alt Hacker News> "Bose blows" is a popular comment amongst the audiophile community but, to me, it seems like they don't blow at all[0]
That comment is not wrong, you are imo just not making an important distinction that the criteria on which audiophiles judge Bose as “blowing” (which is almost purely the sound profile + a few other smaller things like physical comfort/connectivity/price/etc.) vs. what you judge it on (which is more in the long-term technical user/community product support, idk how to describe that area much better) are almost entirely disjoint.
It is perfectly fine and valid for an audio product to “blow” from an opinionated audiophile perspective, while being exceptionally great from the long-term product/user/community product support perspective.
I heavily agree with you btw, Bose should be heavily lauded for making a decision to open-up their speaker firmware after it reaches the official end of support deadline. The fact that this is an exceptional practice is imo, a little bit sad, because I believe that it should be way more common.
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The audiophile community usually are people with more money than ears, their opinion on the quality of particular brands is easy to discard, it is usually correlated more with expense than actual measured performance.
Came here to say exactly this. I consider myself an audiophile (the sane kind) and, if I want “that sound” and have time, I use my HiFi, but if I want to enjoy music and just relax, I use my Bose headphones with whatever thing I have close.
I like how they color sound, and how they use psychoacoustics to do what they do.
Audiophiles using music to listen their systems are missing the point.
> The fact that this is an exceptional practice is imo, a little bit sad, because I believe that it should be way more common.
If we gave tax breaks for open sourcing EOL products, we'd see a lot more of it. Code escrow companies might not like it, though.
Build quality of Bose products is good in my opinion. The headphones are alright but so are Sony, Plantronics and Apple. I love the sound of Airpods Pro in particular even if they don't want to stay in my ears [1] and the pairing experience even with the iPhone isn't what I expect of >$100 headphones in 2016.
If you want really good stereo or 5.1 sound there is no substitute for big speakers that can move a lot of air.
[1] maybe it is that gene polymorphism that makes my ears overflow with wax and has my doctor warning they will plug up one of these days