in it to mimic the original sound to human ears - but it is all make believe.

The above is true for ADD recordings or AAD recordings not for DDD recordings, which is still a vast amount of the human endeavour that we call music that is currently captured on digital medium. Maybe 100 years down the line, people will never ever hear a recording that was originally analog, except those interested in arts and history.

All that you are talking about is in the domain of physics/electronics and can be measured.

Take analog signal, sample it and make a CD or a SA-CD. Press the same signal on a vinyl record. Play them back and take measurements of fidelity. If someone hasn't got the numbers, we are just exchanging opinions.

Maybe if you looked at the groove on the vinyl with an electron microscope, you probably will change you opinion. The grooves aren't anything like the sexy sinusoid everyone fantasizes about. It is a desperate attempt to build a smooth line with odd shaped molecules (and crystals if the material is not amorphous) There would be physics of a needle moving through the grove, the mechanical noise of two surfaces rubbing against each other. But then, I don't have any real data to back me up.

Have you been to a recording studio? Have you "mic'd" a band for a live performance?

I can't argue with a man who feels the need to put the listener down before making his point. Sound reproduction, at the level at which we are talking about, is fairly well understood physical phenomena. One doesn't have to be a recording engineer to understand it.

Can you point me to some albums you have released. I would love to hear the work of someone who is so confident about his understanding of sound.

 

[ssf]

While reading the last few pages of this thread on the discussion of Analog Vs Digital, I felt like the donkey who ignored the weed. Reading arguments for Analog made me shake my head up and down vigorously in agreement. Reading the arguments for digital also made me shake my head up and down vigorously in agreement. Maybe instead of shaking my head up and down vigorously, I should be shaking it side to side slowly when all the while listening to music that I like on both Digital and Analog. Me donkey indeed. :lol:

 

[gobble]

All that you are talking about is in the domain of physics/electronics and can be measured.

Take analog signal, sample it and make a CD or a SA-CD. Press the same signal on a vinyl record. Play them back and take measurements of fidelity. If someone hasn't got the numbers, we are just exchanging opinions.

You got it backwards mate!! Once you convert to digital something is lost!! No point pressing vinyl from a digital recording, the signal is already merged with white noise!

The sequence should be - make an analog recording then press both a Vinyl and CD. Yes I've heard that SACDs sound very much like Vinyl on good transports, no grudge about it. But mass market RedBook format and many inferior quality SACD transports may either fail to bring out the Vinyl magic, or in the lucky (well engineered) case, not enough of the original analog signal may be lost to digital processing giving the SACD format sufficient data to replicate the emotional content of the music.

There would be physics of a needle moving through the grove, the mechanical noise of two surfaces rubbing against each other. But then, I don't have any real data to back me up.

Like when I make music with my woman ... Sounds corny - Are you alluding to audio p0rn?!! :licklips:

I can't argue with a man who feels the need to put the listener down before making his point.

I wish my woman would understand that when I am trying to seduce her!! hyeah: :licklips:

PS: here is a very well written article on what dithering does to analog signal. While it may talk about DAC (digital volume control) the same applies to ADC as well: http://www.users.qwest.net/~volt42/cadenzarecording/DitherExplained.pdf

Once you read it you will understand that words like faithful or accurate are bunkum in the digital world. hyeah:

--G0bble

 

[jaudere]

I am amazed.
One thing for sure. I will stay away from vinyl as far as possible.
Few years back a friend introduced me to hi fi with Denon and jamo set up. Then i joined HFV. I got spoiled.
I fear that similar thing may happen with vinyl. As it is i like CD. If i start liking vinyl, all my cd collection will be wasted.

To get the things back on track, does Bose produce TT/TTT OR did it produce it in past?

By the way, people should be careful about back door entries. Back doors are not strong as front ones as for some intruders.

 

[thatguy]

You got it backwards mate!! Once you convert to digital something is lost!! No point pressing vinyl from a digital recording,

Ok, I probably was not clear. I had meant that the vinyl be made from the original analog signal.

As for the rest of the arguments, unless someone gets real measurements, I find the discussions getting nowhere. It is very easy to put a microscope over one aspect of the reproduction process like quantization noise or dithering and blow it up out of proportion. If someone has done real noise or distortion measurements of 'Analog-Master-Tape -> CD/SACD -> Amp' vs 'Analog-Master-Tape -> Vinyl -> Amp', I would want to see the results.

 

[Toeknee]

Lot's of diffent opinions on this thread. I started using Bose20+ years ago. Started with AM5. Traded up to 901 2 years later. Yes, a bit pricey, but incredible sound for music in stereo. Extremely flexible to position for best direct and reflecting sound. I just went to 5.1 with a Harmon Kardon 1650. Repurposed my 901s by hanging them on a used Bose subwoofer and added a Bose center channel and Bose 161 as ceiling mounted rear speakers. It is a home built package, but sounds incredible. I have found the 2 channel setting on the new receiver produces better music than the old one. I think the amplification is as important as the speaker. I have not experienced the smaller mobile or computer speakers from Bose, but my 901s are 20+ years and still rocking. They have been a good investment.

 

[SatSon]

I have not experienced the smaller mobile or computer speakers from Bose, but my 901s are 20+ years and still rocking. They have been a good investment.

Finally found someone who loves BOSE, in this forum. Kudos Toeknee:clapping:

 

[az2325]

Thanks toeknee for sharing the combo you build up using bose speakers. I was also planning to build something like these but later moved on to energy. Still, out of curosity can you tell us how much it cost for the centre channel and 161's.

 

[Toeknee]

Glad to share ways to get great sound. I had always been very happy with good stereo, but the new TV and movies are using great audio techniques and I wanted to hear them at home. My wife wanted to use just one remote and really doesn't like my Bose 901 speaskers on their stands, so we looked at HT systems from Bose, Harman Karden and Yamaha. Bose and HK just seemed too expensive ($1,800 - 2,400) for complete package uncluding integrated blu-ray. I wanted to keep my Bose 901s so I did the following:

Harman_kardon 1650 5.1 receiver, 95 watt high current $499
Bose center channel, used from Amazon $75
Bose Acoustimass subwoofer, used from Amaxon $80
Bose 161 rear speakers new $149
I use the 901s as satellites of the SW for front $0

Total cost about $800.

The HK receiver has auto setup for speakers, I did not like the result. It also has manual mode which allows personalized tuning and with a lot of trial and error I feel I have a theater quality system for my room which also serves as living room, dining room and kitchen. I had to reduce the bass level, it was shaking the windows. I also love the ability to pull up the center speaker where most of the dialog originates. My hearing isn't as good and some movies don't seem to deal with voices very well at times. I am enjoying the enhanced movie experience as well as stereo music. The width of the sound stage is the same, but the depth is now much greater, with the same 901s I was using.

I joined this site as a result of looking for a surrond sound benchmark recording to help me evaluate my tuning. I didn't find much. One thing I have noted: Some movies sound increible on my system and others are mediocre. Great recording engineering is necessary to get great sound. Maybe more expensive system could overcome poor engineering, don't know. That is as important as the amplification, speakers, power and listening room. When I audition a system, I take my own media so I know exactly what I am going to/should hear. Hear are a couple of web sites you might not be familiar with- La Moateffe and Audiogon. Good luck with your project. Let us know how you are doing.

 

[dovin]

I have listened to Bose a couple of times. I'm not an 'audiophile' and in hearing tests I have fared below average (can distinguish tones 6 hz apart, instead of average of 3.5 hz). But I did not like Bose because something about the music was not coherent. It was a lot of pieces, all jumbled together. This was in a properly setup Bose shop.

Female vocals and higher pitched instruments were very clear, very 'crystal'. I think this is the part about Bose that attracts the ear. But overall it was not all fitting together into a nice listening experience. Speakers like JBL, Klipsch are not as 'crystal' as Bose but somehow the music hangs together.

Not sure this makes sense..

I think Bose will be great for simple soothing tones in an office lobby though.

 

[Toeknee]

Bose may be near the top of the price range for consumer level speakers, but they are dirt cheap compared to almost all audiophile. Go to audiogon.com to compare. How about those solid gold speakers on the world's most expensive speaker thread?

 

[gobble]

I have listened to Bose a couple of times. I'm not an 'audiophile' and in hearing tests I have fared below average (can distinguish tones 6 hz apart, instead of average of 3.5 hz). But I did not like Bose because something about the music was not coherent. It was a lot of pieces, all jumbled together. This was in a properly setup Bose shop.

Female vocals and higher pitched instruments were very clear, very 'crystal'. I think this is the part about Bose that attracts the ear. But overall it was not all fitting together into a nice listening experience. Speakers like JBL, Klipsch are not as 'crystal' as Bose but somehow the music hangs together.

Not sure this makes sense..

I think Bose will be great for simple soothing tones in an office lobby though.

You are right! I too remarked earlier in this thread about the striking way in which cymbals were sounding in a regular showroom I visited.

--G0bble

 

[deepakgang]

in my opinion, Bose is somewhat like Apple - they have chosen what you should have and what you shouldn't, all nicely packaged with a great user experience. For the general public who don't want to know or don't consider the intricate details, they have a product from a great 'brand' which looks good and sounds good which they can then show off. This market is much bigger and proven by the success of these products, there is no reason they should change at all - that too for a fraction of the entire population. Hell - the other traditional brands are changing now