Bose (company)

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Bose Corporation
Bose Corporation logo
Type Private
Founded 1964
Headquarters Framingham, Massachusetts
Key people Amar G. Bose, Chairman, Founder
Bob Maresca, President
Thomas Froeschle, VP, Director of Research, Member of the Board
Industry Consumer electronics
Products Loudspeakers, Headphones, Audio equipment, Car audio
Revenue $1.80 billion (2005)[1]
Employees 10,000
Slogan Better Sound Through Research
Website www.bose.com

The Bose Corporation is a privately held American company based in Framingham, Massachusetts that specializes in high end audio equipment[2][3] and reinvests 100 percent of its profits in research and development. Bose products can be found in Olympics stadiums,[4] Broadway theatres,[4] the Sistine Chapel,[4] and the Space Shuttle[4][5]

Contents

[edit] Background

Bose develops and manufactures audio equipment including speakers, amplifiers, headphones, automotive sound systems for high-end cars[6], and most recently, automotive suspension systems and performing research into cold fusion [7]. 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[8], Airforce[9] & Army[10]) and NASA for audio products, particualy high-end headphones [11]. Amar Bose is still the Chairman and primary stockholder, and also holds the title of Technical Director.[12]

[edit] 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 6500 square meter (70,000 sq. ft.) building in Framingham reserved for that purpose.[13] In 2004, Bose purchased an additional site from HP in Stow, Massachusetts to house growing automotive and marketing divisions.[14]

[edit] 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. [15] 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).

[edit] 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[16] 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.[17] Unlike other major speaker manufacturers, Bose does not publish specifications relating to the measured electrical and objective acoustic performance of its products.[18] [19]. This reluctance to publish information is due to Bose's rejection of these measurements in favour of "more meaningful measurement and evaluation procedures"[20].

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).

[edit] Car Audio

Bose has a wide range of speakers for car audio and has even started to make consuls for car audio including the Bose Media System[1] [2] [3] which can play CDs, DVD audio discs, DVD video discs, Super Audio CDs, MP3s, AAC, and features a music storage system.

[edit] 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,[21] 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.[22] 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 soundwave. A cancelling wave is generated, which is applied to the wheels through the linear motors.[12] Amar Bose expects the system to be available commercially on high-end luxury cars by 2009.[23] In a French interview Bose even shows off the car jumping over an obstacle.[24]

[edit] Pro Speaker Systems

Pro speaker systems like the 102, 402, 802, 25SE, 32SE, 32, 8, 16, 3, and 6 are made for musicians and pro applications. See more on their website at pro.bose.com

[edit] 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.

[edit] Lines of products

[edit] 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

[edit] Products

[edit] Multimedia systems

[edit] Speaker systems

[edit] Home entertainment systems

[edit] Aviation Headsets

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

[edit] Live Music and DJ systems

[edit] Opinions about Bose

A market study published in March 2006 by the independent market research firm Forrester Research reported that Bose's brand name was among the most trusted (by the US population) of consumer-electronics or computer brand names.[25]


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. (See: Audio Engineering Society site [26]). 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, i.e. a dominance of the reverberant sound field in the listening space, ie. a typical home enviornment. (see audiophile beleifs) Those whose main listening experience has been reproduced sound as opposed to live performances, i.e. loudspeaker-sound, often find the sound produced by Bose systems lacking, in particular in the directional high freqencies produced by many expensive speaker systems with tweeters mounted in forward-facing baffles that assure considerable directionality of the higher frequencies. For those listeners, Bose systems will not appeal and they should not, and largely do not, own them.[27]

Bose is widely regarded as a producer of high-end audio systems [28][29][30][31][32][33]. It has been reported by at least one reviewer, that whilst most people view Bose as a producer of "high-end" products, that some people do not hold the opinion that Bose is a producer of high-end audio systems, because in his opinion it dosn't fufill their expectations of what a high-end system should be[34].

[edit] 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).[35]

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

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

[edit] Locations

[edit] Headquarters

  • Framingham, MA

[edit] Automotive division

  • Stow, MA

[edit] Plants

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

[edit] Number of retail stores

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ WetFeet - Bose information
  2. ^ C|Net "Classy compacts: high-end CD radios"
  3. ^ The Register "Bose SoundDock iPod speakers"
  4. ^ a b c d MIT "Inventor of the Week Archive"
  5. ^ Cisco Nasa Publication
  6. ^ Bose Automotive Site
  7. ^ Discover Magasine Interview with Amar Bose "Cold Fusion Research"
  8. ^ Bose Headsets used by Sonar Operators
  9. ^ Aerospace News
  10. ^ Bose Crewman Headphones used by the US military
  11. ^ Forbes Magasine Review "High End Headphones"
  12. ^ a b MSNBC "A car that can jump over obstacles"
  13. ^ Satellite view of Bose Headquarters
  14. ^ bizjournals.com-Bose nixes N.Y. expansion, chooses Stow instead
  15. ^ Amar Bose Interview
  16. ^ Bose Panaray MA12 technical papers
  17. ^ Amar Bose 1968 AES paper "On The Design, Measurement, and Evaluation of Loudspeakers"
  18. ^ Bose Musicians Forum
  19. ^ Gadget Guy Review of the Bose Wave Music System
  20. ^ AES paper
  21. ^ Auto Tech "Better Living Through Curiosity"
  22. ^ Bose bumps at YouTube
  23. ^ Inside Line "Bose Suspension"
  24. ^ French Interview "Suspension BOSE" at YouTube Go 3 minutes and 20 seconds into it to view the Car jumping with Bose Suspension
  25. ^ Forrister Research - "The 2005 Technology Brand Scorecard"
  26. ^ AES "On the Design, Measurement and Evaluation of Loudspeakers"
  27. ^ Steriophile Review from 1975 (citing audiophile beleifs about a bose system)
  28. ^ Forbes Magasine - describing Bose as a producer of "high-end" products
  29. ^ Flyingmag review - describing Bose as a producer of "high-end" products
  30. ^ Wetfeet - describing Bose as a producer of "high-end" products "Bose is arguably the number-one manufacturer of high-end audio equipment"
  31. ^ PCMag.com describing Bose as a producer of "high-end" products
  32. ^ Popular Science - describing Bose as a producer of "high-end" products
  33. ^ Softpedia.com/news - describing Bose as a producer of "high-end" products
  34. ^ PCMag.com - a reviewer saying that whilst most people view Bose as a producer of "high-end" products, some people don't regard Bose as a producer of "high-end" products (see other PCmag.com review that describes Bose as a producer of "high-end" products)
  35. ^ Twice.com PoS article
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