This is news to me: to my friends, at least, every stereo system sounds the same...

Yesterday, I invited a couple of friends to our home. It was a total blast....

Then, the discussion turned into "What's the thing you spend your money on that's the most superficial?" I immediately said "My stereo system!". They were a bit surprised, and finally, asked... "how much did it cost"?

They almost fainted when they heard the price...

Then, they said "the funny thing is, your stereo sounds the same as all the rest".

I was curious, and asked them to explain.

They said "if I liked music, I'd get a Bose Lifestyle system, but just for the looks".

I said "can't you hear my stereo sounds a lot better than a Bose?"

They said "The Bose sounds the best, and your stereo sounds like the rest".

I asked them to keep explaining their point. They said "to me, your stereo sounds like my $200 Sony.It's the same. Your SACD's sound the same as my MP3 collection. I enjoy them the same. But the Bose - ah, that's the best system out there".

What I learned:

1. Mastering engineers maximise everything to the point where there's no soft and loud anymore because people don't care.

2. Bose exists because of better sound through marketing.

3. There's no hope we'll be getting better masterings / formats if people are so happy with their $200 boomboxes.

4. I'm more on the fringe than I originally thought.

5. People don't care about great stereo reproduction, but my friends did say this to me "whenever you play a surround stereo recording, our pants fall off. They are stunning. They sound different. They are incredible. Now, THAT I'd be willing to pay a premium for".

So...

My personal conclusion is: surround is the only thing that can save stereo and hi-res.

 

You need new friends!

Their Bose theory proves that these days, to most people, louder=good sound.

 

Even better:

Tell your friends to listen to a real separate-component setup (yes, even a $500 total receiver/loudspeaker/DVD/SACD setup from any brand except Bose) for a few weeks, then have them switch back to that $200 minisystem of theirs. If they still can't hear a difference, then either of two things are for sure:

• Their hearing and/or brains has/have never been good enough to begin with (or is/are seriously defective).
• They've suffered serious hearing damage, mainly through listening to music WAY too loud.

 

I think they can hear a difference - their point was, the difference was in no way of any importance to them... AND they thought Bose had great sound... when I asked them why, I found out:

* They think so because Bose has some nice stores around here and in the States.

* They think so because Bose is "so cute and small" and my speakers are BIG.

* They think so because Bose has lots of ads everywhere.

So I told them the story about the time I sold my Definitive Technology speakers (which I disliked enormously) and some guy just bought them on the spot because he had seen reviews of them and ads and stuff, and he thought they could get to "60 Hz" (when they had 3" drivers and were enclosed in ultra small sealed boxes...).

There's no doubt about it... marketing is a powerful weapon...

 

Yep, that's "Better Sound Through Marketing," all right. I was, and still am, unimpressed with every Bose Lifestyle minisystem and loudspeaker setup that I've ever heard, especially at the high prices that they cost.

In addition, the "so cute and small" Bose speakers are incapable of true high fidelity sound reproduction. That's because the small satellites cannot reproduce even upper bass, let alone deep bass - while the bass module cannot reach anywhere near as high as the lowest usable frequencies that the sats put out. Worse, the small sats muffle the highs, because they use a single driver that's both too small to reproduce the upper bass/lower midrange region and too large to reproduce even mid-treble response with any "guts."

To me, bigger physical size is better - to a certain extent. However, overly huge speakers tend to sound sloppy and S L O W, largely because many of them use a huge woofer driver that's also trying to reproduce the lower midrange sounds at the same time instead of medium-sized woofer drivers that do a better job overall of reproducing the entire lower half of the audible frequency spectrum.

 

I'm betting your friends are listening to sound quality with 1 ear at best.

it's sad when people are brainwashed by Bose.

 

I once went to one of their seminars, which is really where you go to them to hear their sales pitch. After I heard that thing, I was so unimpressed. I was P.O.'ed when a couple of the men in the audience bought one.

After the show, I grilled one of the men on something simple about the sound reproduction of his Bose system, like frequency response and dynamic range, and he didn't have a clue. After about three questions, he got aggrivated and ignored me totally.

 

At the time I heard their demo, my low-to mid-fi Japanese componant system sounded better than that Bose box. Hell, the thing in my car sounded better than that Bose box.

Herbie Hancock should be forced to master his next album throught one of them to teach him a lesson for doing an informercial for it.

 

I stopped trying to get my friends to "see" the differences in stereo systems long ago...I get frustrated just getting them to shut up while I'm playing something

I think your experience, fj, is symptomatic of something even more sinister than Bose or maximisation. There's a BIG difference between listening to music and just hearing it. A lot of people are "addicted to noise"...music is just something to cover up the silence while they're washing the dishes. It doesn't bring them joy...it's just there, another set of waves in the air along with the TV, radio, cell phones, etc. Makes me sad.

 

How many times has this happened to one of you...
You go over a friend's house, and hear their stereo, and you realize the speakers are wired out of phase. When you bring this to their attention, and correct the problem, they don't even notice a difference.

 

And when I said "I was unimpressed with the sound quality of Bose," I really meant that the performance/sound quality of Bose products is mediocre at best, for the price.

 

There are people that care that what they're buying has limitations. You can't say an Yugo is a bad car, but if you had the choice, wouldn't you go for something better? Of course. Audi? Volvo?

But there are people who don't see it that way, and all the power to them. For my GF, she would rather have bookshelf speakers than my 53" Acoustats.

Me? I wouldn't have it any other way.

 

Over at the Macca site, most of 'em think 1 and LIBN sound great, so I should have known when to fold the tent and move on...

But then, not long ago, someone was bemoaning the fact that their Bose Wave Radio had cacked on 'em, and they were thinking of 'upgrading' and, well, I couldn't resist....really took Bose to the cleaners. Not only did it not make certain people happy, but they began singing the praises of this deck and, naturally, ignored my main comment: that for the same money, if judiciously spent, you could purchase a truly nice sounding(for the size and money)set of speakers, tuner, and CD player to do everything Bose Wave does, except artificially mangle the sound. They wouldn't hear of it, just waxed rhapsodic about how the Wave 'fills the bedroom with sound,' and other such rubbish.

Bose's marketing tactics have succeeded on the masses, folks....they've managed to market expensive crap as 'good' and get away with it.

We are truly on an island....

 

We are. Bose are in consumer's heads through marketing and that's about all.

 

I've noticed this not only with friends. I've gone into stores and have heard many many demo systems with speakers out of phase. I've even been into professional recordings studios and seen speakers out of phase. In fact I've been to the office of a record company vice president and noticed his speakers out of phase. These were used to evaluate recordings. Fortunately, he noticed a difference when I corrected the wiring. His exact words were "I thought something wan't right with this system but I didn't know what it was".

 

Javier,

These sound more like folks who are not really into sound so, to them, high quality sound reproduction is not really that important. Personally, every sound system I have ever heard sounds different with some unique sonic signature regardless of the cost.

I would observe that today portability is more important than quality for many folks. Some of this is caused by our fast-paced life style. Other folks are really into video and surround sound reproduction. Another factor which exists today is $$$. This is real. Wages and salaries have been flat or in regression for a few years while operating costs continue to rise. Today, many folks have less disposable income and more pressing financial priorities so in order to enjoy recorded music they purchase what they perceive gives them the biggest "bang for the buck". Additionally, high quality audio equipment has gotten very expensive at a time when many folks are facing income compression.

Bottom line: Many folks have more important priorities.

Bob

 

Same here for the most part. Some friends admit to the difference.

My son, with his tongue in cheek and a wry smirk, likes claiming to hear no difference between my system and his small boom box. Knowing this I like asking him occasionally how my system sounds or let him know "I'm about to play an LP" so we can play verbal tennis. "better", "worse","way better","way worse","awful","wonderful".

Always fun.

 

Reproduced sound for most people is a casual/background experience at most. Very very few people outside of the "Audiophile/Dedicated Music" listeners such as in our group will actually sit down an concentrate on listening to music unless attending live concert. Nowadays most people listen in cars and through portable units or boomboxes.

The most revealing comments I have heard over the years when people have heard my systems are things like "Wow it's so clear, you can hear every word that they are singing". That in itself speaks to the quality that they are used to. I remember once spending a weekend a party at someone's farm and when we arrived I hear what I though was a bad cover of a Lightfoot number. Shock and horrors when I found that it was Lightfoot singing, the reproduction was that bad but to them it was OK.

As far as the Bose thing goes about the only times I've heard half decent reproduction out of them was:

1) Many year ago a friend had the first very inefficient 901 series driven by Crown amps. The 901's went downhill fast from that point.

2) The Bose slant stage feedback monitors that could handle vast amounts of power even though individual drivers in the array could fail.

 

I've given up on geeking over people's stereos- they just give you a funny look and move on. And then two years later, they'll be introducing you to someone at a party and say 'remember that guy I told you about.. the one that tore my stereo apart one afternoon?' .

 

You nailed it! $$$ is the line in the sand for most people. If I didn't have more "compressing" concerns, you'd better believe i'd own high-end audio! When I make an equipment purchase, I have to think of the forseeable future. For example, it would have been nice to get a nice, dedicated two-channel-setup, since I have little interest in multichannel at the moment, but, I may not be able to go out later and buy a good HT setup if I do get interested, so I got mid-fi HT reciever. I couldn't afford the logic of getting a dedicated SACD player, so I will get a universal player when I can. But, i'm also a music/sound person. Most people I meet aren't, so their priorities are portability and convenience, and they just don't hear or care about sound all that much. They are the same people who will tell you that they only like music where they can understand the words. People who aren't into music will say this.

 

Bose is the name that most people think of when asked about quality audio equipment. That's the only brand associated with the high end that they know. What they don't know is that Bose is associated with the high end only because Bose makes the association. Bose is self-proclaimed high end. What the general public doesn't know is that those who know audio won't go near Bose.

My wife was in a pool and spa store the other day asking about various model spas. Their most expensive models have built-in stereos. The salesman said that she would be better off buying a spa without the built-in stereo and then putting a separate Bose system nearby. These spa stereos aren't good, but a Bose system would hardly be an upgrade.

 

Apart from people being misinformed by powerful marketing, I can understand someone not hearing the difference between various stereo systems or, at least, not placing much importance on the differences that are there. Let's face it: unless something is going TERRIBLY wrong (and I don't mean wrong in the Bose way, I mean wrong as in a driver being blown out or something), most systems of even very modest cost have a reasonable frequency response. For many (most?) people that's quality enough.

If someone focuses on the music only -- by this I mean the actual performance as well as the composition -- and not the "realism" of the sound, then I think that placing little value on so-called high-end systems makes sense. In a way I wish that I was so inclined -- it would certainly make this hobby less expensive and easier. I'm remembering (hazily remembering, I should say, because I don't remember many specifics) interviews with a few musicians in Stereophile over the years where their playback systems were extremely modest -- a boombox in one case, a very inexpensive rack system in another. Being a Stereophile interview, the conversations naturally turned to audiophile issues after a while. While I don't remember any of the interviewees expressing the belief that all gear sounds the same, I do recall their apparent abilities to just listen to the music and enjoy it versus letting the sound of the gear get in the way of their listening pleasure.

 

Wrong answer. There is nothing superficial about a stereo system.

 

The sad truth is that most people have probably never heard their favorite music played on a quality (not necessarily very expensive) system. What's more, a lot of people may not have even heard the best-mastered version of their favorite music. Most fans of rock know Jethro Tull Aqualung, but what percentage have heard the DCC gold CD? Probably an equal percentage don't even know that the DCC gold CD exists. "Hey, what's a DCC?"

 

OK, How many people do each of you know that has a sound system capable of reasonably good/accurate reproduction? I'm not necessarily talking about "high end" just a decent source, amplification and speakers. I only know two or three people.