All the audiophiles love to bash Bose and any other speaker brand you can buy at The Good Guys or Circuit City, but the truth is that they are just being snobs. I have a system built over the last 10 years which I am very happy with (Stereophile class B).
That's the most important part, I am happy with it. The best speakers in the world, are the ones that sound best to you. Bose makes great speakers for background music. They fill the room much better than any speaker with pinpoint imaging, and they have a nice musical tonality. I agree they are not very accurate, and their frequency response stinks, but if you listen casually, not critically, they sound great.
What is the number one most requested/revered brand of factory installed car audio? Bose! Why? Not because the public is stupid, or because only audiophiles have good hearing. The real reason is because when you are in the car, you are driving. Listening to music is a secondary priority. Thus car-audio constitutes casual listening and once again Bose excels.
As for how much they spend on research, I know for a fact that Mr. Bose was a PhD from MIT, and they annually recruit lots of MIT engineering grads. Also Polk develops all their own drivers in house with very complex R&D and testing procedures. I read once that they do laser interferometry experiments on all their cone drivers to see the stress patterns as they distort. Hence the funky patterns molded in. Harmon international (maker of JBL and Infinity) just spent tens of millions of dollars building a brand new state of the art speaker R&D facility, because the Canadians were kicking their butts. (Canada has a great National Lab type infrastructure for speaker mfg.)
The take home message is: Don't believe the hype. That means both Audiophile hype, and mass marketing media blitz hype. Everybody is full of it. Listen and judge for yourself.
