Robert Bose mentioned that a large portion of Bose revenues come from luxury auto sales. I am perplexed how Bose has been able to convince luxury car companies to buy it's system especially when it is supposed to be of poor quality. Of course I am assuming the these luxury brands do have technical staff who can assess quality properly and are not uninformed consumers. That is another mystery and it has nothing to do with small size or ease of use. Help me guys.. and gals...
shkumar, I too find it perplexing that despite dozens of posts trying to answer your question, you keep asking the same question. Which is - why is Bose so successful?
Maybe you don't want to hear the answers you are getting, and are still searching for those posters who would agree with you.
But if you want to be honest about this, then please try to understand the audiophile perspective on this.
For me personally, the popularity and revenue of a manufacturer has nothing to do with the audio quality I would expect from them. Sorry, that is not the correlation I tend to make - and from what I have seen - other forum members or audiophiles also don't make this correlation.
Bose is a lifestyle "hip" brand. Beats Audio is another such brand. Why would a car manufacturer not associate themselves with the Bose brand? It is definitely a boasting point for them.
Have I personally listened to Bose HT products? Yes - but only in a showroom setting. Was it good? Yes, for movies and special effects, it was decent. Was it overpriced? Maybe, maybe not. There are plenty of hifi components that are far more expensive - and many "value for money" products that are much cheaper too.
By the way, my car has a 7 speaker Bose system (comes by default). Sound quality is good and sometimes, by friends comment when they see the Bose logo. But is it spectacular sound? Not sure.
But the real reasons I view Bose products with suspicion is that they do NOT publish any kind of technical specs. They are completely non-transparent in this regard. One thing I see is that if a hifi brand (even the many many small ones) are truly proud of their audio quality, they freely share technical specs of their products. In fact, I see that the more proud a company feels about its engineering, the more detailed specs it freely shares.
The second observation is build quality or engineering quality. Bose in that regard is a "lifestyle" product - i.e. they focus on WAF and making their products look snazzy. But they are not robustly built. Simple thing - knuckle test. Most well built speakers will sound inert and dead if you rap the cabinet with your knuckles. Bose sounds more like the mass market stuff commonly available.
Again, one can come up with N reasons why Bose cannot be judged with a knuckle test. Fair enough.
Again, please note that I am not dissing Bose products or saying anything negative. They have come up with a lot of innovative products and their auditorium, car, and headphone (noise canceling) solutions seem to be really really good. But from a high fidelity point of view, I am not sure if they are doing enough to have enough credibility. And often, when faced with hundreds of other choices (many of which we cannot audition, but have to at least review based on specs), Bose doesn't even give enough basic info for us to make an informed choice.