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Review 4 of 32
Price Paid:
$0.00 Summary:
Pros: Does a decent job of storing music on the hard drive - both convenience and quality of compression and storage. The system is also unobtrusive in the room.
Cons: Very limited feature set. Weak laser and limited format capability. Very limited number of inputs - both video and audio. Speaker system is definitely not audiophile quality. Clunky system interface - very time consuming to edit music library.
Summary: I've been an audiophile and musician since the 60's with a wide range of musical tastes (and yes, I still like to crank it up every now and then). After being widowed and remarrying, my new wife "came equipped" with one of these systems (in perfect condition, too). I replaced my main system in the living room with it and we used it for several months. The wife's a keeper, but the Bose had to go. It's widely accepted that this type of Bose speaker system has little or no response in the middle of the bass range - right where the detail happens in a good bass guitar line. Lower frequencies kick back in (and here you'll have to pardon the pun) to cover the kick drum and low frequency sound effects in movies. Listening to almost any kind of music this leaves a gutless, hollow feeling at the bottom end.
The DVD/CD reader has a very weak laser subassembly and has problems with DVDs which play OK on any of our three PCs or my other two DVD players. The formats readable by the unit are also pretty limited.
It is also extremely difficult and time consuming to edit the stored music collection. The Bose remote has to be used for everything and there is no QWERTY keyboard capability. In addition, the GraceNote music database can only be updated via a CD supplied by Bose (of course). If you don?t update regularly, any newly-released CDs will be stored as ?Unknown? or ?Various artists.? In some cases, the songs will even be stored individually (not as one album) so you can end up with hundreds of unclassified, unnamed, individual files.
I do like the way the system looks in the room ? very compact and much more ?stealthy? than my older floor-standing speakers or my new high-end bookshelf speakers on stands and a separate sub. This, however, isn?t enough to overcome the system?s shortcomings in the audio and video departments.
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