CM is right. Bose likes to use $20 paper cone drivers and put them in multi-thousand dollar home theater systems. This is no exaggeration. You can find the replacement speakers for Bose systems at online electronic surplus stores and outlets for what they are really worth.
All of their speakers have terrible housings. The satellites have thin ABS housings which, besides being succeptible to breakage, have no positive acoustic qualities. Plastic is okay for the low end if there's some padding behind the drivers to make sure little or no sound is reflected. Bose does no such thing. Their subwoofers (which are small and sound like **** anyway) are housed in the lowest quality LDF cabinets (low density fiberboard). Good MDF is what most DIYers use to build speakers.
They power them with cheap amps and top it off with one of the best marketing teams in the world, selling a $60 product for thousands. The markup is unbelievably sick. Your average pair of surround PC speakers for gaming or movies will be way better than anything Bose offers...and I'm not a big fan of PC speakers. They are a great budget item that are hard to beat without spending a few hundred, but generally I tell people to invest in real speakers if they can. And I'm saying now that a $100 Logitech set is probably far superior to anything Bose has on the market. That is not an exaggeration. It is not fanboyism. I don't like Logitech speakers that much but I think they are infinitely better than the terrible Bose.
"Bose, better sound through research." Bose, better profits through marketing. Bose is a respected name among lay people, probably because at one time they did make good audio products. Now they've completely sold out and use their name to fuel an incredible marketing machine that is almost to the level of fraudulent.
The sad part is that Bose COULD make great stuff. Bose puts a lot of money into research, but hardly any of it ends up in products. I would also be willing to be that "research" is just marketing research. But yeah, Bose could make fantastic products if they wanted to. But they chose to sell out instead. Their advertisements are one step away from being false advertising. The only thing that saves them is clever wording and the fact that audio quality is considered subjective to most people.
Yeah, that's my Bose rant. They just suck. It isn't even the quality of their products that bothers me. If they sold their Waveradio for $60, like what it's really worth, I would have no problem with it. Their business practices border on fraud, that's what gets me.
Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.
