Bose and VideoWave!

What with all the products passing through our hands here at Digital Versus, we naturally get some crazy ideas at times. Working on TV ratings recently, we found ourselves wanting to change the way we rate them...

With TV manufacturers constantly wanting to slim down their TVs, audio has been completely left behind. Speakers are at times inserted facing downwards, sometimes to the side, sometimes backwards. They're downsized as far as possible too and in the end the audio has got more and more approximate.

We thought it might be time to get tough. Now, to get a three star rating, you have to be able to watch a game show  or other programme without background noise and what people are saying must be intelligible (don't laugh, this isn't the case on all televisions). As for a five star rating, the audio quality must quite simply be good enough to justify not buying a speaker kit. There are already two precedents: the Sony Z4500 series was a serious challenger, but there's a new product that could be about to move the goalposts...

It's possible to combine quality sound with an LCD panel

Bose has now arrived with a product that is astonishing to say the least: an LCD panel combined with a sound system deployed using the Bose AcousticWave mini-hifis. The demo we recently saw was eye-opening. Five speakers and a subwoofer hidden under dark fabric. During the presentation, the surrounds disappeared, rapidly followed by the speakers facing us, then the subwoofer. The sound however was still there.

In fact, the audio system is built into the back of the panel. The low end is produced using six speakers in what is the proprietary WaveGuide design with a long conduit for non-directional amplification. Seven more speakers take care of the mid-end and two tweeters handle the high end with the sound mostly coming out the sides. We'll come back to this system in more detail in the near future - it's a good deal more complex than you might think at first. Nevertheless, while it does give a very broad coverage and the sound is enveloping, we're definitely not talking a pseudo 5.1 system here as some other sound bars can be. The walls are simply used to give more breadth to the sound.

Unfortunately, quality sound takes up space: the VideoWave is at least 20 cm thick.

VideoWave: a screen, sound but not a television


Coming back to what we were saying further up: the VideoWave is not a TV. It's just a panel coupled with a heavy duty sound system. Thus like the latest Bose LifeStyles you only get A/V connectivity: HDMI, component, composite, S/P DIF optical and coaxial... No trace of a tuner. The reason given by Bose is simple: TVs aren't their business and users already already have plenty of audio and video sources at their disposal, whether this be games consoles, internet boxes, Blu-Ray, DVD players and so on.

As we've said already, we'll be coming back to this astonishing product in more detail, but of course we can't leave you without what is a very important piece of information if you think you might be interested in the VideoWave. It will come in at around £6000. Bose obviously hasn't yet decided to go for the mass consumer market, though it does look as if we may have found our grail when it comes to 5-star audio ratings.


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