Great sound... easy to use... less mess

This 2.1 system delivers more stunning surround effects than the Sony 5.1 system it replaced, and the sound clarity is much better. It's not a thumping, rocking-out system, but it's very crisp and clean.

UPDATE: After a couple more months of use, I've discovered that the surround sound is hit or miss... some titles are great and others give you no effect at all.


SETUP:

The room I'm using this in is a small family room (about 12' x 20') and I really didn't have a good place for the rear channel speakers. The 2 speaker setup is great and it makes life easier when the wife decides to rearrange the room every 4 months.

Installation was a breeze and I eliminated a rats nest of cables from the old system. There's enough I/O ports to allow it to interface with a wide array of devices.

The system and manual seems to have been designed for the technically inept. They tried to keep things as simple as possible and don't really explain what's happening under the covers or get into technical details. This also means you might not have the full control or ability to tweak things as much as you might like. This is actually kind of nice as I tend to spend too much time tweaking and not enough time just enjoying devices!


STORING SONGS LOCALLY:

You can rip CD-Audio discs and store them locally onto the hard disk in just about 5 minutes per CD. Just pop in a CD and push the store button. It's as easy as that.
After 10 CD's you must wait for the data to be processed (I imagine it rips the tracks in a RAW format and then needs to compress them to MP3). This step can take up to 6 hours for 10 CD's according to the manual.
The device has a locally stored database and it will automatically tag the tracks with Artist, Album Title, Track Titles and Genre if it finds a match.
If you rip a custom compilation CD that you've made, you'll have to manually enter the data. This is a painful process and you can't enter a different Artist/Album Name for each track, so expect all of your compilation CD's to be by the artist "Various". In my opinion a local CDDB is a waste of HDD space. With a built-in Ethernet port, why not just pull this data live off the Internet?


COMPATIBILITY:

DVD+R/-R movies play just fine and DVD/CD discs full of mp3's are playable. It would be great if you could transfer mp3's from CD to the HDD, but I guess this would just make life too easy. Also, MP3 ID Tag information is not used so you don't see the title of the song, artist or any information. There is no mechanism for browsing mp3's, so finding a song on a DVD with over 800 songs is next to impossible. Hopefully Bose will release a firmware update and make using MP3's on disc usable.

VCD/SVCD discs do NOT play so I had to keep the el-cheapo Coby DVD player attached for VCD/SVCD flicks.

SA-CD disc do NOT play as some web retailers claimed they would. For such an expensive system, I thought it would play SA-CDs. Too bad, I bet they'd sound great on this system.

No DivX playback.

FUTURE USE?

I was hoping the on-board Ethernet port would allow me to pull MP3's from my computer to the device or even play streamed media, but the only mention of the port in the manual states "for future use".
I guess they figured this would just be too complicated for us stupid consumers. I won't hold my breath for any feature that uses this port.


SUMMARY:

If you have the room and don't mind the clutter, you can buy great sounding 5.1 or 6.1 systems for about 1/3 the price.

If you want a serious "make the walls shake" audio system, look elsewhere. (I have a great set of JBL Studio speakers for this)

If you want a clean, compact, great sounding all-in-one system that the non-technical people in your household will love... this might be the home theater system for you.

UPDATE:

After about a year and a half the DVD drive will no longer recognize any disc... it won't even spin a disc.
Bose has a flat rate of $125 to fix this and they'll give you a full one-year warranty again. Pretty fair deal in my book. I hope we get this back soon!!!