What High End Manufacturers Could Learn From Bose

I met the VP of marketing for Bose at a party once. I told him I was into audio, but didn't tell him to what degree. To my surprise he pretty much said what you have said. Bose is a marketing company--not an audio company. Mind you, this was the VP of marketing so he was blowing his own horn. But he readily admitted that Bose does not sound that good, but most people don't need something that sounds so good. What they need is simple, easy to use, and packaged in a way they can relate to it.

Can you imagine the guy that bought the one box surround system with 5 mini speakers and a subwoofer, that all neatly plugs into each other in a matter of 5 minutes being the least bit interested in cables that cost more than the whole system--and the fact that you need 20 pairs of cables to set up a really state of the art Levinson, bi-amped monster system?

Marketing efforts (this includes their design philosophy) from Bose target the mass market, which is why they can put ads in general interest magazines and run TV ads. High end audio would fail miserably with that type of marketing, unless they changed their design philosophy to something that "sounds good enough for most, and is very easy to use" thereby meeting the needs of the general public--but then it wouldn't be high end, would it?

Does any high-end company advertises itself on any general interest magazines???????

give me a break!

No, nor should they. Krell is never going to be a mass-market product, so following the Bose strategy would be ruinous. High-end is a niche product, and always will be.

A good post, as usual, Onhwy61. To some extent, I think those companies you mention are starting to move in that direction, particularly in the home theater area. I'm sure a large part of the reason more companies don't is, of course, the cost in dollars of doing that; at least Harman and probably Krell have enough funds to publicize themselves more, but many of the best high-end manufacturers can't afford the advertising spreads that a Bose can put out. Unfortunately for the high-end purists (and that probably includes me), I do think that the future of sound reproduction will be in the home theater area, and that may not exactly be the high fidelity we're hoping for. I will also note an observation, which may or may not be true, that the more a high-end company tries to increase its advertising and profile to the general public, the more it seems to lose some of the mystique that comes with being a high-end company. I'm thinking of a Krell, for example, which in my view makes good products but has received a good deal of bashing, far more now than in the earlier days when it was a small unknown company which was more admired for building no-compromise powerhouse amps (sort of reminds me of a quote from a little known pro basketball player, who thanked his agent when a fan yelled out he was overrated, as he thought no one even knew who he was!). Some of this undoubtedly comes with making more affordable components to attract a wider customer base, where corners invariably have to be cut and sound quality suffers in comparison to the products which may first have gotten the company on the map. But I do wonder if a company which does succeed at getting a large market presence will be viewed by the high end community as selling out, or no longer a high-end company (look, as another example, at some of the audiophile community's view of Stereophile as it has gone from a small underground publication to a larger media glossy). Curious to see what others in this forum think.