Catch the Wave...radio

Happy New Year...It's 2003!

For some details on the Wave Radio you can now visit my new website...

http://www.mfk-projects.com/other_measurements.htm


Bose! Most respected name in marketing! There is a lot of anti Bose sentiment on internet news groups most of which is deserved. For what it is, the little Wave Radio is not a bad product. It’s a desk top clock radio! What do you expect it to be able to do?

Anyway, I got the Wave radio with some left over Diners Club reward points and would otherwise have never bought one. I must admit I was surprised at the overall build quality and easy of use. It has two alarms so you can awaken gently to the soft music of a CD for awhile before finally being forced to face the reality of time to get up and go off to work by the old familiar beeping of the second alarm. There is also a large easy to access snooze button right on the top front of the unit to delay the inevitable for a few more minutes. Speaking of controls, they are all located right on the top of the top loading CD door. Typical for the most part, you don’t need the instruction book to figure out how to use any of them. Setting up the alarms is pretty much self explanatory. Just click on an alarm button, use the forward or back button to set the time, press the middle button between alarm 1 and alarm 2 to select CD, FM, etc. You can even select the CD track number to awaken you with and the volume setting for the alarm independently of what ever volume you may want to play something right now. After getting it, I had to admit, it’s pretty nice! At this moment I’m writing this review from my hotel room at the Westin in Singapore. The room includes you guessed it, a Bose Wave radio! I do however miss my own for reasons I will get into next….

Another nice feature of the Wave Radio is the line level output on the back of the unit. This enables you to use the radio to supply sound to another location or simply to upgrade it’s sound quality the way I did mine. Simply connect these to an external amplifier and better speakers and you have a first rate audio system in your bedroom or where ever you choose to set it up. The little Bose makes a great front end! There are some flaws with this but not serious. Sometimes when stopping or starting a CD you will hear a pop in your external speakers. Depending on volume setting of the external amplifier, it can be pretty loud so you need to watch this or limit the amount of power you use. I have mine connected to a compact 20 w/ch amplifier using the LM1875 linear IC from National Semiconductor. This currently drives a bookshelf speaker system of my own design using a 6.5” Vifa woofer and 1” dome Morel tweeter. This setup works very nicely but any small amplifier and high quality speaker system should work equally well as would a set of old Altec A7 Voice of the Theatre’s as will be connected to mine soon.

As for the sound quality using the unit as a stand alone, you pretty much have to be tone deaf to enjoy it. Yes it’s far superior to a typical small clock radio but that really isn’t saying much is it. The bass is excessive in the mid bass region while non existent in the low region. You can’t hear Paul Harvey promoting it on it because male vocals are so boomy you can’t understand them.

As a loudspeaker system designer (as a hobby) the first thing I did with my Wave Radio was to take it apart and check it out. It’s very well built and can be disassembled and re-assembled with easy. First, the left and the right speaker are not the same. The left (Fs = 160hz) is the woofer and the right (Fs = 250hz) is the midrange tweeter. The left speaker is the only one mounted in the Bose invented, “wave guide” which actually existed before the man was born but that’s another story. The voltage response at the terminals of this speaker filters most of the midrange but has a peak in the upper treble (12khz) to give the unit some degree (not much) of a stereo image. Likewise the bass is filtered from the right speaker. The signal continues to increase with increasing frequency on the right speaker to compensate for the natural roll off of the 2.5” driver. Interestingly, there is a small dip at about 3khz. This is a technique of “psychoacoustics”. The technical reason for this has to do with the way the human ear hears direct vs. reflected sound in determining loudness and is not within the scope of this review. It is simply to show that Bose put a lot of technical thought into this.

Using an Agilent 33120 arbitrary wave generator I input various tones while viewing the resulting power spectrum on a MLSSA (Maximum Length Sequence System Analyzer). The idea is that you input for example a 100hz tone and then view the 100hz tone coming back from the speaker. There will be harmonic distortion components also coming from the speaker so your display will show the 100hz tone, a 200hz tone, a 300hz tone, and so on. With a decent quality speaker the first couple distortion components will be a good -40 db down with higher harmonics -50 db down. The Bose didn’t fair well here with the first few distortion components being only a few db down and significant out to more than 10 harmonics. It was really a lot of distortion! (as mentioned at the top, this data is now on my web site at www.mfk-projects.com/other_measurements.htm) Normally if this had been a serious speaker project evaluation I would do multiple other measurements including multi tone distortion test, energy time curve test, and so on but these were so bad I didn’t do any more. Based on listening I expect the energy time curve (stored energy) is also pretty bad but not horrible. I’ve heard worse but only in cheap computer speakers.

So, as a stand alone unit it’s better than a $49 typical clock radio but then at 10x the price it should be. If you’re looking for a great little CD/Radio/Alarm, and don’t mind about the price then this is it, look no farther. If however Bose marketing has you convinced this will replace bulky speakers and audio equipment, you could not be more wrong. This simply won’t do it! It’s a plastic box with very low quality very small loudspeakers in it. Yes, a bit of fancy foot work psychoacoustics to fool you into thinking it has bass when in fact it doesn’t but it’s not an audio system! Buy it as a clock radio and you will be very happy with it. If you are an audiophile you will hate it but keep in mind you can use the line level output to drive something else. Even a small amp and a set of Radio Shack Optimus 7 speakers would work great! When I got my Wave Radio free from Diners Club I told myself I would never buy one and if something happens to this one I will not pay $500 to replace it. Now I’m thinking about buying one for my guest bedroom. It will also be connected to external amplifier and speakers, I personally could just never use one of these without it.

I’m a serious audiophile and as we say, if Bose were a car it would be a Yugo. Still, I recommend the Wave Radio. It’s well built, it’s easy to use, and it works great! Sounds horrible but better than anything else similar and the line outs allow a fix so what’s the problem? Go get one!

One quick note I forgot to mention: The pre-amp level output on the back is constant level and not a function of the units own volume control so your external amplifier must have it's own gain control.

This and the Quiet Comfort headphones are the only Bose products I recommend. For speaker systems look to almost anything else other than those products found in Best Buy, Circuit City, and Frys. (You have to go to a real audio store) Also, in terms of customer service Bose is a good company but keep in mind that this is a company that sued Consumer Reports for writing a negative review about one of their products. Also, most of their patents are based on ideas that existed long before they used them but were discarded by the original inventors who had considered them failures. The original inventors were attempting to improve sound quality and did not see the marketing value in things like big sound in small boxes etc. The real genius of Bose is marketing. They also have a very good understanding of psychoacoustics and use this to simulate a larger than life sound in small packages. The results however can be very fatiguing to listen to.

I’ve found that a lot of people who have Bose speakers crank them up and think, “wow that sounds great”. Then they turn them off and go do something else after a short time of listening. If they really did sound good this wouldn’t happen. They would become so mesmerized by the music they would listen for hours. Unfortunately they don’t realize what the problem is. They simply believe they are not into sitting and listening to music that much. They don’t realize it’s that their Bose speakers are fatiguing them.

mk.