Inside BOSE New Product Preview 2015

A BOSE post for the first time in four years. In September 2015, BOSE launched a major wave of new products — a considerable number of which received minor updates all at once — and the Wave Music System, a perennially popular high-end radio-cassette player of American origin, was given its first full model change in eleven years, which personally had me rather intrigued…

《For those who can’t quite get on with wireless, the Wave Music System — which plays CDs and radio straight out of the box — makes a wonderful gift. The new design brings a significant improvement in performance.》

BOSE products had already seen their first across-the-board price increase in 21 years on 1st July, citing the weak yen — but if a model change was coming in the autumn anyway, the old models were going to be old models regardless, so one can’t help thinking they needn’t have bothered with the price rise. Be that as it may, an invitation to a new product preview event found its way to me at just the right moment — for reasons I can’t quite explain — and so I made my way to BOSE’s headquarters in Shibuya, half out of curiosity and half just to have a look around.

It was actually my first time attending a BOSE event, and it was rather different from the listening sessions I’ve attended at other audio manufacturers — the focus was squarely on presentations covering the new products’ features and brand image. The idea was that you’d go and listen to the actual sound quality of the new products individually afterwards, but with a fair number of attendees the venue during the free session was rather noisy, and in the end I didn’t get much listening done within the allotted time… some of the permanent display corners weren’t even powered on… Hmph. The whole thing ended up feeling like I’d simply gone along to have a look at the new product line-up, and while the presentation itself was interesting, as a Hi-Fi enthusiast I have to be honest and say it left me feeling somewhat wanting.

《As a parting gift I received the freshly published COMPLETE BOOK. It’s a photo-image book that conveys very well the idea that what BOSE proposes is a lifestyle in itself — a part of fashion, in the best sense of the word. If you’re a BOSE fan, it’s worth picking up a copy; it doubles as a catalogue.》

Listening to the internal presentation at BOSE, what struck me — belatedly, perhaps — was that what this company is selling has, above all else, the proposition of a lifestyle with music at its very heart. With a typical audio manufacturer, the base philosophy — the top priority — is sound quality and the quality of music reproduction, and from there things like appearance, usability, and target price are layered on top until a product finally takes shape. With BOSE, on the other hand, it seems that the starting point is always an image of the user’s lifestyle, and the overriding development concept is: how do you fit audio into each person’s life in a practical way, without it getting in the way?

In other words, despite being an audio manufacturer, BOSE does not develop its products with “sound quality” at the apex — it places the listener at the centre first and foremost. Sound quality matters, of course, but the listener takes precedence. For an audio manufacturer — where demanding compromises from the listener’s lifestyle and living space in the name of high fidelity is simply taken for granted — I find this a rather admirable stance. And I think the main reason BOSE has been so highly regarded in Europe and America for so many years, achieving the highest market share in the Hi-Fi industry — around 15% in the US and 10% in Europe — is precisely this: that users have responded to a concept so different from that of ordinary audio manufacturers.

Not placing “sound quality” at the top of the priority list, as most audio manufacturers do, means the approach is this: you first establish what functionality the lifestyle demands, and then, within those constraints, you work as hard as you can on the sound. What sets BOSE apart is that the research investment — the cost and talent poured into actually realising “the functionality the lifestyle demands” — is on a scale that is simply extraordinary. And as a result of that research, when you bear in mind the constraints of function, size, and installation conditions, you get sound that pops out and makes you think: at this size! How on earth did they manage that! — something almost like a magic trick.

If you take an audio-purist stance — one that tends to make unreasonable demands on one’s family and oneself alike, and deliberately excludes the physical constraints of one’s lifestyle from the criteria by which audio equipment is judged — then yes, there are products among the range that prompt a reaction of: wait, this price for this sound? To that extent, how you evaluate BOSE will vary enormously depending on what values you bring to audio equipment, and perhaps that’s simply unavoidable.

There’s an unwritten rule among ordinary audio manufacturers where price = volume of components and sound quality relative to rival products, but with BOSE the pricing seems to operate on a scale of R&D expenditure × the degree to which the lifestyle concept has been realised. For that reason, I don’t think it makes much sense to evaluate the cost-performance of BOSE products simply from the perspective of a Hi-Fi enthusiast doing a straight price comparison.

On top of that, the BOSE brand name enjoys overwhelming brand power and name recognition among ordinary people who have never encountered the sound of high-end audio — no doubt partly because of its strong presence in general retail and mainstream magazines. And yet, for all that it holds a top share of the Hi-Fi market, dogmatic Hi-Fi enthusiasts have never particularly rated it — to be blunt, there’s always been a tendency to glance sideways and pass it by entirely — and the gap in perception between the committed Hi-Fi crowd and the general public is, in its own way, rather striking.

So why do I feel the urge to keep writing that BOSE doesn’t treat “sound quality” as its top priority — is it because the sound of BOSE is simply not that good? No, it isn’t, actually. I’ve long had a vague sense of unease about the gap in perception, feeling that many Hi-Fi enthusiasts who won’t even bother to listen to BOSE are somewhat underestimating the value of BOSE products beyond what the reality warrants. And watching the new product launch, I found myself feeling, in a general sort of way, that perhaps part of the cause lies in the business stance of the people doing the selling.

《As you can see, it doesn’t look like a speaker at all. It’s a shame that the new SoundTouch wireless music system has dropped the white option, but I thought it would be well suited not only for home use but also for distributing background music across multiple rooms in shops that rearrange frequently. The wireless functionality and UI are easy to use.》

As I mentioned at the outset, the presentation featured almost no actual sound demonstrations of the new product range. I had gone to listen to sound coming out of speakers, and yet I barely got to hear any of it at all. There was a brief demo of the three updated models in the new SoundTouch wireless music system range for purposes of explaining their features, but the demo source material was rather casual, shall we say — whether this could really be called a demonstration by an audio manufacturer is, if I’m honest, something I found myself genuinely questioning. It may be that selling something developed in America in the very different Japanese market requires a somewhat different approach.

《A new model has arrived for the globally phenomenal SoundLink Mini as well. Apparently, one SoundLink Mini rolls off the production line every 32 seconds. A lucky few at the event won one in a draw… I was quite envious. The new Pearl White in particular is rather elegant — it would make a wonderful gift too.》

The ones who suffer most from all this are the BOSE products themselves — small, individually accessible in price, yet very likely the recipients of an enormous world-class research investment. That the engineers behind them, such as Roman Litovsky who led the development of the ultra-compact SoundLink Mini in the US, have approached the sound with considerable dedication is something that, if you actually listen under the conditions and in the space for which the product was designed, will probably be apparent to anyone.

There’s a clear and definite philosophy in the sound design — a richness in the bass, a soundstage that feels almost futuristic and virtual-reality-like — and naturally, how well that conceptual vision is realised varies from product to product. There are standouts like the Micro MusicMonitor M3 (now discontinued), a small but impressively capable PC speaker that I praised enthusiastically in an earlier desktop Hi-Fi piece, and there are also products that feel, at the current state of development, still very much a work in progress — a mix of the excellent and the less so, just as with any other manufacturer. But given that there are some genuinely sonically appealing products in the range, I found myself thinking, as I looked across those painstakingly miniaturised product lines, what a pity it seemed not to push the sound quality and music reproduction capability more prominently to the fore.

So, to sum up: in the brand-conscious domestic marketing approach, the case for Hi-Fi performance seems rather left behind, overshadowed by appeals to technical prowess in areas unrelated to sound quality and a drive towards brand-loyalty purchases. With that in mind, I’d like — for the sake of rehabilitating the BOSE range in pure audio and AV terms — to deliberately take a Hi-Fi enthusiast’s perspective here on this site and shine a light on what BOSE can truly do. Whether the late Dr Amar G. Bose would have considered that a favour or rather an unwelcome intrusion, I rather wonder. (to be continued)