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Bose Corporation
Type	Private
Founded	1964
Headquarters	Framingham, Massachusetts
Key people	Amar G. Bose, Chairman, Founder Bob Maresca, President Thomas Froeschle, VP, Director of Research, Member of the Board
Industry	Consumer electronics
Products	Loudspeakers, Headphones, Audio equipment, Car audio
Revenue	$1.70 billion (2004)
Employees	10,000
Slogan	Better Sound Through Research
Website	www.bose.com

The Bose Corporation is a privately held American company based in Framingham, Massachusetts that specializes in audio equipment. Image File history File links Broom_icon. ... Bose Corporation logo This is a copyrighted and/or trademarked logo. ... A private company is a company that is independently owned. ... 1964 (MCMLXIV) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1964 calendar). ...   Settled: 1650 â€“ Incorporated: 1700 Zip Code(s): 01701, 01702, 01703, 01704, 01705 â€“ Area Code(s): 508 / 774 Official website: http://www. ... Amar Gopal Bose (अमर गोपाल बोस) (born 1929) is an American-born Indian electrical engineer. ... Bob (Robert) Maresca was named President of BoseCorporation, Framingham, Massachusetts, in 2005. ... Consumer electronics is electronic equipment intended for use by everyday people. ... A loudspeaker is a device which converts an electrical signal into sound. ... Headphones (also known as earphones, earbuds, stereophones, headsets, or by the slang term cans) are a pair of transducers that receive an electrical signal from a media player or receiver and use speakers placed in close proximity to the ears (hence the name earphone) to convert the signal into audible... The term Audio equipment refers to any device designed principally to reproduce broadcast or recorded sounds. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Revenue is a U.S. business term for the amount of money that a company earns from its activities in a given period, mostly from sales of products and/or services to customers. ... 2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. ... Look up slogan in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A website (or Web site) is a collection of web pages, typically common to a particular domain name or subdomain on the World Wide Web on the Internet. ...   Settled: 1650 â€“ Incorporated: 1700 Zip Code(s): 01701, 01702, 01703, 01704, 01705 â€“ Area Code(s): 508 / 774 Official website: http://www. ...

Background

Bose develops and manufactures audio equipment including speakers, amplifiers, automotive sound systems, headphones, and most recently, automotive suspension systems. The company was founded in 1964 by Amar G. Bose, a professor of electrical engineering (retired in 2005) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. As of 2005, the company employed about 7,500 people worldwide (2,000 in Massachusetts) and had revenues of over $1.7 billion. Amar Bose is still the Chairman and primary stockholder, and also holds the title of Technical Director.^{[citation needed]} A 3. ... 1964 (MCMLXIV) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1964 calendar). ... Amar Gopal Bose (अमर गोपाल बोस) (born 1929) is an American-born Indian electrical engineer. ... Electrical Engineers design power systems… … and complex electronic circuits. ... The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private, coeducational research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ...   Settled: 1630 â€“ Incorporated: 1636 Zip Code(s): 02138, 02139, 02140, 02141, 02142 â€“ Area Code(s): 617 / 857 Official website: http://www. ... 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article is about the U.S. State. ... Revenue is a U.S. business term for the amount of money that a company earns from its activities in a given period, mostly from sales of products and/or services to customers. ...

History of Bose Corporation presidents

1. William (Bill) Zackowitz (1964-66)
2. Charles "Chuck" Hieken (1966-69)
3. Frank E. Ferguson (1969-76)
4. Amar G. Bose (1976-80)
5. Sherwin Greenblatt (1980-2000)
6. John Coleman (2000-2005)
7. Bob Maresca (Since 2005)

The company spends at least $100 million a year in research and engineering, employing a 6500 square meter (70,000 sq. ft.) building in Framingham reserved for that purpose.^{[citation needed]} In 2004, Bose purchased an additional site from HP in Stow, Massachusetts to house growing automotive and marketing divisions.^{[citation needed]} ... Stow is a town located in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. ...

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 audio research aimed at fixing what he saw as key weaknesses plaguing such high-end systems. The principal weakness, as he saw it, was how the overall design of the loudspeakers and electronics failed to take into account psychoacoustics (the human perception of sound). Eight years later, he founded the company, charging it with a mission to achieve Better Sound Through Research (which is also the company's slogan). A 3. ... Psychoacoustics is the study of subjective human perception of sounds. ...

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. Acoustics is a branch of physics and is the study of sound, mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids. ... For information about computer bandwidth management, see Equalization (computing). ...

Although these speaker systems accurately emulated the characteristics of an ideal spherical membrane, the listening results were disappointing (some of the reasons for which are listed in a later publication from Bose's research department), leading Bose to 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 more faithful replication of the "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 accompanied by a subwoofer that handled only the very lowest frequencies). The Model 901 premiered in 1968 and was an immediate commercial success, and the Bose Corporation grew rapidly during the 1970s. A bookcase is an article of furniture, forming a shelved receptacle, usually perpendicular or horizontal, for the storage of books. ... The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, inclusive. ...

Amar Bose believes that our imperfect knowledge of psychoacoustics limits our 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, for example, that a square wave (a hugely distorted sine wave) and a 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 your perception of audible quality (or lack of it) and your preferences.^{[citation needed]} The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the SI unit of frequency. ...

Additionally, the company researches portable audio within the fields of Circumaural and Supra-aural headphones, centering within the lines of Acoustic Noise Cancellation (See the separate article). The Bose Headphone Family are the companys portable audio solutions in its consumer electronics lineup. ...

Automotive Suspension System

Another area of research and development at Bose Corporation is two-state, non-linear power processing and conditioning. Several early patents were awarded to Amar Bose and other Bose engineers and this technology is one of the key elements in an innovative project that the company disclosed in 2004 after more than 20 years of research[1], an automobile suspension system that uses electromagnetic principles instead of the hydraulics that are common today. This system uses electromagnetic linear motors to raise or lower the wheels of an automobile in response to un-even bumps or potholes on the road[2]. The wheels are raised when approaching a bump, or extended into a pothole, within milliseconds, thus keeping the vehicle steady. This technology is another application of Bose's active noise reduction technology for speakers and earphones. The unevenness of the road is sensed, processed much like a soundwave. A cancelling wave is generated, which is applied to the wheels through the linear motors. Amar Bose expects the system to be available commercially on high-end luxury cars by 2009.[3] In a French interview (3 minutes and 20 seconds into it) Bose even shows off the car jumping over an obstacle.[4] A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a patentee (the inventor or assignee) for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or composition of matter (substance) (known as an invention) which... 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Karl Benzs Velo (vélo means bicycle in French) model (1894) - entered into the first automobile race 2005 MINI Cooper S. An automobile (also motor car or simply car) is a wheeled passenger vehicle that carries its own motor. ... Electromagnetism is the physics of the electromagnetic field; a field encompassing all of space which exerts a force on particles that possess the property of electric charge, and is in turn affected by the presence and motion of those particles. ... Table of Hydraulics and Hydrostatics, from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. ...

Lines of products

Proprietary technologies

• Tri-Port Earcup Drivers
• Acoustic Noise Cancellation
• Acoustimass Technology
• Acoustic Waveguide Technology
• Direct/Reflecting Technology
• Psychoacoustic Equalization
• TrueSpace Technology
• Electromagnetic Suspension System for Automobiles

Products

Multimedia systems

• Bose computer speakers
• Bose headphones
• Bose SoundDock

The Bose Computer Speaker Systems are the companys computer audio solutions for its consumer electronics lineup. ... Bose headphones are a family of headphone products sold by the Bose Corporation. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

Speaker systems

• Bose wave systems
• Bose stereo speakers
• Professional Speaker Systems for Commercial Applications

The Bose Wave radio is a tabletop stereo manufactured by the Bose Corporation. ...

Home entertainment systems

• Bose Lifestyle Home Entertainment Systems
• Bose 3-2-1 Home Entertainment Systems
• Bose Acoustimass Home Entertainment Systems

Aviation Headsets

• Bose Aviation Headset X

Bose headphones are a family of headphone products sold by the Bose Corporation. ...

Live Music and DJ systems

• Bose Personalized Amplification System™ products for Musicians

Opinions about Bose

A market study published in March 2006 by the independent market research firm Forrester Research reported that Bose's brand name was among the most trusted (by the US population) of consumer-electronics or computer brand names. [5] Forrester logo. ...

On the other hand, the brand is derided, ignored, or disregarded in the audiophile and/or audio enthusiast markets. The only mention the brand gets in audio enthusiast publications is invariably in editorials highly critical of some products, and most audio specialty retailers do not carry Bose products.^{[citation needed]} This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. ...

Some internet audio forums are filled with arguments for and against Bose and its products (for example [6], [7]).

Unlike other major speaker manufacturers, Bose does not publish specifications relating to the measured electrical and acoustic performance of its products.^{[citation needed]}

Market share

In 2006 Bose ranked second in Home Audio retail, behind Sony (based on retail point-of-sale data for the period of January through October, 2006).[8] To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

Bose directly competes against the following companies in the consumer speaker and home theater market:

• Bang & Olufsen
• Boston Acoustics
• Cerwin-Vega
• Harman/Kardon
• JBL
• Klipsch
• Polk Audio
• Infinity
• Wharfedale
• Definitive Technology

Bose directly competes against the following companies in the consumer headphone market: Bang & Olufsen (B&O) is a Danish company that designs and manufactures high end audio products, television sets, and telephones. ... Founded in 1979, Boston Acoustics is a high end manufacturer of home and mobile audio equipment. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... harman/kardon, a division of Harman International Industries (NYSE: HAR), is a leading manufacturer of home and car audio equipment. ... JBL or JBL Professional is an American audio manufacturer founded by James Bullough Lansing in 1946 and is now part of Harman International Industries, who also owns audio manufacturer Harman Kardon and Infinity. ... Klipsch Audio Technologies is one of the most successful consumer and professional speaker companies in America. ... In 1972, Matthew Polk (pictured) and his friend George Klopfer were graduates of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. ... Infinity is a manufacturer of loudspeaker. ... Wharfedale is the name of a prominent audio equipment manufacturer from the U.K., famous for its loudspeakers. ...

• Altec Lansing
• Koss
• Sennheiser
• Sony

An old Altec Lansing PC speaker. ... The Koss Logo Koss Corporation is a United States company that designs and manufactures headphones. ... The Sennheiser Logo Sennheiser is a German pro audio company. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

Locations

Headquarters

• Framingham, MA

Automotive division

• Stow, MA

Plants

• Framingham, MA
• Carrickmacross, Republic of Ireland
• Columbia, SC
• San Luis, Rio Colorado, Sonora, Mexico
• Tijuana B.C., Mexico

Number of retail stores

• Over 151 as of October 20, 2006

October 20 is the 293rd day of the year (294th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 72 days remaining. ... For the Manfred Mann album, see 2006 (album). ...

External links

• The official Bose website with links to various national sites.
• History of Bose Corporation
• Active Suspension website
• Bose's line of consumer-grade headphones
• Bose's "Radio System" Challenge Pages
• Stereophile review of the Bose 901
• G4TV Roundup: iPod Speakers
• Aviation Headset X review