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Bose Corporation
Bose Corporation logo
Company type	Private
Industry	Consumer electronics
Founded	1964
Founder	Amar Bose
Headquarters	Framingham, Massachusetts
Key people	Amar Bose, Chairman, Founder Bob Maresca, President Thomas Froeschle, VP, Director of Research, Member of the Board
Products	Loudspeakers, Headphones, Audio equipment, Car audio
Revenue	$1.80 billion (2005)
Number of employees	10,000
Website	www.bose.com

The Bose Corporation is a privately held American company based in Framingham, Massachusetts that specializes in high end audio equipment and reinvests 100 percent of its profits back into the company. Bose products can be found in Olympics stadiums, Broadway theaters, the Sistine Chapel and the Space Shuttle.

Background

Bose develops and manufactures audio equipment including speakers, amplifiers, headphones, automotive sound systems for luxury cars , and most recently, automotive suspension systems and performing research into cold fusion . The company was founded in 1964 by 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 8,000 people worldwide (2,000 in Massachusetts) and had revenues of over $1.8 billion. Bose has contracts with the US military (Navy, Air Force & Army) and NASA . Amar Bose is still the Chairman and primary stockholder, and also holds the title of Technical Director.

History of Bose Corporation presidents

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

The company spends at least $100 million a year in research and engineering, employing a 6500 square meter (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, Amar 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. Amar 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 ensuring a dominance of reflected over direct sound in home listening spaces, replicating 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, Amar 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.

Amar 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 7 kHz. Similarly, he does not find measurable relevance to perceived 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. Unlike other major speaker manufacturers, Bose does not publish specifications relating to the measured electrical and objective acoustic performance of its products. . This reluctance to publish information is due to Bose's rejection of these measurements in favour of "more meaningful measurement and evaluation procedures".

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).

Cold Fusion Research

Starting in 1991 the Bose corporation has performed research into cold fusion . Building what some have described as the worlds most accurate calorimeter six engineers began to replicate many of the pre-existing experiments and concluded that no more energy was being created than was being put into the device. Since that time more recent experiments using different methods have produced more encouraging results .

Bose Stores

in 1993 Bose opened up its first store in Kittery, Maine. Since then Bose has over 160 stores in the United States and numerous locations world wide. In Britain there are 8 Bose stores, including one on Regent Street. Bose stores feature a 15 to 25 seat theater which has a short film that demonstrates a Lifestyle Home Entertainment System using a high definition front LCD projector. At one point in the show a three sided box is placed in front of the center speaker and the Lifestyle system automatically adjust to correct the sound in the room, due to AdaptIQ technology. Stores located in Factory Outlets have discounted prices on some products selling not only new but factory renewed (retested open box) products.

Proprietary technologies

Tri-Port Earcup Drivers
Acoustic Noise Cancellation
Acoustimass Technology
Acoustic Waveguide Technology
Direct/Reflecting Technology
Psychoacoustic Equalization
TrueSpace Technology
Electromagnetic Suspension System for Automobiles

Lines of Specialized Products

Car Audio

Bose has a wide range of speakers for car audio and has even started to make consoles for car audio including the Bose Media System which can play CDs, DVD audio discs, DVD video discs, Super Audio CDs, MP3s, AAC, and features a music storage system.

At the 2007 auto show in Geneva, Switzerland Bose launched a new media system with the Ferrari 612 Scaglietti. The new system combines stereo, navigation, and hands free calling into one component and interface.

Automotive Suspension System

Another area of research and development at Bose Corporation is two-state, non-linear power processing and conditioning. Several early patents were awarded to Amar 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. This system uses electromagnetic linear motors to raise or lower the wheels of an automobile in response to un-even bumps or potholes on the road. The wheels are raised when approaching a bump, or extended into a pothole, within milliseconds, thus keeping the vehicle steady. This technology is another application of Bose's active noise reduction technology for speakers and earphones. The unevenness of the road is sensed, processed much like a sound wave. A cancelling wave is generated, which is applied to the wheels through the linear motors. Amar Bose expects the system to be available commercially on high-end luxury cars by 2009. In a French interview Bose even shows off the car jumping over an obstacle.

Pro Speaker Systems

Bose produces professional speaker systems like the 102, 402, 802, 25SE, 32SE, 32, 8, 16, 3, and 6 that are made for musicians, professional and commercial applications.

L1 Personal Acoustic Systems

Bose makes personal speaker amps for musicians. Bose released a new version of its L1 speaker system on March 30th 2007

Bose-Electroforce

In 2004 Bose acquired company assets related to the development, manufacture and sales of materials testing equipment, founding the ElectroForce Systems Group The ElectroForce Systems Group provides materials testing and durability simulation instruments to research institutions, universities, medical device companies and engineering organizations worldwide.

Lines of Home audio products

Multimedia systems

Speaker systems

Home entertainment systems

Aviation Headsets

Bose Aviation Headset X

This headset is used in the Space Shuttle (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0880451.html)

Opinions about Bose

Bose is widely regarded as a producer of high-end audio systems. . A market study published in March 2006 by the independent market research firm Forrester Research reported that Bose's brand name was among the 3 most trusted brand names (by the US population) of consumer-electronics or computer brand names in America.

In 1968, Amar Bose presented a classic paper to the Audio Engineering Society entitled: "On the Design, Measurement and Evaluation of Loudspeakers" available from the AES at a small charge. Following the logic in this paper, Bose Corporation has endeavored to strike an economic balance between cost and performance to provide high quality as judged by the average listener whose criteria of quality include faithful reproduction of the listener's experience in a live performance, which according to Bose requires a dominance of the reverberant sound field in the listening space (a typical home environment). (see audiophile beliefs).

Criticisms

Bose's systems have been criticized by Stereophile in 1975 who, in reviewing the 901 system, state that in the magazine's opinion the system was unlikely to appeal to perfectionists with a developed taste in precise imaging, detail and timbre and that the shortfall in these qualities was an excessive price to pay for the improvement in impact and ambiance generated by the large proportion of reflected sound. The review also said that while the system Stereophile magazine reviewed gave a more realistic reproduction of natural ambiance than any other speaker system, that they found it otherwise unexceptional.

A reviewer in PC Magazine stated that he believes Bose is not a producer of high-end audio systems, because it didn't fulfill his expectations of what a high-end system should be. (Widely-accepted performance characteristics of 'high-end' audio systems typically include a flat frequency response curve throughout the audible spectrum, and precise impulse response.) Audio enthusiasts frequently criticize Bose in online forums, accusing it of overpricing its products and criticizing the sound produced by Bose products. Some professional audio analysts who have dissected and scientifically analyzed certain Bose products have found that the sound quality, materials used, and the build quality fails to meet their expectations.

Legal Action

While the company's legal department works primarily to protect the company's many patents and trademarks, some past legal actions have caused much criticism. In 1981 Bose sued the magazine Consumer Reports for libel. Consumer Reports reported in a review that the sound from the system that they reviewed "tended to wander about the room." The District Court found that Consumer Reports "had published the false statement with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of its truth or falsity" when it changed what the original reviewer wrote about the speakers in his pre-publication draft. The Court of Appeals reversed the trial court's ruling on liability, and the United States Supreme Court affirmed, finding that that while Consumer Report's statement was knowingly false, it was made without actual malice, and therefore there was no liability for libel damages.

Market share

In 2006 Bose ranked second in Home Audio retail, behind Sony (based on retail point-of-sale data for the period of January through October, 2006).

Bose 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:

Locations

Headquarters

Framingham, MA, USA

Automotive division

Stow, MA, USA

Plants

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

Number of retail stores

Over 151 as of October 20 2006

External links

The official Bose website with links to various national sites.
History of Bose Corporation
Active Suspension website
Bose's line of consumer-grade headphones
Bose's "Radio System" Challenge Pages
Stereophile review of the Bose 901
G4TV Roundup: iPod Speakers
Aviation Headset X review

References

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