Many people know the manufacturer Bose primarily from sound systems and headphones. But how did the company actually come about and what milestones can it record? TECHBOOK did some research.
Bose Corporation is an American provider of high-quality audio solutions for both private and professional use. In addition to loudspeaker boxes, in-ear headphones and audio systems for cars, for example, sound systems for halls, halls or churches are also manufactured, which are precisely tailored to the respective environment. For a number of years, however, the bad news about the brand, which is cultically revered by its followers, has not stopped.
The Beginnings of Bose
The Bose Corporation was founded in 1964 in Framingham, Massachusetts, by the American and later graduate electrical engineer Amar G. Bose. Bose had already run a successful radio repair shop at his parents’ house and had been accepted at MIT, the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at just 17 years old. Bitterly disappointed by the acoustics of the stereo systems of his time, the lover of classical music finally devoted himself to what is known as psychoacoustics. This is a sub-area of psychophysics that deals with the interaction of human perception of sound as an auditory event and with its physical sound field sizes.
What may sound very scientific and complex finally brought Bose an important insight. Only about ten percent of the sound reaches our ears directly, while the large remainder is first reflected by surfaces such as walls and ceilings. Based on this knowledge, the American developed a loudspeaker that radiated the sound in all spatial directions. The aim: to reproduce the sound emitted by real musical instruments, such as in a concert, so that the sound only reaches the listener after it has been reflected from the walls and ceiling.
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“Think tanks, not audio companies”
This is what the company’s self-image is based on to this day, and with it Bose’s lifelong refusal to recognize conventional audio measurement methods as relevant for assessing the quality of audio devices. The listener’s perception alone is the ultimate test, according to Bose at the time. This attitude has also resulted in the principle of not publishing any technical data on one’s own products to this day.
Bose sees itself “not as an audio company, but as a think tank”. The somewhat idiosyncratic attitude did not detract from the success for a very long time. On the contrary: Bose still enjoys a reputation as a cult brand that fans adore as iconic; not least because the quality of the products is right. And even the design is worthy of an award, as the presentation of the image-boosting Reddot Design Award for the portable smart speaker in 2020 showed.
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Bose can even “iron out potholes”
Of course, Bose is not only active in the field of entertainment electronics, but also offers professional solutions. For example, the sound systems for St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the former Bundestag in Bonn were tailor-made, pardon me, for the premises. And even with at first glance unrelated topics, successes have already been recorded. For example, with the Bose Suspension System presented at the beginning of the millennium, a wheel suspension system that relies on four electromagnetic linear motors instead of conventional spring struts, which actively iron out bumps in the road. “As a result, the car glides over potholes and bumps without the body moving,” Spiegel Online wrote in 2004.
However, anyone who thinks that the (business) world is still okay at Bose is mistaken. On the contrary, bad news has followed bad news and scandal after scandal for several years. A US customer sued Bose in April 2017 because the company had passed on data from users of wireless Bose headphones. Just a month later, Bose released an updated software version that allowed users to turn off the transfer of user data. In 2020, the company sold all 130 Bose stores in Europe, Australia, Japan and North America, citing the significantly changed buying behavior of customers and online trade as the reason. The stores in Asia and the United Arab Emirates have so far remained unaffected by the savings measures.
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Violation of free pricing costs Bose seven million euros
The greatest damage in terms of image followed in early December 2021. At that time, the Federal Cartel Office fined the German Bose subsidiary, Bose GmbH, almost seven million euros. According to the accusation, Bose had “restricted the free pricing of the audio products sold by participating authorized dealers for years”. And just in early May 2022, the company announced that another 250 employees had been laid off. “Again” because Bose had announced 1,000 layoffs in each of the years since 2019. The current business result leaves little hope for a rapid improvement: sales in 2021 were 3.2 billion US dollars. In 2019 it was four billion.