Bose DVD-Based Lifestyle 28 And 35 Entertainment Systems Give You Serious Sound

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The new Bose Lifestyle 28 and 35 systems will make your home theater sould like the movie theater.

Home theater setups have come a long way, and with DVD, bigger TV screens and digital audio technology, it pays to make sure your speaker system is always working its best. Bose Electronics, known for its tiny--yet powerful--Lifestyle home theater speakers and other high-end audio equipment, understands this and has flicked its sound quality up a notch.

The company's new DVD-based Lifestyle 28 and 35 entertainment systems were created to make sure you get the home theater sound you want--without having to call in the professionals for help.

Using a solution called ADAPTiQ audio calibration, these speaker systems, Bose claims, analyze and adjust to any room, speaker location or listener location. So get ready for some serious sound, no matter what kind of room you're listening in.

On Your Own
Here's the gist: Not everyone's home theater space is the same, and this inevitably makes a difference in how an entertainment system sounds. Does your room have an alcove? Window treatments? A drop ceiling? All these things affect sound. And to top it all off, most surround sound systems have a "sweet spot." This is simply the place in the room where you get the best sound. So if you're sitting in this spot, you'll get superior sound. Kinda stinks for the rest of your family or guests, though.

"The ADAPTiQ system changes the whole notion of how you experience sound," says Mitch Nollman, director of marketing for Bose Home Audio Products. "It lets every room get the absolute best sound it can, no matter what."

Of course, Bose is not the first to think of calibrating home theater audio. If you've got the time and the cash, you can call a home theater professional to come over and set up a system for you. Right.

For the rest of us, there are software programs--Ovation's Avia and Video Essentials are among the better known--that use test signals to help you calibrate your speakers. There are also DVDs that feature these test tones. Basically, what these programs do is make sure the sound coming from each channel of a multichannel home theater movie soundtrack is set to the ideal volume for your setup, which will then create an audio effect personalized to suit you. All this is about speaker placement, and the fact that many speakers can play at different volumes--even when the same amount of power is applied to all of them. So why even bother with the new Bose systems if you can do it yourself? Because, as you may have surmised, using these test-tone discs is a pain. In order to get the job done correctly, you really have to know what you're doing. You would also need to buy a sound-pressure meter--these start at $35 and can run anywhere up to $1000.