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Amar Bose To Donate Company To M.I.T.
MBC1977 writes with this eyebrow-raising news from CNN: "'The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced Friday that [Amar] Bose, the 81-year-old founder of the sound system company that bears his name, has donated the majority of Bose Corp.'s stock to the school.'
Very cool indeed!"
Maybe they'll be able to get BOSE to make equipment that is testable for reviews and has some midrange.
The headline makes this story sound more sensational than the reality. MIT doesn't get any control over the company, just a pile of dividend-bearing stock.
I also wish MIT could open-source the designs and IPs of Bose for
the greater good of the audio world.
Why not give it to a school or schools that actually need the money?
Something tells me that using Bose equipment is going to be taboo at caltech in the coming years.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
Is it just me, or did Timothy manage to strip out TFA between the firehose and the front page?
http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/29/technology/bose_mit_donation/index.htm
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
MIT has done wonderful things for the world. As have many academic institutions. But this is as good a time as any to note that making large donations to an elite academic institution is a pretty ineffective way to use your money.
MIT is already well funded, and while this money may go to fund additional research, it may also just lead to a lot of pretty buildings going up. If you have the opportunity to donate, why not donate to a school that will use the money to dramatically increase the number of students it educates, or to a charity that sees the money directed into existing research initiatives that need it.
I'm sure the new Bose facilities will be very nice and the Bose family will have no problem getting into MIT for the next few generations. Nonetheless, it seems like a bit of a waste.
Maybe MIT can do something to make them sound good.
These are non-voting, unsellable shares.
MIT only gets the dividends.
True story: An elderly gentleman walked into an electronics store in Toronto looking to buy speakers. The salesman showed him a couple of different models. The customer pointed at another set on the shelves and asked about them. The salesman said "Oh, those are Bose, they're crap." The customer was Amar Bose.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
Because Bose is just a marketing company that long ago abandoned any actual sonic engineering.
Bose isn't exactly a WASPy name. Fat chance of that happening.
Far better than donating it to a church or other anti-intellectual organization. Just saying.
To any billionaires out there that don't know what to do with their money: set up a foundation, buy a record label, and release (as far as contractually possible) the entire catalog under creative commons, the rest under $0.01/song downloads. That'll give you some legacy! Bose will be forgotten in a week.
While I agree with the funding Americans sentiment, I still think think academia and graduate schools are pretty full of white males when you take said foreigners out of the picture.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
So far I've read:
No highs, no lows, Bose.
and from another commenter:
Maybe they'll be able to get BOSE to make equipment that [...] has some midrange.
If I've read that right one of you is complaining that there isn't enough midrange, and the other is complaining that there is too much. Is there any consensus on what is 'wrong' with Bose sound... or is this just one of those pedantic arguments that audiophiles have while the rest of us just go and buy Bose equipment because it makes us perfectly happy?
Both put out products that are mediocre and overpriced, and have greatly overinflated opinions of themselves.
I'm a white male starting my PhD in the fall and I'm getting more money from the state of Arkansas than a foreigner would because I'm an Arkansas resident. I also had my undergrad degree fully funded by a state scholarship (to the tune of around $80,000). My university is practically begging locals to pursue a PhD. My foreign colleagues generally have to pay full retail and don't get the federally backed student loans my wife is relying on for her AuD. By the time I finish my PhD, it's looking like my state will have paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $250,000 to educate me. I'm thankful for that and plan on living in Little Rock for the rest of my life so my taxes can help future students.
I'm using all of my mod points to mod ancient memes down. Please join me.
Among self-contained radios as small as a Wave music system, can you recommend one with better lows?
I bet the outcome of this experiment would surprise us all!
When Monster's component A/V cable for Wii is cheaper than Nintendo's, the "Monster cables are expensive" meme begins to sound less sustainable.
True story
What's your source, may I ask?
Just to put a finer point on it, it sounds like non-cumulative Preferred Stock [a type of non voting stock with very few rights].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_stock
Why are their no links to sources? I see the article but without links it's just hearsay.
*there
Have you married your sister yet?
XML causes global warming.
I see that slashdot has added a new feature of simply omitting any link, presumably for the e-z convenience of not RTFA.
Will MIT give the company to their Electrical Engineering or Management (Marketing studies) department?
Investing the money in a venture capital fund would be far better for people, including MIT students. Venture capital funds startup companies so those MIT grads and graduates of other Universities can actually get jobs using the knowledge they learned in school.
Philanthropy is great, but it spends wealth rather than creating it. (Giving to MIT is more of a gray area in between though.) Venture investments can help the next Bose.
Having built my own speaker system, I came to realize that the problem with speaker design is to get good sound into a small and shippable product. If you can use your entire house, and many elements, it is trivial to get good sound. For example, many elements covering a wall, each with little effect, is a great subwoofer. After that measure current vs. voltage over the elements to determine element dynamics (Similar to algorithm that controls brushless motors), and feed that back as a correction to the amplifier. Result: perfect reproduction from signal to sound. Adding some sound dampening furniture, carpets, and pictures (print some move posters on canvas with insulation behind) and you are in sound heaven.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I hope so.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/30/business/30bose.html
funding *American* (not just foreign) PhD students
According to Wikipedia:
"His father, Noni Gopal Bose, was a Bengali freedom revolutionary,[3] who having been imprisoned for his political activities, fled Calcutta in the 1920s in order to avoid further prosecution by the British colonial police."
Maybe if "American" students started fighting for what they believe instead of demanding that everything be given to them they would find it easier to get a PhD.
Yeah, my PC speakers cost about $150. I listen to music on a set of Grado SR-80 cans that list at $90. If I need to travel, well I got as a gift a pair of Sennheiser PX-360s that run to slightly over a hundred bucks. I am an audiophile in the sense that I enjoy listening to music, and I listen to it on equipment that reproduces it to higher fidelity than the cheapest consumer stuff out there. Sure, I could spend more money, and get myself a proper DAC, a vacuum-tube headphone amp, some high-end headphones, and a totally sweet home theater, but as much as I would appreciate the results, that's not really an expense I can justify.
I can justify buying what I have, and most sensible audiophiles will see the logic in my choices.
Yet all my equipment together doesn't cost as much as a single "moderately-priced" Bose solution that puts out a horribly distorted sound. The reason why Bose's products are so successful is also why people who care about music dislike them: You hear the speakers, not the music. By punching up the bass and the highs, people hear things they don't normally hear in music, but what they hear sounds nothing like the original.
It's the audio equivalent of ketchup, only if ketchup cost four times the price of a decent cut of meat. Bose isn't the opposite of "Gold-plated Ethernet-cable Audiophiles", it's the gateway to that brand of Audiophilia. MIT's gonna make a lot of cash out of Amar's company. Good for them.
I think you'll find that most American universities do primarily fund American students. I did my PhD in a UK university, but I spent three months in a US university on a collaboration, and from what people said it seems like the funding situation is pretty similar, although not quite the same:
In the UK, the university charges tuition fees for PhD students. These have two rates, one for EU citizens (government subsidised) and one for everyone else (full price). This covers lab space, lecturer time, and so on - the university skims about 50% off before it gets to the department, to cover general university overheads. Most PhD student places for EU citizens come with a grant, either from a government grant, an industrial partnership, a charitable trust, or the university itself. This covers all of the tuition fees, travel expenses, and provides a stipend (tax free income). I don't even know exactly what my tuition fees were - they were paid from the grant and I never saw the bill - while my colleagues from Malaysia (for example) were having to pay a huge amount every year. I was paid a stipend which worked out to about the same as an entry level graduate salary after tax, and claimed around £10K or so in travel expenses, while they had to pay for everything.
One of the reasons why the tuition fees were so high for foreign students was that this money was used to subsidise other PhD places. For every 2-3 non-EU students we got, the university could afford to fund another PhD. This is why you see so many foreign students - the UK and USA are both regarded as prestigious places to do a PhD in much of Asia, so our universities encourage them to apply. Once they're here, the universities charge them a lot and use this to subsidise everyone else. Send them all back home, and you'll see a lot fewer PhD places available for locals.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Oh ya, the company that sued Consumer Reports over their crappy speakers. Very cool indeed.
Don't forget unemployment, and re-training costs for when you get your Ph.D. and there are no jobs.
I'm a white male US citizen with a US Ph.D. working overseas because I can't find a job in the US. And before you start, the ones I'm applying for in the US pay less than half of my current salary. That's quantitative easing for you.
I was shown once that Bose spent more money on marketing than all other audio companies combined.
It's too bad they can't put that money into product development. Compared to truly outstanding speakers, they fall to pieces.
Did anyone mention that he was one of the Indian immigrant who took away our job.. So what he gave is what he actually owed..
Now maybe the genius's at MIT can make light weight BOSS PA Speakers which cost half of JBL's?
They need to be light so the roadies can smoosh them into the horse trailer.
They need to be rugged because roadies drink and do drugs.
They need to be loud cause the fans need to have their ears pinned back in the pit.
Alternatively, maybe they can make a nice shielded computer speaker.
But whatever they do, they ought to bring the price down. Not up.
wow.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"In 1966, U.S.-born white males received 71 percent of science and engineering PhDs, U.S.-born females earned 6 percent of those degrees, and foreign-born students received 23 percent of those doctorates. By the year 2000, U.S.-born white males received just 35 percent of science and engineering PhDs, while 25 percent of those doctorates were awarded to females and 39 percent to foreign-born students. "
There are more foreign born students receiving PhDs than there are white males. If you're a white male, you're the last known demographic for which racism and discrimination against is encouraged, and you are less likely to get a PhD than your female and foreign counterparts. If you're one of the few who believe that funding options for a white male even closely resemble or compare well against the options for virtually anyone else, you're in the minority (ironic, huh?).
http://www.nber.org/digest/jan05/w10554.html
Shitty cables can make the digital signal harder for the receiving component to decode and force it to go into error correction/compensation mode.
It'd have to be a really shitty cable to degrade the signal that far, with capacitance and the like way off spec. And in my experience, $10 HDMI cables aren't quite that shitty.
But less-bad bit flips can change the signal without ruining it, leading to badness.
HDMI and other recent digital data links have error correction codes just to prevent this. And around that, they usually have an even more sensitive error detection to provide a margin of "unusable signal" code words around each valid code word.
I always thought they had damn good mid range at a high end price.
Can you hear me now?
http://www.wilsonaudio.com/
Bose sound equipment is terrible, and it's marketed in such a way that it tricks the customer in to thinking that it sounds better than it really does. Essentially, if you buy a Bose sound system, you really are getting a sub-par product for an over inflated price.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I had a 'Premium' Bose system installed in my car.
I had electronic music I was unable to listen to in the car because entire breakdowns were literally missing from the music. The frequency range had that large a hole in it.
The system did provide strong bass, and a decently loud mid-high range, but did so at the obvious lack of detail and clarity. At times it was like listening to music through a well. high hats became a garbled mess instead of distinctive beats.
The speakers used were cheap paper, and made in Malaysia. They use non standard impedance's too, just to make sure you can never replace them with something better. Good luck finding an aftermarket speaker that runs at 0.5 ohms impedance.
Still. I'm sure it was better then the non premium system.
It's not that Bose is bad, It's that it's so much worse then anything else at it's price point and for no decipherable reason. Any technical improvements they use are arguably less about making good sound and more about keeping their systems incompatible with other amps and speakers.
Prof.Amar Bose is one of the most learned scholars in the field of electrical engg. and he had specialised in the field of sound engg.Coming from a very ordinary background,he attained his status due to immense dedication,sincerity and pursuit of purpose.All along,he had a solid bent of mind esp. in research and this enabled him to pursue bachelors,masters and doctorate degree from the prestigious MIT.
The credit for his stupendous success goes to this parents who saw the zeal of research in him since his early childhood days.His father N.G.Bose was a freedom fighter in India and had come to the US from India during the freedom struggle in India.
Prof.Bose is gratefully remembered at MIT by his faculty members,colleagues and many students fondly .
It is no wonder that his decision to give the majority of shares of his company to his alma mater will bring about the much needed funds required to build up the research activity at MIT and bring it into the next level.
Being an Indian,I feel very proud of his achievements.May his tribe increase.
It is the dream of every Indian to study at MIT and it is the dream of every MITian to become like Prof.Bose.
P.C.Chakravarty.
pcchakravarty2000@yahoo.co.in
The only reason for this is that May 21 is approaching.
I tend to agree the money could be better allocated, as could the time of many of the students. I wrote a related essay about Pricneton University a couple years ago, and most of it could probably also apply to MIT: :-) "
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once?
That said, MIT has done a lot of amazing stuff, and I'm glad for the free software that has come out of there, as well as ideas like FabLabs fostered by the Center for Bits and Atoms. Some really great stuff does go on at MIT -- it's an issue of cost-effectiveness and institutional outlook and a law of diminishing returns weighed against the value of centralization through the MIT brand. It's hard to invest money well; MIT is a "safe" choice in that sense, even if there might be lots of better options out there. In general though, the whole idea of college is more and more problematical these days. See my comments with further links here:
"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It sounds like a good idea (for MIT) but it's actually a signal presaging the death of the company most of the time. The problem is that the majority shareholder will now be folks who 1) know nothing about running a business so as board members can't contribute any value unlike most company board members who are from industry, and 2) academic institutions are well-known to meddle in political and ideological policies and strategies rather than valid and profitable economic and financial policies and strategies.
I know of a company who's founder similarly donated his company to Cal Tech and they pretty much ran into the ground from being a 1st tier company in its markets to 3rd or 4th tier company. Basically you hear the name in its industry and the universal response is: "Are they still in business? I don't know anyone who bought from them in the last 10 years."
I have always liked the way Bose equipment looks but noticed a kind of lack in the midrange. Tweeters are sweet and small and sub sounded suitably woofey. Just as a side note, anyone know if Heil air motion transformers can be scaled up? I always thought a good project would be to make a 10 foot high amazing sounding pyramid of various thickness metal plates.
Bose is the Apple of sound.
Drew Kaplan was unavailable for comment.
Amar Bose, a well-known right-wing wackjob, has been using clever tax-dodge techniques to screw the American public. One way has been thru diversion of money overseas via bogus "transfer pricing". Bose has long claimed the company reinvests all dividends-so what exactly did he give MIT? A stock with no voting rights and no dividends? Why? A tax dodge for sure, that needs some serious investigation. Someone should start with his former secretary, long time mistress, amend finally spouse, Swiss citizen Ursula Bolthauser. No one knows tax dodging more than the Swiss!