In the 80's, everyone agreed Bose products were pretty but overpriced. Unfortunately that reputation stuck.
These days, we all gladly pay extra for good aesthetic design (see: Apple, and almost every electronic gizmo on Kickstarter).
Bose was ahead of their time.
Somewhat expensive. Tiny and easy to live with (I believe the audiophile term is "wife-friendly"). Not very good sound quality.
Good audio requires some tradeoffs. A tiny box with tiny drivers and not a lot of power simply can't reproduce lower frequencies well. There just isn't enough cone displacement. Likewise, putting those little cubes in places that are convenient to live around rarely results in placement that makes the most of what little you have! Well placed speakers are usually in the way. These minicube systems were designed for people who consider sound quality to be of secondary importance to unobtrusiveness, and they serve that market well.
Bose realized that not everyone is an audiophile. Some people want to have sound that's "good enough" without huge tower speakers placed several feet away from their walls waiting for children to tip them over. Of course, these people don't want to feel like they're compromising. If you sell them cheap cubes that are marketed as being "good enough", they'll stay away in droves! If you market those "good enough" speakers as audiophile grade and charge a proportionate amount for them, people will buy them. Even more amazingly, they'll be happy with them. Audio is one of those rare sectors in which you can actually make people more satisfied by overcharging them. Bose realized this.
Prioritizing convenience over sound quality and charging premium audiophile prices for compromise-making products is something Bose does indeed have in common with Apple. Mp3's are in no way a step up in sound-quality over CD's, but mp3 players were a tremendous improvement in convenience over portable CD players. There were mp3 players before the iPod, but the iPod was the first "premium" mp3 player. The first iPod's and their crappy buds cost more than a top of the line Sony discman with some rather nice cans, and people bought them in droves!
So, I agree that Apple has taken a page out of Bose's playbook, but I disagree with your statement than Bose was ahead of his time. Bose's timing was perfect and his company was wildly successful as a result.
I'd like to expand on this. The tradeoff has three variables: enclosure size, amplifier power output, and low frequency response. The reason is because as the audio frequency goes below the resonant frequency, the speaker efficiency drops (and eventually you run into Xmax limitations too). Resonant frequency scales with enclosure size.
Low frequency noise sounds good so a lot of speakers have deep resonances that exaggerate a specific low frequency at the expense of accuracy. Cheap, and impressive in the showroom, as long as you don't listen too carefully.
One speaker designer took the tradeoff in a completely different direction: mount a 10" speaker in a small cube, and use a very high-power amplifier to drive it below its resonant frequency. The speaker had to be specially designed with extremely high excursion (Xmax) and a voice coil that won't melt. The amplifer had to be specially designed to absorb a powerful back EMF as the moving speaker sent current back to the amplifier.
Apparently, the result was a subwoofer that satisfied not only the designer but his wife, who didn't want more "furniture".
There are a slew of companies slinging absolute crap, and a bunch of other companies selling pseudoscientific nonsense. Audio is a very difficult field for untrained people to judge product quality on the showroom floor--and in this sense, it's somewhat different from Apple's marketing task.
I don't own any Bose products, but hats off to Dr. Bose for blazing his own trail, haters be damned.
They also have a great reputation for car audio, where everything is essentially custom designed to the vehicle.
Man, some of the s* setups I have heard in my time.
Thankfully, most car manufacturers have stopped using Bose.
I'm not sure any other audio company could make such a claim in the UK.
Every electronics megastore has an elegant Bose section showcasing the hardware in an Apple-esque way.
Bose is the only high quality audio company I can think of.
Sennheiser? Personally I'd never heard of Bose until recently, when they started advertising in UK cinemas.
While that saying might be a tad unjustified, I find that their products are often purchased by people who don't do adequate research into other headphones that might suit them better. I often see people wearing the "QuietComfort" brand headphones in situations where they gain no benefit from active noise cancelling, although for all I know they could be heavy travelers and only own a single pair of headphones. But honestly, a comparable pair from another brand would run them $200 less...
Except for Braun, Sony, B&O, and other high-end electronic manufacturers...
2. Not all electronics were ugly in the 80s. Bang & Olufsen and Quad would completely blew Bose away as far as style.
Bose implementations used cheap parts and cut corners, but charged premium prices by being the original MonsterCable. Bose stifled competition and innovation with pre-existing art IP. He also dicked people around with trademark because he was an asshat.
He was only one step better than a patent-troll in terms of his effects on the industry (because he actually did deliver a product). Fuck him and his Beats by Dre bullshit sucker-identifying crap.
Bose was drowning start-ups in the bathtub, let alone badgering any real competition. It's an affront to HN for his death to be atop the list without him being pilloried as a pariah.
Are there any other faculty members (not necessarily at MIT) who have managed to start their own companies which became successful, and yet have stayed on as a faculty member? That itself seems to be a rare achievement.
I remember when CK Prahalad took a leave from Michigan to start Praja, but I don't think it was very successful.
When he arrived he was clearly still recovering (he had difficult walking and needed time to collect his thoughts before speaking), but he was still able to make a barn-burner of an acceptance speech. Afterwords, he took the time to speak to anyone who wanted to talk to him, including me.
I know audiophiles and enthusiasts have a low opinion of Bose products and their litigation strategies (some of which I share), but I had Dr. Bose as a professor in college and he was a fantastic instructor (even without the free ice cream during tests!). Students would often challenge him based on audiophile beliefs, and he would always use sound engineering arguments to refute them. And he was the only MIT prof I have saw who regularly ate meals at the Lobdell Food Court.
RIP Dr. Bose.
camera-phone picture of James Barger, Dr. Bose, Christopher Jaffe and Eric Unger at the aforementioned reception: http://twitpic.com/d2amd3
edit: bose.com has a memorial up: http://www.bose.com/remember/index.html
> but I had Dr. Bose as a professor in college and he was a fantastic instructor
Most folks knew him from the audio course. Less known was how long his history of teaching, eg his network theory book in the late sixties. That book was how I learned some of the more exotic transformations. (Most folks know parallel and series. It turns out that there are things like pi-delta/wye-delta and friends.)
RIP.
RIP Dr. Bose
Wow. Respect.
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I should leave it there, but since everyone is talking about headphones, I'll play too...
I love the QuietComfort headphones. This is true, even though they are expensive and I've broken a number of them. They are simple, so my bluetooth Sennheiser headset remains on the shelf. They are light and comfortable: I often wear them for 12 hours in a day. They have good sound. They have contributed to so many coding and writing zones over the past ten years I've lost count. They're probably the single most important productivity tool I own. They don't leak sound (unlike open headphones -- I had a pair of really great Sennheiser headphones that made my cubicle neighbours crazy years ago, as Portishead apparently sounds like torturing cats when listened to on open headphones). They are great for air travel. Hell, when you combine them with earplugs they even make float plane trips passable.
So, thanks Dr. Bose for one of your company's products.
It had 8 smaller drivers facing towards the wall, angled to reflect off it and produce a more ambient sound. And one driver facing towards the listener to provide the direct sound needed for vocals. The speakers (heavy, heavy speakers, btw) had an earlier version of their waveguide technology, which channeled the back pressure of all the small drivers and combined them to provide the bass that a larger driver would have produced.
In order to correct some of the bad behavior of the small drivers & enclosure, there was an external electronics box that you inserted between your preamp and amp, or in a tape loop if you had a receiver (it had pass-thru capability) to get the speakers to sound right. Once DSPs became affordable, they changed over to them, instead of the analog components the series of 901 that I had used.
I think I paid $1300 at the military exchange for the pair, and the (essentially required) Bose stands were another $200 or so. Which was a lot of money at the time (CD players were still $500). But I had bragging rights until I got written-up by playing them too loudly. The 901s definitely preferred a high-current amp -- I used a Hafler 200 watt MOSFET amp. A Sony integrated-circuit based receiver went into shutdown trying to drive them.
Many of the great engineers of their day worked in audio, and I find myself continually attracted to their creations. Many who work in software today, may have been building amplifiers and speakers in the 60s.
The signal processing they add to create the "spacy"effect destroys the mix, the balances of the instruments, the placement, it's all lost in a hazy phase fog of sound. I don't get it.
To my ear, even many of the cheap desktop systems from companies like Logictech sound better.
If you're looking for decent sound at a low price, there are many low cost powered studio monitors that sound pretty good, like these from M-Audio:
http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.family&ID=studi...
I don't think they are good as professional monitors, but for everyday listening pretty damn nice.
Full disclosure - We created a web app that plays audio in sync across multiple Internet devices (http://SpeakerBlast.com) & are curious about the advances being made in this field.
Could our IP devices used alone or in harmony ever produce the same sound quality of a Bose or Sonos speaker?
Most audiophiles buy stuff very few people have heard off, and Bose products themselves are on the fence of trying to be audiophile, yet popular ... a tricky space to be in.
Video of active suspension: http://youtu.be/q8sVDenpPOE
Incredible company. He'll be missed.
Kudos to Dr. Bose.
A short biographical sketch: http://flic.kr/p/f8wZ6R
Another write-up: http://flic.kr/p/f8wZee
I hope Hacker News black lines today out of respect for this man.
