Bose Accoustimass Review

Overall Rating

Very compact yet big sound.

I have owned a set of AC5's for a few years now and reading through some of the earlier comments on here just makes me laugh.

If you read back some of the criticism's you will find that they tend to contradict one another. For example, how many negative reviews have said that there is no bass yet there are plenty of negative reviews also saying the bass is boomy or uncontrolled? See what I mean, they both can't be right, is there bass or isn't there? One of them must be wrong. Do the alarm bells start going off yet?

Okay, first thing's first, the AC's are too expensive for what the are? Well here's the problem, you want a big sound but you haven't got room/ don't want big speakers. This is what Bose give you. Are they going to be the same price as those similar sounding speakers that are five times the size? No of course they aren't, of course you're going to pay more. Can you get better for the same money? Yes you most deffinately can but they are a much bigger speaker and if you haven't got the right space for them then they are useless to you.

As for sound quality, there is absolutely nothing wrong with these speakers. I keep hearing that there is a lack of mid range on these speakers , well I'm not really sure exactly how that works being as I haven't ever noticed this myself (again just to clarify we are talking about the AC5's not the AC3's). What I can hear is a crisp, clear sound with plenty of bass when it is needed. I read earlier that you can tell the sound is coming out of the speakers.....total nonsense!!! The sound staging is as good as any other speaker I have heard. An example being Dire Straits "Love Over Gold". The guitar leaps out at you from one side of the room yet Mark Knopflers vocals come from directly ahead. The Xylophone at the end starts one side of the room (above the speakers) and slowly works it's way round to the other side. Whoever claims that there is no sound staging at all have clearly no idea what they are talking about.

All in all if you want a compact rather than bulky set up with a great sound then these are great speakers. Yes you do get a great hi-fi sound as long as you are using them with the right equipment i.e. a decent amp (you'd need one of those to make those audiophile's dream speakers sound good aswell). Give them a try, you'll be surprised.

Members' Comments onGuest's Review

• kfilly on 16th May 2008

  I read your review and I disagree with it entirely. As you can probably already tell, I am not a fan of Bose products. They are the most advertised, over priced, and over hyped speakers. Try this little experiment for yourself. Simply go and ask a person to name any speaker brand, and I bet the answer you hear is Bose. Excessive advertising or high prices do not always equate to higher quality. I feel that a true audio consumer will audtion several brands (at least in store) before selecting one. Did you do this? Have you ever heard other speaker systems? The funny thing is that most people can pay a whole lot less, and get a lot better quality than anything Bose has to offer.
  
  I now want to address some of your comments and explain why Bose systems more or less stink. First, it is possible to have no bass and boomy bass at the same time. You are probably scratching your head saying, huh, but I will explain. Bose speakers cannot produce true base. Most Bose bass units only play down to about 45 Hz of frequency (I am even being generous here), and the problem with that is the average person can hear frequencies down to 20 Hz. Oops, Bose does not think the last few octaves of movies or music are important enough for people to need to hear. Those missing frequencies are what as referred to as true bass or lower end bass. At the same time, Bose speakers can be boomy within the mid-bass they produce. This probably explains the differences in the reviews you read as a lot of people who buy Bose products do not know a lot about home theater. Second, there is a fundamental flaw with the tiny cube speakers. Apparently, Bose is the only company that figured out how to break the laws of physics. The size of a speaker helps to determine what frequencies it is able to reproduce. Bose cube speakers use 2-1/2" paper speaker cones (plain paper cones are junk) cannot play the entire upper range of human hearing (20kHz) all the way down to male vocals which are down to about 80Hz. The subwoofer has to make up for the difference and play the mid range sound that even a cheap pair of bookshelf speakers should be able to handle. This extends the range the subwoofer has to reproduce thus making it an over achiever. The subwoofer on a good system will only play low frequency sound. A bose system has it playing everything the dimmunitive cubes cannot handle. Here is a simple test for all Bose owners. Unhook the cube speakers and see if you can follow the dialogue from the subwoofer alone. If you can, it is not a good system.
  
  I am not going to destroy your decision to buy a specific product. If it sounds great to you and others who happen to listen to it, that is great. My problem is that so many people mindlessly walk into an audio store and say I want a Bose ... whatever. Your review also promotes their, in my opinion, inferior product. Next time do some research as their are other options out there. I also understand that music listening is purely subjective. Maybe you actually like those speakers, but; if you never made an apples to apples comparasion you do not know what you missed.
  
  

• dan hall on 31st May 2008

  I think kfilly wrote an excellent comment- it very well reasoned and certainly rings true in my experience also.
  
  I am currently looking for some new speakers for precisely the reasons mentioned in that response: my current speaker system (some relatively cheap Z-10s by Logitech, not audiophile fare by any measure) have a "muddy" midrange and poor separation because the larger speaker cone is having to cope with bass frequencies as well as midrange. I guess a 2.0 system will always suffer from having smaller drivers having to compensate for the loss of the sub woofer.
  
  Just seeing the size of the little tweeter units on this Bose setup is enough to put me off- it certainly looks like a great deal of attention is being paid to the visual asthetics here with a potential compromise made at the midrange of the sound spectrum.
  
  I could be wrong, but I'm not risking it!

• BPMT on 1st Mar 2009

  Unfortunately, your statements are wrong. It would be so nice if you were right, but you're not. Who wouldn't want those tiny speakers to perform just as well as those behemoths? Well, anyway, here's some substantiation about all that's wrong with Bose speakers: http://www.intellexual.net/bose.html Really, sound reproduction is all about physics and technique and Bose simply doesn't deliver. Notice especially the frequency curve: there's no real bass (see that steep fall off?) , there's a complete gap in the midrange around 200 - 280 Hz and then the highs are curtailed at around 13 kHz... This is exceptionally poor behaviour. Sad but true.
  I'm sure there are a lot of people happy with Bose, but the performance can't possibly be a reason for that.