I believe Bose uses deceptive marketing practices to sell over-priced and under-performing equipment because they fool the customer into believing they are the "best out there" and worthy of the high price.
Here, here on both (bose & Monster) counts!
Lol, my fiancee's ex-husband (we're friendly) really likes my set-up. And it inspired him to put together his own HT. But I'm afraid he's very new to the game, and falling for all the myths that I fell for back in my day. First off, when he bought his 60 inch plasma he bought a $130 dollar Monster HDMI cable to hook it up with. As soon as I heard this I immediatelly tried to intervien. I told him look, I know Monster looks like it's better than all the rest, but in reality they aren't. I bought an HDMI cable for $20 bucks, and there is absolutely no difference between the two performance wise. Monster may use thicker plastic coating and such, but they both operate the same.
He says, "are you sure, they told me the Monster cable was much faster at processing the information"... I laughed (maybe that was a bad move) and told him that's why they sell so many $130 dollar HDMI cables, because the salesmen are trained to make them sound like a superior product. If everyone knew they were the same, then who in their right mind would pay $110 dollars more than necessary to achive the same goal? So he stormed off back to the store for a refund. He came back and said, "well they showed me two tv's hooked up with different cables, and I'm telling you what they aren't lying, the Monster Cables are better"!!!
Probably very differently tuned tv's if you ask me.
"So the salesman asked me what other cable I'd been looking at and I told him I'd found a nice set for $79 bucks. He said, well I'll tell you what, if I could come down on the price of the Monster Cable to around that same price, wouldn't it be worth the extra quality in picture to you"? So he stuck with the Monster Cable at $80 bucks. Now that right there would bave been enough to tell me that something's rotten in Denmark when they can come down $50 bucks on a product without blinking simply to 'match the competition'. But oh well, I didn't want to critisize him any more so I just congratulated him on getting a better deal.
Next up was his surround system. Now I knew he wasn't about to spend anywhere near what I spent on my set-up, so when he brought home an 'in a box' system and started talking to me about it all I told him was where to position everything to get the best sound out of it. He ended up unhappy with it and headed back to Indy to see what he could find. He came back gleaming, he'd found audio nirvana.... in BOSE!!!! He was falling all over himself telling me how awesome these two little speakers sounded, it was an all-in-one system, it covered the center channel, left/right mains and surrounds within these two little speakers. He said he was listening to some sales jargon from some guy when a Bose representative walked up and said, "hey, why don't you come over and listen to these little beauties"... So he walked him over to his Bose sound room and played him some stuff from these two little speakers, and it blew him away!!!
That's when he says to me, "what's their deal man, is Bose just better than everyone else or what"??? At this point I was about to burst I was so appauled by the sales gimicks they'd been pulling over Tony's eyes. But I didn't want to make hime feel like a shmuck, so I simply replied, "well there are several people out there that do like Bose, yes... but you can find better out there". But he wasn't buying it. He was sold hook, line and sinker by that demo. He said when he buys them he's going to bring them over and show me how they compare to my set up. He said I won't believe how good they sound.
I can't wait. I only wish I had a pair of M22's to give him a good price comparison for his Bose that are going to cost him $600 bucks. $600 bucks for two tiny little speakers... now there's a profit margin for ya. What would you guys guess they have in materials in those... $50 bucks? So yeah, while I have no doubts he'll find out they certainly don't compare to an Epic 80/800 system, I'd really like to be able to show him he doesn't have to spend $4000 bucks just to get good sound. He could get a great sounding system with just two M22's for less than that, and add some QS4's around back one he had a bit more saved up.
Still can't wait until he does bring them over though!
