Bose Soundtouch 535 surround sound system

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You won't find much love for Bose amongst the informed crowds in tech forums. It's seen as a company that has rested on its laurels for far too long and is now milking the wealthy with slick marketing and little real substance.

One key criticism is sound quality. It's ironic given the Bose company slogan of "Better sound through research". When listening to Bose demo you'll be struck by the impression of treble detail and bass kick. It's a sound that very much grabs the listener by the lapels and shouts "listen to me!". That's okay in short bursts (hence why Bose demos never last very long) but it does become rather tiresome after a while. It's a bit like having a conversation with someone who shouts; it is uncomfortable. When that happens with a sound system then the reaction is to turn it down.That's the sign of a poor system.

The reason why the sound is a bit 'shouty' are to do mostly with the speakers.

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The "direct & reflecting" satellite speakers use a single driver per module (one for each direction) to try to cover quite a wide frequency range. It's obvious that the little modules won't do bass. What's less obvious is that it takes a very good driver to cover midrange and treble without some compromise somewhere. Unfortunately the Bose module drivers aren't that great so they struggle a bit to portray voices and instruments through such a wide frequency range. The result is sound that's a bit strained.


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Bass is compromised too. Bose use a pair of relatively small speakers in a ported box to try to fill in from the bottom end of the frequency range up to the point where female voices start. (This is partly because the cubes don't handle mid-range frequencies well). It's a trick used by other sub/sat systems too of course, but not at these sort of price ranges. Because the drivers are relatively small (approx 5.5" diameter) there's a limit in how low they can go. A decent powered subwoofer with a single 8" driver will get down to 35-40Hz. Bigger drivers go deeper. There is a theory that multiple smaller drivers can equal one large driver. In certain cases that's true, but it takes smarter design than the Bose uses to achieve that. What we have then is a sub that sounds a bit limited in range. It's loud enough but lacks the tunefulness of the more conventional alternatives.

The overall result when combining the speakers is something of a hole in the middle of the frequency range where the detail and depth and tone of instruments and voices resides. The common description for this sort of sound is "boom & tizz". At this price range you can do so much better.

At this point the usual recommendation is an AV receiver plus a sub/sat speaker package. However, one reason for looking at the Bose is that the head unit is fairly slimline. So, rather than recommending receivers which normally come in at twice the height I'm going to change tack slightly. Marantz is one of the top audio brands in AV and Hi-Fi electronics. They've realised there's a gap in the market for customers who want the quality and features of a full height AV receiver but either don't have- or don't want something quite that large in their lounge. The result was the Marantz NR range. The one I would specifically look at is the NR1605 This includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and is 4K ready including upscaling. These are currently around the £350 following the introduction of the NR1606 with Dolby Atmos at £599. That makes the non-Atmos NR1605 a bit of a bargain.

Just like the Bose you would add a Blu-ray disc player of your choice if required. The Marantz will work with any brand of player.

To complete your system you will need speakers. There's a world of product to choose from, and in this market it's absolutely the thing to choose speakers from the best manufacturers in the field to compliment the receiver. Britain is fortunate to be a world class leader in speaker design and manufacture. UK brands such as Tannoy, B&W, KEF, Monitor Audio, Rega, Mordaunt Short, Linn, Naim, Proac, PMC, etc. If it was me, then I'd start by having a listen to the Monitor Audio Mass AV system (£599) which is a 5.1 sub/sat system that won What Hi-Fi's Best AV Speaker Kit (£500-£1000) award. This is a surround speaker kit that can make beautiful music too.

The Marantz with the Monitor Audio is simply one combination from a galaxy of choices. However, I am confident that for well under £1000 that this combo will offer superior features and significantly better sound performance that you'll enjoy and appreciate more and more as weeks turn to months and turn to years.

Good luck.
 
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Thanks for very detailed response, much appreciated.

I have to admit, I have never heard of any of the other brands that you mention, but then again this is not my area of expertise and other than taking a walk across the isles of John Lewis' electronic section, I guess I wont come across these names but would need to visit a specialist centre. Can you recommend any in London for me to visit and experience the sound differences? Is Richer Sounds any good?

Also my 19 year old nephew who seems to love all this stuff tells me to make sure I go with in the wall speaks or in the ceiling speakers since we have the opportunity to do all of this as part of the building work. I thought cone speaks always give the best sound effect - what are your views on this? He also suggests I got for more than 7.1 setup.

If I am in no rush to choose a system but want to make sure I future proof my room now, how would you suggest I do this i.e. what type of speaker wires should I run in the walls and ceilings, if you assume an overall open plan living and kitchen area of some 10m wide and 7.5m deep (but actual living room being some 5m wide by 7.5m long and 2.6m high)?

Finally, I've just put the following image together reflecting some of the above information. Would you think this is a good setup of the rear (green) and front (blue) speakers and location of them? The TV will be on the 5m wall.



Thanks again.
 
I do this kind of thing for a living.

Richers is okay so long as you get someone with first hand experience who is actually interested in putting together the right solution for you rather than just tucking you up with some old flannel and a load of boxes. There are specialist installation companies dotted across the metropolis.: The Cornflake Shop (W1T), Robert Taussig (W1U), Oranges and Lemons (SW11), Grahams Hi-Fi (N1), Finite Solutions (SW6), Sevennoaks Sound & Vision (national chain) etc etc. It might be easier to start with a brand (say Monitor Audio) and then use the Dealer Finder tool. Look for 'custom install' dealers as a sub category.

In-wall/in-ceiling is fashionable and looks 'cool' because it is hidden. They use cone speakers in the main. The trick is that they are buried in to the wall or ceiling so the depth is hidden. There are speakers that work on a vibrating plate principle (Amina is one brand) and that are then plastered over (yes, seriously!) but you might need to revise your budget upwards quite significantly to get decent performance equivalent to conventional speakers. This kind of thing is more a lifestyle choice. In general terms for every £100 spent in conventional box loudspeakers you need to spend about 1.5x that in sub/sat speakers, 2x~3x that in conventional in-wall/in-ceiling and about 8x~12x that for Amina-style invisible speakers to give roughly equal performance.

I have had a look at your plan and made a few changes that would make the system perform better and open up a couple of interesting options too.

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1) 'rear' speakers moved closer to the viewing area. They were just too far away to be of any use, particularly if they were in-ceiling speakers. The other thing to be aware of is that they aren't rear speakers. Their correct designation is 'Surround speakers - Side'. That's because in every movie sound mixing studio in the world the surround effects speakers for 5.1 are located either side of the prime listening position (in your case this is marked with an X on the plan) rather than directly behind it.

2) Don't go 7.1: With the area being open plan I think 7.1 would be wasted. This is why I have shown 'Surround speakers - Rear' as ghosted. It would be far more effective to take the budget you'd spend on two sets of surround effects speakers and combine it to purchase one pair of really good dipole speakers. These will give the sort of diffuse and enveloping effects sound that will send goosebumps up your arms and have you looking over your shoulder to see who is there.

3) Mix and match speaker types: Modern AV receivers at £500+ are actually pretty accomplished for music too. They won't replace a good dedicated stereo system, but you will be surprised how good music can sound through a properly thought out and installed AV system. To this end (and if budget and aesthetics allows) have a think about floorstanding front speakers. Invest in the centre speaker to match.

For the surrounds, given the open plan layout of the room then the two sensible options are floorstanders or in-ceilings. Bearing in mind the recommendation of using dipoles in point 2 and the fact that dipole floorstanding speakers don't exist, then the sensible option is in-ceiling dipoles.

4) Other options: At the sort of budget and quality being discussed, you'll find that nearly every AV receiver is a 7.1 design. That means it can be used either as 7.1 in the conventional way, or as a 5.1 amp with the extra remaining two channels dedicated to a different part of the house. This feature is called Zone 2 (marked in blue on the plan). I use this quite regularly for clients who would like music or TV sound somewhere else e.g. a kitchen or bathroom or playroom.

The second zone can be operated completely independently of the main zone. It can be switched on/switched off, volume and source changed, even tune the radio or select streamed music... all without affecting the main 5.1 zone which might be off or doing something else entirely different. Depending on the AV receiver chosen then it's likely that there will be a smart phone app on iOS or Android to control the receiver. This includes independent control of Zone 2, so with your smart phone in hand you could walk in to the kitchen, switch on Z2 and listen to radio or the sound from the TV without having to run the main system. It might be nice to cook in the evening with some music playing, or perhaps when there's a social gathering you can have both zones playing the same thing so that sound is spread evenly around the entertaining areas. Where you have zone 2 is entirely up to you; it's not restricted to indoors. There are weatherproof speakers available that would allow you to have sound outside if that's your wish.

Two other options not shown but worth considering are Zone 3 and Front Height speakers. Zone 3 is exactly what Zone 2 is, but an additional zone. So the amp would have outputs for the main speakers, zone 2 and zone 3. Front Heights is something different. Some of the larger AV receivers with 7.1 or 9.1 speaker outlets have the option to run an additional pair of small speakers above the TV or projection screen. The receiver then uses some clever processing to extend the front channel effects up and to create additional height information. It has the effect of lifting the roof off the room. This is kind of a forerunner to Dolby Atmos except it doesn't require the special films with the Atmos sound track; it works on any source so long as the feature is engaged. A 7.1 receiver with front height option can't then run Zone 2, the reason being that there's only one speaker outputs which are soft selected to be either Z2 or Front Height but not both at the same time. 9.1 receivers are less restricted. It can be possible to have 5.1 + 2ch front height and also still have a spare set of outputs to run Zone 2.



Cabling: 4mm cross sectional area 100%-copper multi-stranded (79 strand) cable with a low smoke zero halogen (LSZH) jacket will cover all your needs for the main speakers including any additional zones. The thickness is important where longer runs are required. A 4mm CSA cable will deliver 94% of the amp power to a speaker 30m away. i.e. the losses due to resistance are just 6% at that distance. Thinner cable will dissipate more power. 2.5mm loses about 10% at the same distance. 1.5mm loses around 18%.

The subwoofer doesn't use speaker cable. It uses coax cable. It looks like a single wire phono cable such as you have seen with the red and the white phono connections on other bits of audio and video gear over the years. The difference with subwoofer cable is it must be very well shielded internally to prevent stray signals causing interference that then manifests as hum within the sub. This stuff is extremely good and also very easy to hide because it is much thinner than conventional shielded subwoofer cables.

The rest of your cabling consists mainly of HDMI leads, some aerial coax, network cable and power.

Getting the cables laid in during the build phase is a great idea, but you really must have a very good idea of exactly where the final location for each piece of equipment will be otherwise the cables won't be in the correct places. So while you may have quite some time to decide the final makes and models of gear, the cabling is really driven by the build phase of the project. Look at the timetable for that as your time scale for the To Do list of deciding speakers and whether you want to use additional zones.
 
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Hi Lucid

hey thanks very much for all this detailed information, I didn't get a notification indicating you replied and just saw all this now.
Funnily enough I was talking to www.satcure.co.uk and he mentioned your name.

If I wanted to multi room audio, can I get away with sub £30 in the ceiling speakers and running some cable back to a central hub somewhere else in the house?

Do you sell cable and other stuff to help me achieve the above, what about amps etc? Can you send me some links to stuff that you could recommend as a setup for me?

Thanks.
 
...can I get away with sub £30 in the ceiling speakers...
It's your house so you can install whatever you like, but personally I wouldn't recommend any paying customer of mine to go ahead with multi-room if that's all they were prepared to spend on each speaker. If you and I were discussing fitting out a shop with some very basic 100volt line background music system then £30 per speaker is bottom-end budget for 'Muzak' (i.e. not remotely close to Hi-Fi quality) and might be justifiable for somewhere with a lot of background noise and where the piped music isn't ever going to be anything louder that faintly heard.

A multi-room system should have the ability to play at the same sort of volume as a reasonable quality stereo system, and produce sound quality on a par with that too. I'm thinking here of at least the sort of sound you might get from a £300 home Hi-Fi. If you're going to go to the time and trouble of installing multi-room then I don't see it as unreasonable to expect it to perform to that level as a bare minimum.

I suppose in the end it comes down to what you feel is acceptable sound quality. If you consider a £40-£50 home stereo system the best thing you've ever heard and never felt the desire to go beyond that then maybe you'll be okay.

Do you sell cable and other stuff to help me achieve the above, what about amps etc? Can you send me some links to stuff that you could recommend as a setup for me?
Yes, I do. I think you need to put a figure on your budget though so we can see what we have to work with.
 
I'm not sure of your contact details...

Could you please briefly explain how a multi room audio setup should be done if you have a central hub somewhere on the ground floor.

In terms of budget, it's no so much how much I want to spend, but having an idea of what an entry and mid level system would cost. I'm not into high end (e.g. paying £100 for HDMI cable) but I like to look around on the shelves and be convinced that a mid range price is worth going for.

Right now I'm just thinking whether I should be running speaker cable from each room to the ground floor hub or not and can worry about the quality of the speakers later, but wouldn't hurt to have a better understanding, or even if it is still worth doing this when you have Sonos and other wireless systems available.

Thanks.
 
I'm not into high end (e.g. paying £100 for HDMI cable)
That's not a good example because HDMI signals are handled by digital circuits. That means that you get either excellent picture and sound or dreadful picture and sound, with almost no in-between state. Therefore a cheap HDMI cable which is just "good enough" will be fine.

In contrast, a cable carrying, say, analogue audio can make a significant difference to the sound that you hear and, therefore, paying the bare minimum is never going to get a good sound.

Anyway, you still need to decide on your maximum budget, otherwise you are simply wasting everyone's time. In order to decide, you really need to hear some demo systems.
 
But I don't know what these things cost so it's difficult to say what my budget is. Also depends on how the system is specced out.

If I walk into John Lewis and can see varying TV, I might decide to go for X. I might be able to afford £10k but doesn't mean I want to spend £10k. At the moment I'm not sure of what I can get for X and how best a system is designed for a mid range. How much would you spend if you're not into high end audio but good would suffice? And what would you get for that?

BTW - question is in relation to multi room audio. Not the original question which was about the Bose system.
 
Let's start off by defining what multi-room is, and then by logic that will also define what multi-room is not...

You're looking at a multi-room music system if...
(1) it can play music from a source in all the rooms of your home and play it in sync so there's no audio lag between rooms
(2) you can select to play a different tune in every single room all at the same time
(3) the system allows you to group rooms together (say; all rooms downstairs) but then still allows the rest of the rooms to operate independently either as single rooms or some additional combination of rooms and groups
(4) you can easily control the volume per room, and per group, and for the whole house
(5) the system allows for accessing music stored on a home library (PC / NAS drive / Home server), and accessing streamed content via the web (internet radio and free/subscription services such as Pandora and Spotify)

So, a multi-room system is not just one amp hooked up to a bunch of speakers so that what plays in one room plays throughout the house with the volume level controlled on a global basis: That is distributed music such as a background music system, but it is not proper multi-room.

If you want a system that does the stuff in the numbered list then the next question relates to the size and type of rooms you want to cover. For example, there are plug 'n' play multi-room speakers such as the Sonos Play 1, Play 3 and Play 5 but you wouldn't want to plug in a 240V device such as these in to a socket in a bathroom. Another example is if you have a large open plan area and want music evenly distributed throughout the space; you'd want multiple speakers in that area rather than just one or two speakers playing at one end of the space so loud that sound carries to the other end but the volume is uncomfortably loud near the speakers. Several in-ceiling speakers might be a better solution in that situation.

Once you have worked out the answer to the above then your thoughts can turn to where you want the gear itself. i.e. are you happy to have a self-contained unit such as a Sonos Play 1/ Play 3 / Play 5 speaker sitting on a shelf in most rooms, or would you prefer to have everything concealed so that only the round in-ceiling speaker grilles are visible, or are you happy to have a mix of both depending on the room type.


If you want to do proper multi-room on a budget then go for the Sonos Play 1 speakers and put one of them in each room as a starter system. This will tick all the boxes in that numbered list. The cost per room will be roughly £160. You won't need any speaker cable so the installation cost is negligible. On top of that you'll need one of the Sonos Boost wireless bridge devices to link your router to the Sonos system for streaming internet-based services. A small NAS drive at 300-500Gb will be plenty of capacity to hold hundreds of your own ripped or downloaded music tracks and allow for everyone in your house to play their own individual choice of music track all at the same time. Using a NAS rather than relying on music stored on the hard drive of a PC means there's no need to boot up the PC just to listen to some of your own tracks. The NAS is left on 24/7 so your music library is always available. It's also cheaper to run than a laptop. The only remaining item(s) you'll need is something to control the system. Most of us use our smart phones. The phone connects via Wi-Fi to your home router which in turn connects to the Sonos system. There's a controller app that's a free download for Android and iOS. (Microsoft phones aren't supported). The app gives the ability to control any and all of the player devices. and navigate your home library, and choose what 'net services you want to listen to, and even play music stored on the phone direct in to the Sonos system.

The Sonos Play 1s might be their entry-level product but they still sound good. They're comparable to the sound from a decent £100-£150 mini/micro Hi-Fi. The control of the system is the slickest and most complete of any multi-room system. The developers of the Sonos system spent a long time researching what would make the perfect multi-room system; and just like Apple's ground-breaking iPod, they nailed it first time. Sonos has been out now for about 10 years and in all that time no other manufacturer has come close to equalling the control interface or beating it on price and performance.

Work out your costs based on a Sonos Play 1 system and let us know if that's within your budget.
 
Nice explanation, thanks.

If we are about to close off all the ceilings and walls in the loft rooms and be ready for plastering, at this stage you wouldn't suggest I run X number of type Y speaker cables to a media room? Better to go wireless? Certainly £200-£300 per room is not an issue for me.
 
You haven't said enough about what your priorities are to make any kind of recommendation either way.

Start by prioritising what's important to you; these are things that you need to decide for yourself. For example, wireless is easy and relatively low cost, but it's not so discrete and with the best will in the world a single 3" or 4" bass cone speaker driver inside an all-in-one wireless speaker isn't going to produce the richness of bass that a pair of 6" or 8" bass cones can reproduce from a pair of good in-ceiling speakers.

As for wiring, flood-wiring a house to cover all foreseeable eventualities can be the most cost-effective solution in the long run because you avoid the cost and mess of running cable at a later date. However, if you can never see yourself making use of those installed cables because there'll either never be the money available to complete a system, or you still haven't decided the room layouts, then it could equally be a complete waste of money.

So, you need to sit down and decide what's important to you, and then you can plan and install accordingly.
 
Hi Lucid,

Coming back to this thread after many months as we have made significant progress on the wiring on the whole home accept the ground floor room which is shown in the picture above.

In terms of the speaker placement for the 7.1 system, should the rear speakers be positioned as you have shown i.e. speakers more closer together and not in the same line as the side speakers?

What are your thoughts on the Monitor CT-165, CT-265 or Minx C46?

Thx.
 
The Monitor Audios are alright but there are better products around that will be an easier load for the amp. The Minx.... nah. The BMR driver is trying to cover a huge frequency spectrum and it struggles at both ends. It's also not as easy a load for the amp nor as efficient as the CT-165s which in themselves aren't stellar performers either: Very 'middle of the road' then.
 
Hi Lucid

What do you recommend in that case?

Also could you pls advise on the speaker setup? Should the rear speakers be as close as you have shown and should they definitely not be in line with the side speakers?
 

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