Bose founder, Amar Bose, has died at 83

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/obit-amar-bose-0712.html

by jefftchan • 13 years ago

368 156 13 years ago

web.mit.edu

sunnybythesea• 13 years ago

His last lecture here for those interested http://video.mit.edu/watch/dr-amar-g-bose-last-lecture-of-fa...

pud• 13 years ago

Bose got a bad rap.

In the 80's, everyone agreed Bose products were pretty but overpriced. Unfortunately that reputation stuck.

These days, we all gladly pay extra for good aesthetic design (see: Apple, and almost every electronic gizmo on Kickstarter).

Bose was ahead of their time.

swinnipeg• 13 years ago

Don't overlook the Braun Atelier systems. Those products are art.

lotso2• 13 years ago

all electronics, except Bose, were ugly.

Except for Braun, Sony, B&O, and other high-end electronic manufacturers...

calinet6• 13 years ago

ADS [drool]

batbomb• 13 years ago

1. Bose products in the 80s were ugly too.

2. Not all electronics were ugly in the 80s. Bang & Olufsen and Quad would completely blew Bose away as far as style.

mrkmcknz2• 13 years ago

Not sure of the reputation of Bose in the US but over here in the UK 8/10 people would know Bose as a high end, high quality audio company.

I'm not sure any other audio company could make such a claim in the UK.

Every electronics megastore has an elegant Bose section showcasing the hardware in an Apple-esque way.

stonemetal2• 13 years ago

Same rep in the US. It is just the audiophile hipsters who can't wait to show how much they know by bashing Bose.

Buttons840• 13 years ago

To give myself as a one man sample:

Bose is the only high quality audio company I can think of.

timc33• 13 years ago

B&O and Bowers and Wilkins both spring to mind, both make much better products

nly• 13 years ago

I'm not sure any other audio company could make such a claim in the UK.

Sennheiser? Personally I'd never heard of Bose until recently, when they started advertising in UK cinemas.

rdl7• 13 years ago

Bose Pro Audio (where I worked for a summer at MIT) was always awesome -- we were doing audio radiosity calculations to simulate audio systems in CAD mockups of existing or planned buildings (stadiums, etc.) with various speaker placement, from arbitrary listener positions. Their speaker arrays were rugged, well engineered, etc. -- no one worries about "audiophile" stuff for venue audio or PA.

They also have a great reputation for car audio, where everything is essentially custom designed to the vehicle.

ioquatix• 13 years ago

I for one, WISH, people would worry about audiophile stuff for "venue audio or PA".

Man, some of the s* setups I have heard in my time.

lectrick• 13 years ago

I have a Chevy Volt with a low-power Bose system, and honestly, it sounds fucking amazing.

jser3• 13 years ago

You have obviously never experienced the pain of a prolonged car trip with Bose. I never knew what ear fatigue was prior to the unfortunate experience of owning Bose car audio.

Thankfully, most car manufacturers have stopped using Bose.

gamble• 13 years ago

What? Bose has long been notoriously low-quality for the price. They were the Beats by Dr. Dre of the 1980s, not Apple.

Nav_Panel2• 13 years ago

So goes the old saying: "No highs? No lows? Must be Bose!"

While that saying might be a tad unjustified, I find that their products are often purchased by people who don't do adequate research into other headphones that might suit them better. I often see people wearing the "QuietComfort" brand headphones in situations where they gain no benefit from active noise cancelling, although for all I know they could be heavy travelers and only own a single pair of headphones. But honestly, a comparable pair from another brand would run them $200 less...

acjohnson552• 13 years ago

With all due respect to Dr. Bose, that reputation stuck because it stayed true. To be fair though, Bose gets away with their premium cost because they fill a very important market hole in home audio: they produce top-notch products backed by good design and actual science.

There are a slew of companies slinging absolute crap, and a bunch of other companies selling pseudoscientific nonsense. Audio is a very difficult field for untrained people to judge product quality on the showroom floor--and in this sense, it's somewhat different from Apple's marketing task.

I don't own any Bose products, but hats off to Dr. Bose for blazing his own trail, haters be damned.

beloch2• 13 years ago

Nothing epitomizes Bose so well as their minicube home-theater-in-a-box systems.

Somewhat expensive. Tiny and easy to live with (I believe the audiophile term is "wife-friendly"). Not very good sound quality.

Good audio requires some tradeoffs. A tiny box with tiny drivers and not a lot of power simply can't reproduce lower frequencies well. There just isn't enough cone displacement. Likewise, putting those little cubes in places that are convenient to live around rarely results in placement that makes the most of what little you have! Well placed speakers are usually in the way. These minicube systems were designed for people who consider sound quality to be of secondary importance to unobtrusiveness, and they serve that market well.

Bose realized that not everyone is an audiophile. Some people want to have sound that's "good enough" without huge tower speakers placed several feet away from their walls waiting for children to tip them over. Of course, these people don't want to feel like they're compromising. If you sell them cheap cubes that are marketed as being "good enough", they'll stay away in droves! If you market those "good enough" speakers as audiophile grade and charge a proportionate amount for them, people will buy them. Even more amazingly, they'll be happy with them. Audio is one of those rare sectors in which you can actually make people more satisfied by overcharging them. Bose realized this.

Prioritizing convenience over sound quality and charging premium audiophile prices for compromise-making products is something Bose does indeed have in common with Apple. Mp3's are in no way a step up in sound-quality over CD's, but mp3 players were a tremendous improvement in convenience over portable CD players. There were mp3 players before the iPod, but the iPod was the first "premium" mp3 player. The first iPod's and their crappy buds cost more than a top of the line Sony discman with some rather nice cans, and people bought them in droves!

So, I agree that Apple has taken a page out of Bose's playbook, but I disagree with your statement than Bose was ahead of his time. Bose's timing was perfect and his company was wildly successful as a result.

imissmyjuno• 13 years ago

I generally agree but the iPod argument really downplays the effort apple puts into industrial design and UX. At the time of the 3rd gen iPod and being a high school studeny I could only afford one of the few of its competitors, the HDD-powered Creative Nomad, and its infuriatingly unintuitive and inconsistent UI. I'm not even talking some kind of "attractive" UI like the rather useless cover flow view introduced later. The Nomad was literally a pain to use where a little wheel had to be rotated to scroll between the many albums. in hindsight, the clickwheel UI would've been worth more than a few extra gigs of space.

dietrichepp3• 13 years ago

A tiny box with tiny drivers and not a lot of power simply can't reproduce lower frequencies well.

I'd like to expand on this. The tradeoff has three variables: enclosure size, amplifier power output, and low frequency response. The reason is because as the audio frequency goes below the resonant frequency, the speaker efficiency drops (and eventually you run into Xmax limitations too). Resonant frequency scales with enclosure size.

Low frequency noise sounds good so a lot of speakers have deep resonances that exaggerate a specific low frequency at the expense of accuracy. Cheap, and impressive in the showroom, as long as you don't listen too carefully.

One speaker designer took the tradeoff in a completely different direction: mount a 10" speaker in a small cube, and use a very high-power amplifier to drive it below its resonant frequency. The speaker had to be specially designed with extremely high excursion (Xmax) and a voice coil that won't melt. The amplifer had to be specially designed to absorb a powerful back EMF as the moving speaker sent current back to the amplifier.

Apparently, the result was a subwoofer that satisfied not only the designer but his wife, who didn't want more "furniture".

OGC2• 13 years ago

Bose was ahead of his time as they sold overpriced products before Apple did. Why this is worth celebrating is questionable.

andrewcooke3• 13 years ago

something of an aside, but atc scm7 speakers are comparatively small, have no ports (so can be placed near walls), come in a variety of finishes, and look clean and modern. if you're looking for an "easy to live with" set of speakers we found these to be a pretty decent compromise...

tossmeup2• 13 years ago

That rap was accurate. Better sound through marketing and douche-baggery IP / anti-competitive behavior.

Bose implementations used cheap parts and cut corners, but charged premium prices by being the original MonsterCable. Bose stifled competition and innovation with pre-existing art IP. He also dicked people around with trademark because he was an asshat.

He was only one step better than a patent-troll in terms of his effects on the industry (because he actually did deliver a product). Fuck him and his Beats by Dre bullshit sucker-identifying crap.

Bose was drowning start-ups in the bathtub, let alone badgering any real competition. It's an affront to HN for his death to be atop the list without him being pilloried as a pariah.

rallison• 13 years ago

Indeed. Let's not forget that Bose sued Consumer Reports in 1971 for publishing a review that described a Bose system as one that "tended to wander about the room" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports#Bose

steveh73• 13 years ago

Bose aviation headsets are amazing.

Anechoic• 13 years ago

It's not well known, but Dr. Bose had a stroke a few years ago. I was an officer of a local Acoustical Society of America chapter in Boston. Dr. Bose had been awarded a plaque at the national ASA conference in the summer of 2011, but he wasn't well enough to travel to accept the reward, so we volunteered to host a reception in Cambridge to give him the award and recognize other prominent acousticians. At that point, none of us knew what had happened to prevent him from traveling (I figured he was just really busy), but we were informed shortly before the reception.

When he arrived he was clearly still recovering (he had difficult walking and needed time to collect his thoughts before speaking), but he was still able to make a barn-burner of an acceptance speech. Afterwords, he took the time to speak to anyone who wanted to talk to him, including me.

I know audiophiles and enthusiasts have a low opinion of Bose products and their litigation strategies (some of which I share), but I had Dr. Bose as a professor in college and he was a fantastic instructor (even without the free ice cream during tests!). Students would often challenge him based on audiophile beliefs, and he would always use sound engineering arguments to refute them. And he was the only MIT prof I have saw who regularly ate meals at the Lobdell Food Court.

RIP Dr. Bose.

camera-phone picture of James Barger, Dr. Bose, Christopher Jaffe and Eric Unger at the aforementioned reception: http://twitpic.com/d2amd3

edit: bose.com has a memorial up: http://www.bose.com/remember/index.html

jpdoctor2• 13 years ago

Well put. One addendum:

but I had Dr. Bose as a professor in college and he was a fantastic instructor

Most folks knew him from the audio course. Less known was how long his history of teaching, eg his network theory book in the late sixties. That book was how I learned some of the more exotic transformations. (Most folks know parallel and series. It turns out that there are things like pi-delta/wye-delta and friends.)

RIP.

_pmf_• 13 years ago

Do you have any links to lecture notes or the like?

ilyanep• 13 years ago

It's my impression that everyone who has known him in a professional context (beyond just having heard of Bose products) has a quite high opinion of him. It's a shame to see talented engineers (and/or marketers, depending on how you want to look at it) pass away.

mrkmcknz2• 13 years ago

Bose.com have a pretty nice tribute running right now:

http://www.bose.com/remember/index.html

savrajsingh3• 13 years ago

Sorry to hear. One of Bose's greatest contributions may be the Bose Suspension, which (to my knowledge) hasn't been put into production yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSi6J-QK1lw

rdl7• 13 years ago

That's like the tank cannon stabilization system on modern MBTs, applied to an entire vehicle. Wow.

Tloewald• 13 years ago

That's amazing. Upvoted.

OGC2• 13 years ago

It has been put into production: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=940wGYCeQ68

savrajsingh3• 13 years ago

I hadn't seen that, very cool. Though I'm not sure this is a licensed version of the Bose system or an all-new system. It looks like the Mercedes system uses computer vision -- no mention of cameras or CV on the Bose website.

pdevr2• 13 years ago

RIP.

Are there any other faculty members (not necessarily at MIT) who have managed to start their own companies which became successful, and yet have stayed on as a faculty member? That itself seems to be a rare achievement.

rdl7• 13 years ago

Ron Rivest (RSA Security) would be a great example of that, although he wasn't CEO of RSA (for long, I think).

anusinha• 13 years ago

Prof. Phil Sharp [1] received the Nobel Prize and founded Biogen, one of the earliest biotech companies. He remains on the faculty at MIT as an Institute Professor, the highest distinction awarded to MIT faculty.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_Allen_Sharp

wheels• 13 years ago

Let's see. There's one called "Y Combinator". I think they have a website, but I can't find it at the moment.

acjohnson552• 13 years ago

Barry Nalebuff of Honest Tea is a professor at Yale. I didn't really know anything about him or his company until I saw him speak yesterday, but both are quite impressive!

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

Barry is a Professor at the Yale School of Management. He seems to be one of the few business school faculty (i.e. not a technologist) to have founded a successful product company. As opposed to a consulting company, of which there are many examples.

I remember when CK Prahalad took a leave from Michigan to start Praja, but I don't think it was very successful.

Erwin2• 13 years ago

MIPS was started by Stanford people including Hennessy whose CPU architecture book (Computer Organization and Design: the Hardware/Software Interface) is famous: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Hennessy -- since then he returned, and is now Stanford's president.

vayudoot• 13 years ago

Tom Leighton of Akamai - http://people.csail.mit.edu/ftl/

colinsidoti• 13 years ago

Bob Langer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._Langer

pdevr2• 13 years ago

I cannot edit the parent comment, so posting as a reply: I learnt about some great people today. Thanks to all those who replied.

rb2e• 13 years ago

As a ex sound engineer and now self described audiophile, I deeply admire and respect Bose products. Though expensive, I loved my Bose speakers till they fell off my computer desk onto the floor. The small cube satellite design with the sub on the floor, filled the room considering there such small size. They were good enough for me to mix and master with for my friends projects.

RIP Dr. Bose

nawitus3• 13 years ago

Nobody in audio respects Bose products, though. They're overpriced and low-quality.

LaunoRagnheiour2• 13 years ago

What about the sound engineer you just replied to?

curiousDog• 13 years ago

"In 2011, to fulfill his lifelong dream to support MIT education, Dr. Bose gave to MIT the majority of the stock of Bose Corporation in the form of nonvoting shares. Under the terms of the gift, dividends from those shares will be used by MIT to sustain and advance MIT’s education and research mission. MIT cannot sell its Bose shares, and does not participate in the management or governance of the company."

Wow. Respect.

robg• 13 years ago

Never took venture capital or IPO'd; gave his company to MIT.

b1daly• 13 years ago

He obviously was a tremendous achiever, but the current Bose products I have heard are terrible sounding.

The signal processing they add to create the "spacy"effect destroys the mix, the balances of the instruments, the placement, it's all lost in a hazy phase fog of sound. I don't get it.

To my ear, even many of the cheap desktop systems from companies like Logictech sound better.

If you're looking for decent sound at a low price, there are many low cost powered studio monitors that sound pretty good, like these from M-Audio:

http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.family&ID=studi...

I don't think they are good as professional monitors, but for everyday listening pretty damn nice.

AlexPandian• 13 years ago

Bell, Morse, Land, Kurzweil, Bose, ... the list of Boston associated inventors is never ending. Then again Polaroid or Bose corporation can't compete with the limelight of the web world.

Most audiophiles buy stuff very few people have heard off, and Bose products themselves are on the fence of trying to be audiophile, yet popular ... a tricky space to be in.

paul9290• 13 years ago

Any audiophiles here know if we'll ever witness Bose or Sonos type speakers(sound) built into our mobile devices?

Full disclosure - We created a web app that plays audio in sync across multiple Internet devices (http://SpeakerBlast.com) & are curious about the advances being made in this field.

Could our IP devices used alone or in harmony ever produce the same sound quality of a Bose or Sonos speaker?

tapsboy• 13 years ago

The Bose trio is an inspiration to many in India 1) Jagadish Chandra Bose 2) Satyendra Nath Bose 3) Amar Bose

niels_olson7• 13 years ago

Now, see, that's a useful comment. I learned!

swatkat• 13 years ago

Subhas Chandra Bose too; albeit not in sci/tech context.

pvdm• 13 years ago

He was an inspiring speaker but I avoided his company's products. Due to no fault of his own, the company that bears his name turned into a marketing driven company rather than engineering driven.

rblion• 13 years ago

My name is Amar too. A sad day for innovators named Amar. Shine On buddy, thank you for the contributions to audio technology that has enriched millions of lives. :)

cmbaus• 13 years ago

I'm glad to see this article at the top of Hacker News. It is easy to not realize how big audio was in consumer electronics all the way up until the early 80s.

Many of the great engineers of their day worked in audio, and I find myself continually attracted to their creations. Many who work in software today, may have been building amplifiers and speakers in the 60s.

chiph• 13 years ago

I had a set of Bose 901 speakers in the 1980s. They were a really innovative design, and certainly not "wife-friendly" with their requirement that the wall behind them be a certain size and distance away.

It had 8 smaller drivers facing towards the wall, angled to reflect off it and produce a more ambient sound. And one driver facing towards the listener to provide the direct sound needed for vocals. The speakers (heavy, heavy speakers, btw) had an earlier version of their waveguide technology, which channeled the back pressure of all the small drivers and combined them to provide the bass that a larger driver would have produced.

In order to correct some of the bad behavior of the small drivers & enclosure, there was an external electronics box that you inserted between your preamp and amp, or in a tape loop if you had a receiver (it had pass-thru capability) to get the speakers to sound right. Once DSPs became affordable, they changed over to them, instead of the analog components the series of 901 that I had used.

I think I paid $1300 at the military exchange for the pair, and the (essentially required) Bose stands were another $200 or so. Which was a lot of money at the time (CD players were still $500). But I had bragging rights until I got written-up by playing them too loudly. The 901s definitely preferred a high-current amp -- I used a Hafler 200 watt MOSFET amp. A Sony integrated-circuit based receiver went into shutdown trying to drive them.

aarondf• 13 years ago

I remember being blown away by Bose active suspension, and wondering why Bose was doing it. Seems like a Google play in a way: make a bunch of money in one area (audio/ads) and do awesome stuff in another (active suspension / cars, glass).

Video of active suspension: http://youtu.be/q8sVDenpPOE

Incredible company. He'll be missed.

bzelip• 13 years ago

damn, i loved my dad's 380ZX soundsystem. its what turned me onto hi fidelity. neat to know it was named after someone and that he went to MIT. peace

jpswade• 13 years ago

This is a great loss, a man that I only recently learned about through reading "Autobiography of a Yogi", which mentions his great achievement as an eastern scientist, breaking out into a western world.

I hope Hacker News black lines today out of respect for this man.

peterarmstrong• 13 years ago

Wow, someone dies and there's so much negativity about headphones.

I should leave it there, but since everyone is talking about headphones, I'll play too...

I love the QuietComfort headphones. This is true, even though they are expensive and I've broken a number of them. They are simple, so my bluetooth Sennheiser headset remains on the shelf. They are light and comfortable: I often wear them for 12 hours in a day. They have good sound. They have contributed to so many coding and writing zones over the past ten years I've lost count. They're probably the single most important productivity tool I own. They don't leak sound (unlike open headphones -- I had a pair of really great Sennheiser headphones that made my cubicle neighbours crazy years ago, as Portishead apparently sounds like torturing cats when listened to on open headphones). They are great for air travel. Hell, when you combine them with earplugs they even make float plane trips passable.

So, thanks Dr. Bose for one of your company's products.

gprasanth• 13 years ago

Silence.

shiven• 13 years ago

Dr. Amar Gopal Bose, you will always be remembered. Thank you for the inspiration. R.I.P.

A short biographical sketch: http://flic.kr/p/f8wZ6R

Another write-up: http://flic.kr/p/f8wZee

tt• 13 years ago

His Acoustics class was arguably the best course I took at MIT. His numerous anecdotes about hard work, perseverance, and applying thought process to every challenge we face really stuck with me. The end-of-semester field trip left a long lasting impression. He made me a better person I am today. I'll really miss him.

nanospider• 13 years ago

Interesting that in the spirit of the usual startup discussions here on Hacker News, no one has mentioned that this is/was a single founder company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose_Corporation

Kudos to Dr. Bose.

Bose founder, Amar Bose, has died at 83

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