Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I used to be the audio buyer for Best Buy's corporate office. I have heard my fair share of speakers over the years. We tested everything from low end KLH speakers to some of the most esoteric speakers ever made. I always thought Bose performed well, but was overpriced. They are primarily an engineering company, who happens to sell products to keep the bills paid for their research. Their product always kicked a$$, but you paid well more than market retail for it. Music is changing, and the way people listen to music is changing. 20 years ago, a good audio system was a separate, clean amplifier with a pre-amp, some high end speakers, and an audiofile cd player. You basically needed a room dedicated to the audio craft, with acoustical considerations, seating, and specific placement of the equipment. In fact, amplifiers maintained a constant current through them so that the electronics never got totally cold. You might treat the corners of the room and walls with acoustic panels to make sure there were no dead spots, and you positioned your furniture for optimal listening based on where the sweet spots of the music crossed perfectly and blended into the room. Acoustical music was the demo material for the typical audiofile, as we talked about imaging and the recreation of live performances in your living room. The rasp of the violinist strings and bow, the echo of the drums through the music hall, and the crispness of the horns. The 1980's began paving the way for the current generation of "stereos" as home theater systems came into play. At first, home theater systems used elements of the true audio systems, bringing a cinematic experience into your home. Over time, as retailers started to canibalize each other, it became a war of pricepoints as the "home theater in a box" was born... a complete system including a DVD player, stereo surround sound amplifier, five speakers, if you were lucky a subwoofer (either active or passive) and ever decreasing quality, features, and pricepoints. In the early 1990's, you could get a "complete" home theater system under $200. It changed from a generation preoccupied with sound reproduction into the next generation that started to look at technology as the cool part, not necessarily the music. Top Gun in surround sound, now in your living room. That is what escorted in the current generation of people and technology. Stereo equipment now is more about technology and convenience more than it is about sound. Digital reproduction, by definition, is perfect, as it is numerical vs. analog. A series of 1's and 0's which capture the specific formula that the music has been encoded into. So, what you are hearing is what the studio intended you to hear, sound wise. There is a focus on the "on demand" aspect of the listener, with people using the latest iPhone to play their favorite tunes at the health club, in their car, or at home. The device delivers the audio experience, and the speaker is just the carrier of the noise. There's less of an emphasis in most circles on the caliber of the audio delivery system, and more on the technological aspects of on demand listening. So this Bose bluetooth speaker is awesome. It does what they say it does. Bose 20 years ago never would have been caught dead with a device that sounded like this, but they were marketing to a different customer. In the old days, Bose used sound tubes to create a longer sound tunnel for their acoustimass subwoofers, resulting in a large base sound that when amplified could fill a room. This speaker doesn't do that, nor was it designed to do that. It was designed to make your on demand listening easy. I really like this speaker. In fact, I will probably put several throughout the house. It's easy to pair, easy to charge, and battery life is good... not sure if it is eight hours as advertised, but it's certainly consistently over 6. It's good to throw out on the porch for a summer bar-b-que, or move into the family room for Sunday night dance parties with your toddler. It has an auxiliary jack on it, so you could use it to improve on crappy sound from a guest room television, or do things like connect a Yamaha keyboard to it instead of a full blown music amplifier. In short, I like it. I like what it represents from the change in how people listen to music. Since it's Bose, it does outperform other bluetooth products in it's class, both cheaper versions and slightly more expensive ones. It does what Bose says it does. I would not hesitate to recommend it to a friend, and am likely to purchase a few more myself.