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Sound Engineer and Entrepreneur Amar Bose Dead At 83
countach44 writes with the news that Amar Bose, founder of the electronics company that bears his name, has died at age 83. "Dr. Bose founded Bose Corporation almost 50 years ago with a set of guiding principles centered on research and innovation. That focus has never changed, and never will," said Bob Maresca, president of Bose Corporation. "Bose Corporation will remain privately held, and stay true to Dr. Bose's ideals. We are as committed to this as he was to us. Today and every day going forward, our hearts are with Dr. Bose; and we will do everything we can to make him proud of the company he built." The slideshow that accompanies the MIT posting shows some of his sound-related inventions over the years.
No highs. No lows. It's Bose.
Bose had "sound-related inventions"? I thought they were just marketeers with crappy paper cone speakers.
I've yet to like a Bose product, but he obviously made many, many people's life a bit more enjoyable.
Fixed it for you.
But not the people's wallets. Bose's markup for their shitty products would make even Apple blush.
Long time ago (Acoustics). It was by far the best class I took as a grad student. He genuinely was not only a great engineer but a great teacher. He showed he movie Stand By Me to the class, and hosted the entire class to a tour of Bose. Most importantly, he was the only professor to really stress that common principles in engineering (lumped parameter model) exist throughout multiple domains, whether electrical, mechanical, or acoustic.
I really hated my experience at MIT for the most part, but his class was one of the few bright moments and I would like to think I am a better engineer because of him.
that their prices will go even higher? I don't understand why people think Bose is high end. I get better sound out of iHome speakers.
Shut up brain or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip. - Homer Simpson
The man was an engineer and a good one at that. It's a shame his company was centred around art. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I have a Bang and Olufsen system here for the simple reason that it sounds ok but looks damn spectacular. The biggest problem with Bose the company was their slogan "Better Sound Through Research." The reality is all of their designs sacrificed good sound in the name of artistic design.
Nothing really innovative has come from the company. The double cube speakers effectively ensure that the room acoustics and design completely wreak any hope of having a proper soundstage, their Accoustimass module is nothing more than a cheap papercone subwoofer which is horn loaded and again prioritises being small over producing good bass, and they seem to be the last to the market with these sound bars which they are trying to sell these days.
They do have a great set of noise cancelling headphones. They do a better job than any other I have worn. It's just a shame their sound isn't up to scratch and their cost is insane (I can get a set of Sennheiser Reference series headphones for cheaper, and I did).
None the less Bose the person and his company have done great things. I credit the popularity of his products to the change in style in sound equipment over the past 10 years. HiFi's used to be something we'd hide in cupboards, heat permitting, yet they have now become the centrepiece of many living rooms.
Better Off with Something Else
I've never been a fan of Bose home audio equipment: the whole mall-store marketing schtick and, well, um, the actual sound, were enough to put me off.
But they launched the first practical and useful noise-cancelling pilot headphones to the civilian population in 1998, after almost 10 years of military sales, and they quickly dominated the market, even at the then-lofty price of $999. They just plain worked, and worked well. Other manufacturers followed, and sometimes beat Bose's performance in later years, usually at about half the price, but there's no denying that they did pioneering, real audio engineering work in this space.
They were also smart in offering a "panel install" of their proprietary connector into aircraft. If you've owned an aircraft, you'll know that installing anything permamently is (a) expensive and (b) requires a pile of paperwork and (c) you'll never rip it out. The connector eliminated the need for the little battery pack you had to carry around, and provided additional lock-in. Clever. Sucky, but clever.
The Wave radio that "fills the room with sound" on the other hand. Meh.
Klipsch
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
They're hardly flat.
9 3.5 inch drivers is an unusual setup.
Wouldn't have paid the price for new ones. $1400 pair last I looked.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I was never impressed with Bose speakers at their price, but I was impressed with the video demo of the Bose Suspension System.
The Bose Ride system for heavy trucks looks interesting as well.
I have listened to and on occasion bought the big B's products.
Like anything ---even /. Listen with an educated ear (or read)
and make up your own mind.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
The only BOSE system that I have ever had was in my Murano. Unfortunately, it was integrated with the environmental system controls, so it took 8 years before Metra came out with a kit to replace it. Finally I was able to replace it with a Kenwood head unit and Infinity Reference speakers. The difference was like night and day.
It's a cartoon video, but it sums up the situation pretty well IMO: "The High End Store"
http://bobbyowsinski.blogspot.com/2012/05/485-volume-knob.html
Magnepan
A fine man has passed away, a man who belived in research and sharing knowledge. Now look at what this community is able to produce at this very moment. It is sad reading, sad, sad reading.
Imagine what the rest of the world would write if this crowd, the /. crowd closed down? Lets us hope the some would reflect of the wisdome and style of this crowd, on how the site and crowd brought us new knowledge, new ways to share a crowds knowledge in a way that made an impact on many technical branches of an emerging technologies, that set standards that our kids would try to live up to. Imagine that someone you hold high and dear passed away, is this how that person should be remembered on /.?
Save your shitty comments on the company that carries Dr. Boses's name and its products to another day and take 60 seconds away from producing comments and reflect in honour of the passing of a great man.
We have "Beats" now by Dre... The real mastermind in audio tech.
There's a good, measurable, audible reason you want to use low resistance cables for speakers. Speakers have a resonance frequency. When the membrane is pushed/pulled out of the center the membrane will want to move back to the center. Because of the speed it's traveling, it will overshoot that and there's your resonance. To stop that from happening, you'd ideally want the coil that's attached to the membrane to be "shorted out" on the outside. That way, the electrical energy generated by the coil moving over the magnet will be converted in to heat and the resonance will get dampened. Good amplifiers have a "damping rate" that's high. Essentially, that means they are very good at shorting out the speakers to eliminate resonance. The thing is, speakers themselves have a very low impendance, typically 4-8 Ohms. To effectively dampen out those speakers, you'll need a low resistance, way below 1 Ohms. This resistance is for the entire circuit combined, amplifier, speakers and all the connecting terminals in between. Having speaker cables that add a few tenth of an Ohm to this resonance will make your speakers sound "like someone is banging on a cardboard box" for lows and "a bit like a tin can" for highs. This effect is clearly measurable, and audible and has nothing to do with audiophile subjective arguments.
Low resistance cable doesn't mean hellishly expensive by itself. You can get good results by keeping your wires short, using as little interconnects as possible and making sure the resistance at the interconnects is as low as possible. Low resistance is achieved by tightly coupling as much surface area as possible. If you have screw type terminals, make sure to tighten them sufficiently. You usually can get affordable 4mm2 Oxygen Free Copper (OFC) wire for a reasonable price at electronics stores. The wire with the fine strands will remain bendable and in theory will give you "better transients". Since audio frequencies don't really get influenced by that I personally think it's not that important, but having cable that will flex will make it a lot easier to put in place and work with. You could spend fortunes on brand cabling, silver cabling, gold plated silver cabling and whatnot, but for any "normal" application, the 4mm2 copper wire is just fine.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
So much for the lifetime warranty.
The Bose company wisely kept the good doctor under wraps. He was a known bigot, the reason the company factories were put so far outside Boston. And adulterer - he had decades-long relationships outside his marriage, finally divorcing his wife and marrying a Bose employee who gained a US green card under mysterious circumstances. His hatred of government is why he's organized the sham gift to MIT -it's all really a tax dodge. That's your Amar Bose.
I feel that a lot of these opinions about the low quality of Bose equipment is due not to their own true, honest experiments and trials with Bose sound systems, but gathered with a bit of bias in the mix. When you're told "Bose is pretty shitty" by someone who knows/seems to know what they're talking about, when you go to try them, whether you think of it or not, you may already be biased to dump the Bose in the garbage bin.
My first experience with a Bose system was at a bowling alley, in a TouchTunes Audio jukebox. I have no idea about what drivers they used, what kind of amps or anything was used in the juke, what bitrate their music was at. I didn't have regular access to the Internet then, and had never thought to look any of it up anyway. To me, it wasn't about names, if it sounded good it sounded good, if it didn't sound good, it didn't sound good. This sounded pretty damn good. Great, even. But I'm not one to buy into names too deeply (though they of course get special consideration), after all the same brand can produce a masterpiece or an utter piece of shit. The big thing I noticed with it is that sound clarity depending on where you were standing, then again this is a very common problem, which was only exacerbated by the amount of noise in the bowling alley in general, the open layout of the floor, and installation by people who may or may not have been fully qualified in acoustics and understanding optimal placement. Even then, plenty of audiophiles have a "listening chair," sometimes in a dedicated room just for playing music in. In that chair is the culmination of their testing and moving of drivers and more testing and balancing the EQ - it's called the "sweet spot." It just sounds best there, and anywhere else in the room is not as clear. The problem with some of Bose's equipment is it flips the standard upside-down - for example, the Wave radio, or the 901s with the rear-facing drivers. The idea is not to give a sweet spot, but to, as they do say, "fill the room with sound." Without playing into the customs and traditions of the audiophile, even if performance was on-par with top-rated drivers, they would be biased against it.
My second experience with Bose is in my Trailblazer. According to a Trailblazer/Envoy enthusiast forum, the later years (such as mine) had a different amp which was cheaper for GM to acquire than the original amp (called the Lux). It is believed that this "non-Lux" amp is of inferior quality to the Lux, and that it was done purely to shave cost. But considering there was a roughly $700 premium on the price of the vehicle off the lot for the Bose equipment (included amp, 6 drivers, and a slightly-different head unit which either had the Bose tag on it, or said Bose when you turned it on, along with some variations in the EQ functionality), why would they want to shave price when they're shoveling a bunch of it off to the consumer anyway?
I have not experienced a Lux-equipped TrailBlazer/Envoy soundsystem, but I have experienced both a TrailBlazer and an Envoy EXT (the extended version), and while I cannot speak on the difference between the two, the Bose in my TrailBlazer is nothing short of amazing. The forum I read had complaints relevant to one of the first comments I saw on here - "No Highs or Lows." But I beg to differ. The Bose-equipped head unit allows only Treble and Bass adjustment (standard units also had a mid adjustment), and came with no default EQ settings. There was either CUSTOM (which was your setting), or TALK (which sucked all the bass out and adjusted the volume a little, I guess to help with talking to people rather than just turning it down?). I found that with literally 15 minutes of playing with just the two EQ settings you control, it can become a decent system. The no lows part is an outright lie - Blooddrunk by Children of Bodom makes it impossible to see out of my mirror. All three are just a blur from the bass. The no highs part seems dependent on your seat position. The system was designed by some department of Bose whose job it i
Regarding the above two posts. I became an audiophile in the early 1980's, back when two channel stereo was pretty much it. My definition of being an audiophile, and I would assert that at the time was what many audiophiles also sought after, could be summed up as having the simple goal: to lessen distortions in audio reproduction made by the equipment. A home audio system was to accurately reproduce what was recorded.
Currently there is another definition of the word audiophile that many use. It is hard for me to give it a just phrasing, because I think it is a straw-man argument, but here goes: someone who spends insane amounts of money trying to get better sound that isn't any better than you can get for very reasonable amounts of money, and the field also has large numbers of fraudulent or unscientific assertions or beliefs. Not part of the definition, but all stated with high doses of contempt.
Because of the two different definitions of the word audiophile, which have little in common, discussion is problematic. But, let me throw something out. As as audiophile, I state as a fact, not an opinion, a very simple method to improve two channel sound reproduction in at least 90% of homes with two channel sound. change the speaker position. And it's free. And it's scientifically valid.
And when people have listened to music in my home and have been impressed with how good it sounds, none of them will ever go home and move their speakers around!
Well, yes there are people who call themselves audiophiles who do spend crazy money etc. etc, but it doesn't make invalid the idea that different systems can sound better or worse than other systems.
Back to Bose: I was in the market for new speakers about 20 years ago. Having heard about Bose (how could you not), I investigated. They were the only speaker manufacturer that did not publish frequency response specifications for their speakers or a freq. res. graph. Now, that specification tells you very little about how a speaker sounds-the ear is quite sensitive to even minor variations from a flat response--but I was seeking for speakers that went lower than the 45hz the speakers I had. My goal was to fill in the lower octave(s). When I did actually go into a Bose store to give a listen, I quickly discovered a much different experience that going to a big box electric-washing-machine emporium or to an audiophile centered retail store. The big box places you were pretty much left on you own and you chose between which gizmo had more switches and buttons that ... well skip that. The Bose Experience was a subtle sales job that somehow totally skipped over the concept of reproducing accurate sound. And I think that is one of the keys to their success. The average person, make that all but a very rare person, enjoys listening to recorded music. But unless there is some gross distortion, they're happy. (setting aside head bangers clipping their speakers at 1,000 decibles). Bose sold them on convenience, no inconvenience or intrusion of a pair of big black speaker boxes, and basically: we're have good speakers because we tell you so, and just ask anybody.
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The 801's and other Bose direct reflecting speakers. While most speaker companies were looking at flat response, sensitivity, phase angle, and other issues, Bose looked at a problem. The problem was worse in the 1960's and 1970's. To get the stereo illusion with most speakers the listener had sit with his/her head in a very limited space with the left and right speakers in front of you, and each speaker the same distance from you. 99% of people will never, repeat, never try that. Only whacky audiophiles like me tried it, and hey it worked!
Bose insight #1: why require the listener to sit? They're at home, not in a concert hall!
2: why require them to keep their head in a small space?
3. why require the speakers to occupy floor space?
The early Bose fixed those problems. The sound is spacious, you can walk around, stand up