Bose (audio)

The Bose Corporation is a privately held American company based in Framingham, Massachusetts that specializes in audio equipment. The company was founded in 1964.

Background

Bose researchers and engineers develop and manufacture audio equipment including speakers, amplifiers, automotive sound systems, and, recently, acoustic balancing headphones and digital technology speaker systems. The company was founded in 1964 by Dr. Amar G. Bose, a professor of electrical engineering (retired in 2005) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. As of 2005, the company employed about 7,500 people worldwide (2,000 in Massachusetts) and had revenues of over $1.7 billion. Dr. Bose is still the Chairman and primary stockholder, and also holds the title of Technical Director.

History of Bose Corporation presidents

1. William (Bill) Zackowitz (1964-66)
2. Charles "Chuck" Hieken (1966-69)
3. Frank E. Ferguson (1969-76)
4. Amar G. Bose (1976-80)
5. Sherwin Greenblatt (1980-2000)
6. John Coleman (2000-2005)
7. Bob Maresca (Since 2005)

The company spends at least $100 million a year in research and engineering, employing a 70,000 sq. ft. building in Framingham reserved for that purpose. In 2004, Bose purchased an additional site from HP in Stow, Massachusetts to house growing automotive and marketing divisions.

Early years

In 1956, while a graduate student at MIT, Dr. Bose purchased a high-end stereo system and was disappointed when it failed to meet his expectations. He later began extensive audio research aimed at fixing what he saw as key weaknesses plaguing such high-end systems. The principal weakness, as he saw it, was how the overall design of the loudspeakers and electronics failed to take into account psychoacoustics (the human perception of sound). Eight years later, he founded the company, charging it with a mission to achieve Better Sound Through Research (which is also the company's slogan).

Research history

During the company's first year in business Bose Corporation engaged in sponsored research. Its first loudspeaker product, the model 2201, dispersed 22 small mid-range speakers over an eighth of a sphere. It was designed to fit in the corner of a room, reflecting the speaker's sound as a mirror would for light in a corner cube and giving rise to an acoustical image of a sphere in a vastly larger room. Dr. Bose used an electronic equalizer to adjust the acoustical output for flat total radiated power.

Although these speaker systems accurately emulated the characteristics of an ideal spherical membrane, the listening results were disappointing (some of the reasons for which are listed in a later publication from Bose's research department), leading Bose to further research into psychoacoustics that eventually clarified the importance of a dominance of reflected sound arriving at the head of the listener, a listening condition that is characteristic of live performances. This finding led to a revised speaker design in which eight of nine identical small mid-range drivers (with electronic equalization) were aimed at the wall behind the speaker while one driver was aimed forward, thus insuring a dominance of reflected over direct sound in home listening spaces, similar to the dominant reflected sound fields listeners experience in live performances.

Before hearing his new design for the first time, although confident that his new design would produce a more faithful replication of the "live" listening experience, Dr. Bose was unsure as to whether his new "direct/reflected" design would be a small audible improvement or a large one over his earlier design and the best commercially available loudspeakers. The new pentagonal design, named the Model 901, was a very unconventional design for speakers at the time (which were generally either full-size floorstanding units or bookshelf type speakers accompanied by a subwoofer that handled only the very lowest frequencies). The Model 901 premiered in 1968 and was an immediate commercial success, and the Bose Corporation grew rapidly during the 1970s.

Dr. Bose believes that our imperfect knowledge of psychoacoustics limits our ability to adequately characterize quantitatively any two arbitrary sounds that are perceived differently, and to adequately characterize and quantify all aspects of perceived quality. He believes, for example, that distortion is much over-rated as a factor in perceived quality in the complex sounds that comprise music, noting, for example, that a square wave (a hugely distorted sine wave) and a sine wave are audibly indistinguishable above 7kHz. Similarly, he does not find measurable relevance to quality in other easily measured parameters of loudspeakers and electronics, and therefore does not publish those specifications for Bose products. The ultimate test, Bose insists, is your perception of audible quality (or lack of it) and your preferences.

Another area of research and development at Bose Corporation is two-state, non-linear power processing and conditioning. Several early patents were awarded to Dr. Bose and other Bose engineers and this technology is one of the key elements in an innovative project that the company disclosed in 2004 after more than 20 years of research, an automobile suspension system that uses electromagnetic principles instead of the hydraulics that are common today. The main benefit of this system is that roll of the car in turns can be reduced.

Additionally, the company researches portable audio within the fields of Circumaural and Supra-aural headphones, centering within the lines of Acoustic Noise Cancellation (See the separate article).

Lines of products

Proprietary technologies

Tri-Port Earcup Drivers
Acoustic Noise Cancellation
Acoustimass Technology
Acoustic Waveguide Technology
Direct/Reflecting Technology
Psychoacoustic Equalization

Products

Multimedia systems

Speaker systems

Bose Wave Systems
Bose Stereo Speaker Systems
Bose Personalized Amplification System™ family of products for Musicians
Professional Speaker Systems for Commercial Applications

Home entertainment systems

Aviation Headsets

Bose Aviation Headset X

Opinions about Bose

The Bose brand is very strong in the marketplace at large. A market study by independent analysts Forrester Research published in March 2006 reported that Bose's brand name was more highly regarded (by the US population) than any other consumer-electronics or computer brand name. Also, more US households (17.5 million by Forrester's estimate) aspired to own Bose products than the products of any other consumer-electronics or computer manufacturer -- Dell, Apple, Sony, Pioneer, TiVo, etc. The study indicates that many people trust the Bose brand because they believe that the products are quality products.

However, audiophiles often criticize the company, deeming its products inferior to other speakers in a similar price range. For instance, they accuse Bose of using lower-quality materials than other manufacturers. The company's stance is that subjective listening is the sole determining factor of audio quality, and thus, contrary to industry practice, it refuses to publish specifications such as frequency response. In turn, hi-fi specialist magazines such as The Absolute Sound and Stereophile don't publish reviews of Bose products.

Bose is also criticized for selling its products in common retail stores, such as Target and Best Buy. Critics assert that because Bose is a premium brand offered in these locations, potential buyers don't have a chance to compare their offerings to those of competing brands. Because Bose's advertising budget is so much larger than other high-end audio equipment companies and its reputation in the general population is so good that the consumer desire to own Bose products is much higher than that of other brands; often with many consumers completely unaware of other competitors.

Market share

Bose directly competes against the following companies in the consumer speaker and home theater market:

Bose directly competes against the following companies in the consumer headphone market:

Bose caters mainly to the premium/luxury segment of the consumer market, mainly affluent non-audiophiles. While critics argue over the price and quality of some Bose products, there is no doubt that Bose is growing and sometimes dominating certain segments of the high-end consumer audio market.

Locations

Headquarters

Framingham, MA

Automotive division

Stow, MA

Plants

Framingham, MA
Carrickmacross, Republic of Ireland
Columbia, SC
San Luis, Rio Colorado, Sonora, Mexico
Tijuana B.C., Mexico

Number of retail stores

Over 150 as of October 6 2005

External links

Bose Corporation

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Bose (audio)