Stealing the secret to Bose’s success
I was reading this year-old article a few months ago about Dr. Bose dying, by Mike Fremer
The article itself is kind of illuminating from a historical, and people getting their knickers in a twist and keeping them twisted for decades, and yet another tale of abuse of the Capitalistic system kind of way. But when I ran across a comment by ‘iyke’:
“Bose success is largely based on the fact that their marketing allowed People to feel like audiophiles without actually being one. They tapped into the laziness in all of us; here, you too can be an audiophile, just buy one rectangular box and you will have the world’s most sophisticated sound system in your…who wouldn’t fall for that? There’s one born every minute….”
This rang true for me.
Being an audiophile is hard – there is so much to learn.
What all the specs mean, and what specs are important [none of them :-)]. Cables and racks – many being just more opportunities to screw up the sound. All the made-up techo-speak – is anything real?
How easy it is to get something that sounds awful [just walk in the door of most any dealership – they will be happy to (unwittingly) demonstrate this every day]. Prices going up by 10% to 30% per year for most of the gear for no observable reason [well, I guess we know the reasons :-(].
You have to be really fracking serious about wanting great sound.
Or you can just buy a Bose. And you’re done.
The point being… if we want the general public to spend their money on high-end audio, we have to make it easy for them – much easier than it is now. The old-fashioned dealers were supposed to help with this, but most now just push boxes. But we don’t just need dealers to present this message, the entire industry: manufacturers to the press, need to get on board a little here.
A message like:
“Oh! Look how easy it is to get really awesome great sound with this inexpensive Audio Note setup. Or this Odyssey Audio setup. Or by hooking up these Zu Audio speakers to Peachtree electronics.”
It is fun and geeky to make all this really complicated – but it is more profitable to make it simple. [I know, we all want to just have fun and be geeky! :-)]
So maybe it is not so much as ‘stealing’ Bose’s secret as permanently borrowing…
