Why Audiophiles Hate Bose | TDNC Podcast #93

hey everyone it's Colin how's it going they are one of the biggest audio companies in the world with a very recognizable name so why do audio files almost universally seem to hate bows so for a really really long time we're talking decades now audio files have generally railed against bows products with the explanation of the the gear being inferior quality offering poor sound and just overall being more expensive than it should be given their performance and I do tend to agree with some of the assessments I don't necessarily consider myself like a really hardcore audiophile but I know how I want my sound to sound like and I know what I'm willing to pay to get to that level of sound quality but I also know that I'm not really willing to go off the deep end and spend exorbitant amounts of money to try and eke out just a little bit more sound so I tend to consider myself a little bit more of a practical audio file or a little more mainstream of an audio file so I feel like I've got a good handle on not just the situation but a decent perspective where I can kind of see it from both ends so I figure you know what this time let's go through and kind of unpack the argument see really what the deal is with bows and why do audio files feel the way that they do if you ask any audiophile you know why they dislike bows and have them start to get into some of the deeper technical discussions it really always comes back to the engineering and the build quality it almost always comes back to like the hardware and and not so much some of the other factors which we'll talk about a little bit later on in this episode you generally look at products in the price range that Bose sells at and the other companies that sell in that price range those companies tend to focus on quality components putting really good quality parts in their products but they also tend to have fairly traditional engineering so you look at say clips or pulk or some of the other maybe not elite brands out there but other you know fairly well known names but names known specifically for good quality sound at those same price points and they're all going to have products that look fairly similar right you're going to be looking at say bookshelf speakers or tower speakers or any other home audio products that are gonna have a fairly similar design to them you know maybe drivers of a certain size are made out of certain material you know woofers and tweeters they're not gonna stray too far from the norm of what they've always done they're going to keep pushing the envelope in terms of trying to make those parts better and better but they haven't really rethought the way that speakers you know if we're talking about speakers the way that they should look or the way that they should go about reproducing sound it's you can almost compare speakers from some of those manufacturers being made now with ones from 30 years ago they'll be very similar overall in design so Bose does things very very differently and I think that's one thing that tends to trip up the audio files instead of looking at okay how can we build better quality you know cabinets for our speakers or better quality drivers to put in the speakers or better quality electronics bows instead looks at it from the perspective of how can we make the speaker sound better to the listener or at least how can they make the speaker sound to the listener the way they want the listener to perceive it this is a concept called psycho acoustics and Bose is the undisputed king when it comes to doing research and and exploiting concepts of psycho acoustics it all comes down to how does the human brain perceive sound and taking advantage of some of the ways that that works and other quirks just inside our heads when it comes to listening to music and perceiving the way sound is and Bose takes all of that research and all that engineering and designs the products around it instead of the other way around so you'll look at like a traditional speaker and it'll have say if it's a bookshelf speaker it'll have a woofer and a tweeter it'll be a two-way design the woofers can be for low frequencies and the tweet is gonna be for high frequencies and they'll crossover at some point and that traditional speaker manufacturer will have designed that speaker in such a way to you know have it be a fairly seamless transition from you know sound frequencies from the woofer to the tweeter but ultimately when they test those speakers on human subjects if the humans say well you know it sounds like this or it sounds like that generally the way those manufacturers will tweak the sound to get it to be more like the way they want is to make changes to the physical design of the speaker if someone says all the bases to boo me or the bass is too tight or there's too little bass or there's too much or whatever the designer of the speaker will go back and make tweaks to the actual design of the speaker you know maybe they'll add a bass point they'll turn it into into a ported design if the if the bass is too weak or if the bass is too who me they'll maybe switch it into a sealed box design or something like that what Bose does is it starts twiddling knobs in its portfolio of tools that it can use to tweak sound the way Bose tweaked sound is it does very very heavy EQ and in some cases digital signal processing and both has been doing this for a very long time so because they rely on heavy EQ within the speaker and heavy DSP within the speaker it allows them to do more on traditional arrangements or unique arrangements in terms of the actual hardware so where you would have say that traditional speaker with a woofer and a tweeter BOS in a lot of cases does something completely different one of boses quintessential bows like speakers if you're looking at some of the weird tech that they've done the way they've made speakers that are non-traditional over the years is the Bose 901 it's very different it you know from like the outside it kind of looks like a traditional you know bookshelf or or you know tower speaker you'd put on the stand but the engineering is way different instead of a separate woofer and tweeter instead it's just got an array of these four and a half inch drivers and all of those drivers play full range now what's especially unique about the 901 is that the majority of those drivers actually face away from the listener they're bouncing off of the walls behind the speaker and only a single four and a half inch driver on each of those speakers fires towards the listener now beyond the whole concept of the reflected sound and all of that just looking at the hardware of the speaker four and a half inch drivers are not optimal for playing full range and I think generally most anyone who knows a decent bit about audio would tend to agree large speakers are better at reproducing low frequencies small speakers are better at reproducing high frequencies which is why woofers and tweeters look the way that they do so how are you supposed to try and get good high frequencies and good low frequencies out of a four and a half inch driver well this is where Bose cheats and they make heavy use of equalization where even with the 901 s which came out decades ago they have you run an external equalizer box and they tell you very strongly you need to use this component in order for the speakers to sound correct and that's been the case with a lot of poses other speakers as well is there's always been some level of Equalization involved to try and get the hardware to down the way that Bo's intends it to even if that hardware itself on its own just can't do it it lets Bo's build speakers at a lower cost simply because one it's using more common parts like it's cheaper for both to just stick a bunch of these little common four and a half inch drivers in a speaker than it is to build all these different parts you know separate woofer separate tweeters and all that for these designs but it also lets them share that technology and engineering across multiple product lines it almost turns Bo's is lined up into a whole bunch of like Lego bricks where they're all pretty similar in terms of shape and size and they just put the right pieces in the right place and if it's not optimal with what parts they're using well they'll just go back later and tweak it with the EQ or the DSP and it's the same thing not just with its home audio engineering which is probably what most people are familiar with from Bo's but even also into its pro audio engineering line and I've actually used some of boses Pro products before and this is actually where most of my experience with the company really comes into play in terms of speakers but there are some very common elements so you look at the Bo's 901 and it's that home speaker with a bunch of these foreign half-inch drivers well then you look at one of those as pro products like the bose 802 it looks really familiar it's got the same four and a half inch drivers and it's got them in that same type of arrangement and also they expect you to use their proprietary external processing unit to get the sound to sound the way that they want them to sound and now the you know the bose 802 and it's smaller companion the fro to their older products and bose has definitely moved into newer product lines but a lot of that engineering is still very similar where they're just sharing the overall technology between the two sides and just tweaking it to fit the exact application that they're targeting now it it also comes down to marketing in some ways it we've seen and heard stories of audiophiles some substantiated some maybe not so much where you got to kind of take their word for it or or listen to these stories with a bit of a grain of salt but as part of that whole EQ and just tweaking the sound to make people perceive it the way Bose wants in some ways Bose has kind of done a little bit of dirty pool when it comes to its demo setups in stores I've read reports of Bose custom tailoring demo setups say in you know audio stores stereo stores to suit the room that those setups are in exactly you know maybe putting more time and energy into tweaking that system to sound good in the store then any consumer ever would into getting it to sound good when they got that product home I've also read reports of Bose supposedly not allowing side-by-side comparisons between its products and its competitors not letting them be in the same room or not letting them share some of the same equipment so you can't a be sum of the parts independently you know both speakers through the same receiver as a different brand of speakers and you could tell the difference really trying to very tightly control the experience that people have and you can kind of see some of this in stores Bose has been getting better I should say but for a long time when you would you know walk up to a Bose demo station at a bigger box store say like a Best Buy or Costco or Target something like that where they wouldn't necessarily have sales people there to talk about the products and instead the products kind of need to sell themselves you know you walk up to say like the headphone demo station and the music would always just be a canned selection of it so you could put the headphones on and listen to them and maybe you could tweak the volume and change tracks but you wouldn't have any control over the actual music being played you couldn't pick say your own song so you couldn't really reference that against other music that you're familiar with now this is something we'll get to in a moment but Bo's has been getting a little bit better in that regard in that a lot of the demo stations at least the ones that I've seen now allow you to plug your phone in and play your own music through the headphones but it still makes you wonder because you can't see that entire signal path you can't see the headphone cable coming out of the headphones and going into your phone often it goes into that demo station who knows what's going on inside that demo station are they running additional amplification are they doing some additional tweaking some DSP in there to get those headphones to sound even better than what they would just inside the cans themselves so these are all things that the audio files tend to really kind of latch on to and and cause them concern and cause them to freak out about the company whereas a lot of the other audio manufacturers at least the ones that kind of go after that higher end market the audio files themselves are a lot more transparent with like look here's the engineering behind our products we'll give you all the specs and all the data points and all the spec sheets and and technical information that you want will let you compare them fairly head-to-head against other brands you know they really tend to stand behind their products in the engineering whereas Bose is a little bit more secretive it's hard to get any sort of technical data out of bose to get spec sheets it's really really tough to see say like EQ curves and stuff generally Bose doesn't publish those so if you wanted to see what the frequency response of a speaker of a headphone or whatever was most often you have to look for third parties that have done that testing on their own and both generally goes after those people to pull down their reports I've heard of lawsuits from Bose suing companies that have talked negatively about them you know reviewers and and product magazines and stuff like that you know where somebody publishes say an unfavorable review of a bose product there have been some famous cases where both has gone after them to try to get them to pull their review down or something like that so that tends to leave a bad taste in audio files mouths so you've got that technical perspective of people not liking though it's just because of the way that they design their speakers they they tend to use cheaper components and lesser quality components and don't necessarily do their homework in quotes to make the speaker sound as best as they possibly could or the headphones or whatever product it is instead they just rely on psycho acoustics and just twiddling all the EQ knobs to get them to sound good enough well you know III said at the beginning and I'll say it again and I'll probably say it again later just as a reminder I'm not the biggest fan of Bo's products myself but I see where the company is coming from and I see what their intention really is the thing that a lot of audio files tend to forget is that Bo's isn't targeting them Bo's isn't interested in audio files I don't think Bo's has ever really advertise themselves as being an audiophile focused company the big thing with Bose is that it really targets the mass-market regular consumers and if you look at boses marketing this really bears it out you're not going to find so much bose stuff at the higher end audio shops of you know which they're still existing there's not that many I mean it's probably another podcast topic to go into just the nature of how we listen to music these days versus say 20 years ago but you're only really gonna find Bose in kind of the more mass-market types of environments either in its own stores or in the larger big-box kind of retails like I mentioned earlier here in the US places like Best Buy and Costco and Target where you're not necessarily going to be competing with other high-end audio products in stores like those Bose is probably going to be some of the most expensive audio gear that you will find everything else is going to be less expensive and part of that plays into the marketing I mean there's the subtle concept of stuff that's more expensive must be better and I think Bose definitely relies on that as part of its message but it's also just done really really good work for itself in terms of getting its name out there and getting the general public to think that Bo's products are high quality to think that the sound is high quality and you know to be fair for the average person that isn't really into audio that isn't really you know doing tons of homework into all these other brands that are gonna be a little bit more niche smaller names they're just looking for a simpler product to you know take home and plug in but still suit and you know in quote sounds good you know Bose I think resounds with them really well you know they they have a very favorable opinion of Bose they think boy you know I've heard the name a lot and their products are pretty expensive and lots of other places you know and people that I've talked to maybe own Bose products and they generally think they're pretty good so you know it's the concept of what is good enough and for the vast majority of just casual listeners Bose products are good enough and I think that's one of the things that Bose is banking on now that said Bose has been changing a bit recently it's still heavy into doing sound processing and psycho acoustics and all that but there does seem to be a new focus at Bose on trying to overall improve the sound quality or refine it the common complaint with Bose before was that the bass was really really bumi and the high-end was really kind of lacking in detail and all that kind of stuff it's just where the sound is very kind of unoffensive I think is the best term that I can think of to use to describe the way both sounds it's it's meant to sound and quotes good they generally want to try and get it their products to sound as good to as many people as they can but it seems like there is a new focus fo is to kind of refine that a little bit better so we've been seeing them move a little bit more towards traditional speak and we haven't been seen that so much in the home audio realm from them because their home audio realm has been changing dramatically both seems to really be pushing more towards headphones and then things like Bluetooth speakers and I think again that's another podcast topic but it's just to change along with the way that people tend to listen to music at home now or you know on the go whatever but you look at those as pro products and they're starting to move more towards traditional design with better discrete components and not doing so much the arrays of these little four and a half inch drivers but rather getting into better and more appropriate components for the solution that they're trying to solve you know instead of a bunch of things running full range we're actually starting to see some of those as professional products using say compression drivers and horns having better design for say their symbol for units trying to cut across more aspects of pro audio and not just coming out with a few solutions that they say well these are just general purpose you can use them for anything you know like the bose 802 for a long time bose advertised the 802 is kind of a do anything type of pro audio speaker and now they're diversifying the line up to try and better fit all of these different markets and use cases and they're bringing more traditional technology along with it so bose is definitely changing I don't think they're going to necessarily go completely away from the way they've always worked with you know what let's just build the boxes the equipment itself down to a price and then just EQ the hell out of it to get us the rest of the way but it definitely seems like they're trying to compete a little more fairly with other companies whether they'll ever be truly successful at that or not I don't know but in the very least the bows of now is definitely different than the bows of say 10 or 20 years ago that's all the technical side of things so but that's I think only half the story as to why audio files hate bows there's definitely more to it and a lot of it just comes down to the nature of audio files and and why otherwise they may hate that company you know that most obvious reason is beyond the technical side of it it's just it's expensive for what you get the pricing is not in line with its competitors or maybe the pricing is in line with other audio file you know grade components but the the Bose stuff just doesn't perform I think that's gonna be a subjective opinion again it comes back to which audiences bose actively going after they're not going after the audio files they're going against the mass-market the regular Joe Schmo who wants a home theater system to take home and plug in that kind of person is not necessarily going to be doing the homework or even know how to do the homework to find all the different parts and pieces that they need to put together and then how to put them together and get them to sound their best they just want to go to the store and buy a box with like a home theater system in it or speakers in it and take them home and plug it in and be done you know so there's you know there's that argument so it also kind of comes down to the sound quality right it ties in a little bit well the sound quality isn't as good well sound quality is a subjective thing as well and like I said I'm not the biggest fan of the weibo stuff tends to sound but you know it's I wouldn't call it bad and there's definitely some good things that Bose does case in point where Bose has used its DSP knowledge and experience really well are in its noise canceling headphones I own a pair of bose qc25 I bought these with my own money a few years ago and the reason why bottom is because the noise cancelling on them is excellent I did a review on these actually a few years ago that reviews fairly old now so take it with a bit of a grain of salt because it's not really all that current the qc25 s have been replaced with newer models and all that but what I said in that review and I still stand by the statement is that they sound good but not great but over all they are an excellent pair of headphones simply because the noise canceling works really really well they're good enough when I'm going to need a pair of noise cancelling headphones is likely not when I'm expecting the best possible audio experience you know what I mean I have headphones here at home that sound way better than these qc25 s ever could hope to but they're not appropriate headphones for me to take out and sit like on a plane with right these are great for when I want good enough audio in a suboptimal environment so some of its also kind of taking the whole well Bose just doesn't sound good in quotes kind of sentiment and putting it in perspective putting it in context I think a lot of the times where Bose products are used our in environments were it would be really tough to get sound to be good anyway and coming back to my experience with Bose Pro audio products I've used them in some environments where traditional speakers actually wouldn't do very well Bose pro audio stuff tends to work really well in places that have high reverberation where you really need vocals and speech to cut through high intelligibility that's where some of that weird Bose Engineering actually tends to work pretty well music doesn't sound nearly as good through them as through say traditional Pro Audio speakers but sometimes you just need to get the job done and in some cases they actually do perform pretty decently so you know it's it's kind of the audiophiles cutting a wide swath you know painting bows with a broad brush all these other euphemisms to you know basically say as a company they're no good when you know I think that's not necessarily a fair statement to make across the entire company the biggest one though I think and this is one that audio files may may start giving me crap down on the comments about if they haven't already is that you know audio files I think they need something to hate I think they need some company to vilify and to be fair to the audio files this isn't just an audiophile thing I've seen this cut across a lot of other communities and groups and such where for whatever reason you know the diehards within that community tend to focus on just one company or you know one thing and turn it into their nemesis turn it into their villain for audiophiles it definitely seems to be Bo's I mean you don't see audio files complaining about the quality of say Sony audio products really quite so much why because Sony doesn't charge the same kind of prices that Bose does Bose is priced and seems to be acting like it's an audiophile brand even though they haven't really ever advertised themselves as being such and I think that's what really triggers the audio files so Bose has become the audiophile villain their nemesis but we've seen similar things with other communities you look at say the PC enthusiast community I'll give you five seconds to blurt out the name of the company that you think is the nemesis amongst PC enthusiasts yeah I'm sure 90% of you just said Apple if not a hundred percent of you just said Apple PC enthusiasts love to hate Apple they absolutely love to hate Apple they just need a nemesis Apple does plenty of stuff right Apple does plenty of stuff wrong Apple and Bose are actually very comparable in some ways by the PC enthusiast community they've got to have their villain too and it happens to be Apple our PC enthusiasts going to complain about like Acer or HP or some other big company with the same ferocity that they'll complain about Apple no because Acer and HP and Dell and those other companies market themselves differently they don't seem to try to sell their products as being PC enthusiasts or you know at PC enthusiasts pricing like Apple does Apple products are expensive compared to what you get like I said they're very comparable to Bose in some ways but Apple is never really actively advertised its products as being PC enthusiasts level I don't think Apple has ever said yeah go out and buy this really expensive laptop and you'll be able to play all of your games the same way and with the same quality that you would on an equivalent priced PC they've never done that so it's the same thing we've seen it again also I think to some extent in the gaming community the console gaming community you know the people who are diehard into the Xbox of the PlayStation I seen them complain about Nintendo in the same way well Nintendo they charge as much money but the performance isn't as good or whatever across all these communities they mean somebody or some thing to hate and I think a lot of that comes down to this concept of tribalism we've talked about tribalism before it in a nutshell it's like a threat right for some reason audiophiles think that Bo's is a threat to all the other audiophile focused companies and I don't think that's the case at all that's like never going to be the case do you think a big company like cliff or paradigm or a definitive technology or somebody like that alack any of those do you think any of those are really actually threatened by Bo's do you think any one who is serious in new audio and going to say a boutique audio dealer would go through a demo of one of those high-end brands and leave that demo going now you know what I'm gonna go back to Costco we're Best Buy and buy that Bose set up for the same amount of money nobody's gonna do that nobody is gonna do that if you've gotten to the point where you really consider yourself an audiophile you're just never gonna consider Bose anyway so it's that tribalism and I think it's just unfounded fear on the part of the audio files that Bose is somehow a threat even though they're really not so with all of that said I am of course curious as to your thoughts do you consider yourself an audiophile or at least are you into good sound quality and all that what kind of products do you own do you own any bones stuff do you own any Bose speakers or headphones or anything like that what are your thoughts if you've not bought any Bose products why not I think the answers to that one are going to be pretty similar but I'm just curious so leave all your thoughts down in the comments below just be nice as all I ask also if you're interested in audio only versions of these podcasts they are available as plain mp3 downloads for all supporters at all contribution levels over on my patreon page they've also got RSS feed support so you can get your own URL dump it into the podcast player of your choice and you'll get it automatically Plus these podcasts tend to go up on patreon a few days before they show up on YouTube so that's all just something to think about if you're interested anyway if you like this one I would appreciate a thumbs up be sure to subscribe if you haven't already you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at this does not comp and as always thanks for watching

Channel: This Does Not Compute

Views: 1,308,714

Keywords: Bose, audio, sound, speaker, headphones, music, QuietComfort, Acoustimass, Panaray, SoundLink, audiophile, equipment, home theater, pro audio, PA system, Klipsch, Paradigm, ELAC, Definitive Technology, Polk, podcast, This Does Not Compute

Id: EQ6RM3XMfKg

Length: 32min 20sec (1940 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 27 2018