History

### **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 research aimed at clarifying factors that he saw as fundamental weaknesses plaguing high-end audio systems. The principal weaknesses, in Bose's view, were that the overall design of the electronics and speaker failed to account for the spatial properties of the radiated sound in typical listening spaces (homes and apartments) and the implications of spatiality for psychoacoustics, i.e. the listener's head as a sonic diffraction object as part of the system.  Eight years later, he started the company, charging it with a mission to achieve "Better Sound Through Research", now the company slogan.

In an interview in 2007 Bose talked about an early review that kept the company alive.

"One magazine in the United States, a really credible magazine, had one reviewer named Norman Eisenburg who really knew his music. In those days I used to take the loudspeaker to the reviewer. I packed my son and loudspeaker in the car and went off. I put this little thing on top of the big speakers he had, turned it on, and within five minutes he said: 'I don't care if this is made of green cheese, it's the best sound, most accurate sound, I've ever heard.' He came out with a review titled 'Surround and Conquer'. He was not known to do things like that. Everybody in the press knew he knew music, and it resulted in rave reviews one after another, and we were able to survive."
### **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 a simulated, massless, ideal, spherical membrane, the results of listening tests were disappointing (some  of the reasons for this are detailed in a later publication from Bose's research department).  This led Bose to conduct 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 dominance of reflected sound arriving at the ear of the listener, faithfully replicating that aspect of a "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). 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 imperfect knowledge of psychoacoustics limits the 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 that a sine wave and a square wave (a hugely distorted 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 the listener's perception of audible quality (or lack of it) and his or her own  preferences.

Unlike other audio product manufacturers, Bose does not publish specifications relating to the measured electrical and objective acoustic performance of its products. This reluctance to publish information links back to the classic Amar Bose paper presented in 1968 to the Audio Engineering Society: "On the Design, Measurement and Evaluation of Loudspeakers". In the paper, Bose rejects these measurements in favor of "more meaningful measurement and evaluation procedures", and defines himself as a subjectivist, not an objectivist, in terms of audiophile beliefs; he considers the human experience the best measure of performance.

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).

Additionally, the company researches portable audio within the fields of circumaural and supra-aural headphones, centering within the lines of acoustic noise cancellation (see Bose Headphone Family).

### **Cold fusion research**

In 1991 Bose Corporation began research into cold fusion. Company engineers built a precision calorimeter, began replicating prior experiments, and concluded that there was no net energy gain.

## Technical data not published

Amar Bose believed that traditional measures of audio equipment are not relevant to perceived audio quality and therefore does not publish the specifications for Bose products, claiming that the ultimate test is the listener's perception of audio quality according to the listener's preferences. Many other audio product manufacturers publish numerical test data of their equipment, but Bose does not. In 1968, Bose presented a paper to the Audio Engineering Society titled "On the Design, Measurement and Evaluation of Loudspeakers". In this paper, he rejects numerical test data in favor of "more meaningful measurement and evaluation procedures".