Reviews for Bose® Companion® 5 Multimedia Speaker System

These speakers are over hyped. I bought these speakers, listen to it for an less than an hour, and return them right away. If you want some really good speakers , get some KRKs, Audioengine or some M-audio. For the same price or less, any of those speaker brand that I just mention sounds a lot better than Bose. Stop getting ripped off by Bose everybody!!!

Problem on a newly bought Mac mini with mountain lion. I can see the Bose in the System Pref and in the Midi Audio app (utilities). The user guide shows screenshots with older OS. I tried to do the same but no sound is coming out. Contacted Bose support but they say I should speak with apple care, in other words, they say it is an apple problem. The Bose tech guy has no clue on mountain lion and said he works on windows environment only and cannot check, strange answer!

There are products that you eventually wish that you had never bought in the first place. This is sadly one of those as far as I am concerned. I should have researched it more.

You may like the product initially if you "upgrade" from something even worse (like I did), but this product is definitely not worth what I paid for it from my perspective.

Here are my comments:

-The build quality is bad and the system fragile. I had (and still have) several build quality issues with it. The first puck was not working. The connections on the back are so cheap that I get strange feedback-like sounds when the connections are physically stressed for any reason (moving the wires near the connection or moving the "acoustimass" unit for example). The bass control is a very cheap and fragile plastic wheel.

-There are almost no software controls. The only controls available are in the Midi Setup utility: a volume control for the whole unit, not even for each channel, and very limited speaker configuration options (stereo and 5.1 and channel reassignment) but that's it. The physical controls are limited to on-off-mute, bass and volume. The bass control is very inconveniently located at the back of the "acoustimass" module, meaning you have to crawl under your desk on all fours to reach it.

-The connection is USB, meaning that you will run into compatibility problems. The sound for some games does not work or is severely distorded.

-The 5.1 effect is not very good.

-The output is limited to 48khz, 16 bit. Forget about playing higher quality files. I could not believe that when I saw it, it is not mentioned anywhere that I could find in the documentation.

-The connections for the satellites are proprietary. You can't easily use the satellites for something else (not that you would want to, see below) or connect other speakers to the system.

-And last but not least I find the speakers more and more unpleasant to listen to as time goes by and the sound quality is just not there. I got some high quality speakers for my HT, and the difference is just incredible (the price is admittedly not the same). A little research on the internet reveals that there are serious issues with other Bose speakers (not these specific ones, I could not find specific measurements for them, Bose does not appear to publish this data). Research also reveals that Bose makes products which are quite controversial to say the least.

Do yourself a favour and consider something else like Focal or M-Audio for example or use your optical connection to feed a separate receiver/amplifier using encoded digital audio. You will get much better quality in that manner with the bonus of added flexibility (you can upgrade the amp and speakers separately, etc.).

OSX 10.5.6. doesnt seem t recognise these speakers - the speakers play but you cant setup them up for 5.1 surround which is a real shame. Cant seem to find any addittional drivers that will fix this very frustrating esp' as i purchased this from a mac store

BAD

Don't waste your money

email me before you buy

threw mine in pool

waste of money

do knot buy