The slogan of audio design firm Bose Corp is ?better sound through research?. The company, is one of the world?s most trusted brands and its founder Amar Bose, who passed away last week, was almost revered by the business press. That was remarkable, because while Bose was a radically progressive engineering teacher, a creative technologist and a compelling leader, he saw a linear relationship of scientific creativity with company ownership and an inverse relationship with business management. His company?s slogan should probably read: ?Better sound through research enabled by keeping out shareholders and professional managers.?
Amar Bose never took his company public because colleagues at MIT (which has always been a great incubator) who had done so were spending most of their time addressing shareholder concerns rather than carrying their research forward. And in a 2004 interview with Popular Science he had admitted, with obvious satisfaction, that if he had been working in companies run by MBAs, he would have been sacked over and over again.
He wasn?t dissing investors and managers but illustrating the problem which all science and technology enterprises have to manage. Their fortunes and their brand value are generated by research, a high-risk activity with no guaranteed returns. But it is in the nature of managers and the shareholders whose interests they represent to reduce risk. This instinct wired into the system may have the unintended consequence of curtailing the very research on which progress depends.
Bose Corp remained privately held (in 2011, Amar Bose transferred his majority stake to MIT) so that its scientific leadership could invest freely in research that was both long-term and wide-ranging. Many of its projects, in areas ranging from automotive design to nuclear physics, have not brought in clear dividends. Apparently, the company had invested 24 years of work in a suspension system for cars, the first improvement on the current design, which traces its ancestry to horse-drawn carriages. Bose?s system smooths the ride by using fast-reacting motors to raise and lower a car?s cabin to compensate for irregularities in road surface and the centripetal force of cornering. Prototyped in 2004 and expected to be commercially available in 2009, it is yet to hit the road. Bose had also researched cold fusion when far too many scientists were chasing that holy grail of limitless, almost free energy. They were apparently ready to celebrate success in replicating an experiment when they realised that the energetics observed owed to chemical rather than nuclear reactions.
Within audio design, where Bose is rated right up there with Sony, JBL and former giants like Philips and TDK, radical scientific ideas enhanced its image and endeared it to audiophiles. At the very beginning of his career, Amar Bose had trashed the notion of the sound lab. Based on his rejection of acoustic laboratory measurement in a 1968 paper, his company still does not publish technical data on its products. Turning away from traditional acoustics to psycho-acoustics, from sound as it is sensed to sound as it is perceived, Bose designed equipment that would be judged by the human listener, not laboratory instruments. In a very practical way, he had gone back to the ancient, controversial statement of Protagoras: ?Man is the measure of all things.?
Bose believed that sound engineers were measuring things which don?t matter. For instance, if you read audio data for dictaphones, you will find response measured far outside the 2-4 kHz band in which almost all human voices speak. The fact that a dictaphone can record perfectly at 20 kHz, the highest audible frequency, is just ?sound-good? but irrelevant information.
What mattered to Bose was the intuition that audio devices sound flat because they project music directly to the listener while the concert hall offers a different experience, in which sound bounces off multiple surfaces before it reaches the listener, acquiring a three-dimensional richness. Bose speakers try to mimic that experience in small apartment rooms or out in the open by scattering sound.
But, curiously, Bose does not seem to have worked on the crucial innovation in speaker design: bass reflex. Formally analysed by AN Thiel and Richard H Small in the seventies, this design reverberates sound behind the speaker cone before letting it out through a port, enriching the bass component. It was so revolutionary that you see the bass reflex port beside the cone of every modern speaker, even in the cheapest two-in-one. Mystifyingly, Amar Bose does not seem to have worked on it, though it was developed precisely when he was questioning the basics of speaker design.
That?s one mystifying miss but otherwise, the company has been radically innovative. And it will remain so, because after Amar Bose?s death, Bose Corp affirmed that it would remain closely held?the secret ingredient to which its founder attributed its success.
