Bose is a "premium" brand in the same way that people who don't know what high quality is buy expensive clothing with brand names think they're buying high fashion. The reality is that Bose is wildly boosted in certain frequencies to be louder, not better.
I haven't listened to a McIntosh system, but I know who they are from a friend who loved them and because they're sold at the home theater shop where I buy my own equipment. They're (as far as I know) an _actual_ premium brand, meant to represent the music faithfully.
This is an unfortunate purchase, as Bose will likely delude the value of the brand rather than absorb / import the quality into their own brand.
Most people like bass. Bose sells because normal people like the sound. Most people don’t really care and the choice is some random Amazon and Bose it’s probably going to win. My Bose Bluetooth lasted way longer than anker or other no name brands.
I wouldn’t say my Sonos speakers are good quality audio but it’s not bad. Plus, I can play music on 6 different speaker at the some time.
Maybe Bose can learn a thing or two and provide better quality across the line up.
Counterpoint: I got a Bose PA (S1) a couple of months ago. The frequency response isn't super flat, but it seems surprisingly well defined, and is better than the small keyboard amp it replaced.
I had a similarly dim view of Bose, but was pleasantly surprised.
I had a 1995 Camaro with a Bose stereo. Best car stereo I’ve ever heard. And possibly best stereo I’ve ever heard. And I’ve owned Mercedes S-class as well as custom installed car stereos.
That Camaro Bose actually had a tuned port subwoofer and used the rear glass to reflect the sound to the listener, while amping up mid-bass to balance out road noise.
It’s so good thet I’m looking for the exact same car 30 years later.
Bose is perfectly capable of high end audio engineering if they choose to.
McIntosh used to be like that (my father was blind and I grew up with McIntosh equipment). Whether they still are like that, I doubt it. Why? Because China drags the high quality products down.
First principles: "good" audio reproduction is a lot more objective than most think. It turns out that what "sounds good" is... accurate signal reproduction, usually fitted to a target response curve (sometimes known as the Harman curve) that more or less corresponds to the Fletcher-Munson equal loudness curve. You also need enough dynamic headroom to reproduce the peaks in the listening material - this gets challenging when talking about material with large dynamic range like well-recorded classical, movie soundtracks, etc.
The reality is that Bose is wildly boosted in certain
frequencies to be louder, not better.
[McIntosh] They're (as far as I know) an _actual_ premium
brand, meant to represent the music faithfully.
Speakers, even high-end speakers, tend to be distortion machines that do anything but represent music faithfully. They typically sound ear pleasing, and some brands (B&W, IMO) actually crank up the treble in order to sound more "detailed" and compensate for the diminished high frequency hearing of their target audience (aging male boomers with extra cash to blow) Exceptions are high end speakers (Genelec) designed for studio use, but you can also get pretty close to that level of performance from cheap JBL 3-series active monitors. (Depends on whether you need that last 1% or not)
As far as amplifiers, McIntosh's most famous products, reproducing music "faithfully?"
Well, even cheap < $100 chip amps on eBay do that well, objectively speaking.
What premium amps like McIntosh tend to have is oodles of sustained power and big beefy capacitors for even greater burst power for clean dynamic peaks even at high SPLs. You don't need to spend McIntosh-style megabucks to get that, but it's kinda like table stakes for a "premium" amp.
Not really "actually premium", more "very expensive", which is not the same thing. They do marketing integration with automakers, like Bose, which is a big red flag for an actual premium (in terms of sound) maker.
I haven't listened to a McIntosh system, but I know who they are from a friend who loved them and because they're sold at the home theater shop where I buy my own equipment. They're (as far as I know) an _actual_ premium brand, meant to represent the music faithfully.
This is an unfortunate purchase, as Bose will likely delude the value of the brand rather than absorb / import the quality into their own brand.