The Bose VideoWave was presented in a small room, dotted with what appeared to be a speaker system, mounted on the walls around the room, plus a sub on the floor, each unit covered in a black veil. The music started up, the band began to play, and with the crash of a cymbal and the boom of a bass drum, spotlights flashed on each speaker, and the veils dropped to the floor one by one, leaving empty spaces, and bare walls, save for a rather large Bose branded TV screen.
This is the Bose VideoWave, the new Bose product which bundles a home cinema system into the back of one TV screen, plus a head unit for linking up all your HD sources and an iPod dock as standard.
The sound from the Bose VideoWave was full, with gorgeously plump middle tones, rumbling bass and crisp top notes. At the first demonstration, everyone in the room spent the proceeding five minutes looking around to find out where the sound was coming from. It’s startlingly wide, with clear surround, considering it’s coming from the back of the TV.
The Bose VideoWave has a seven-element speaker array mounted inside, which is within another new Bose invention, called a PhaseGuide, to direct sound discrete sound is aimed and heard where there are no speakers. This means that the sound comes from all around you, despite being pumped from in front of you. The bass is pumped through six woofers, which are mounted together to deflect the vibrations from one another and prevent any vibrations reaching the screen. Each one is about the size of a small tumbler, but weighs a lot more.
The Bose ClickPad remote has a pleasing touch sensitive surface, which you give a haptic click when selecting something. It’s precise, and easy to use, without needing a plethora of clicks to get where you want. The interface is in a frame around the edge of the screen, which looks like a grey home cinema Monopoly board. This displays what is available in terms of sources, plus all the standard controls: play, stop, skip etc.
The Bose VideoWave has been in development around ten years, and Bose has developed new technologies specifically for this system. It weighs 44kg, and is 15cm thick, which is heavy, and quite deep for an LCD screen, but with what you can shrug off by buying an all in one system like this, it’s little price to pay.
However, what you lose in weight and faff, the Bose VideoWave gains in price tag. The biggest downside to the Bose VideoWave is the price – it’ll set you back a whopping £6,000, which is a lot to spend on your home cinema system no matter how much of an audiophile you are. This price reflects the fact that it is a bundle – a 46” screen plus a full Bose home cinema speaker system, crunched down into a screen and head unit.
This system, although expensive, sees Bose doing what it promised – to make things easier for people. Unsurprisingly, Bose found that not everyone wants to wire up and mount a whole bunch of speakers around their living room, and also unsurprisingly, that they don’t know how to calibrate the sound, and want fewer remotes. It’s followed through on giving consumers what they want, but while the VideoWave does a lot for simplicity, it won’t do much for your wallet.
The basic setup gives you the 46” Bose VideoWave screen, plus a head unit that can take up to five HD sources, an iPod dock and a ClickPad remote.
Out mid October 2010 | £6,000 | Bose
