What's Inside $1100 Bose Acoustic Wave Music System CD-3000 

EDIT: Please note, when I used the ohm setting on the DMM, I was testing resistance, not impedance. Very sorry for the confusion See listings of Bose Acoustic Wave Music Systems here: goo.gl/TL4g2X

98% of the people commenting have never even heard of it before and definitely never heard on in person. These things sound really good. The bass is present but not shaking the house. And they get really loud. People see the price of it and assume it's just not worth it. And in some ways I agree. But to have a plug and play non complicated HiFi system that anyone can use it is worth it. My friend's mother uses hers to play jazz music on and it sounds excellent. Not all types of music is gonna sound good playing on it. Smooth jazz sound great on it though.

When I was about 10, my dad bought an old upright console radio/record player. Sounded good. After it conked out I took it apart before my dad got rid of it. It had an "acoustical labyrinth". It was a Stromberg Carlson. Also back in the late 30's or early 40's some european makers were making transmission line enclosures. They just didn't really catch on that well over here. A 40 hz tone has a wavelength of 28 feet, so to make a quarter wave transmission line you would make a 7 ft. labyrinth. Bose just marketed the idea of a "Waveguide" like it was their brainchild. But, I guess all companies would take advantage of the fact that most people would think it was new technology. That's marketing. I always thought their products were a little expensive for what they are, but for many people who are not "stereo buffs" or "audiophiles", or "golden ears, who buy $10,000 amps", they fit their needs and take up minimal room. There's something for everybody. I enjoyed this video, as I always wanted to see one inside. I just assumed the 2 drivers in front were the only ones and that they were connected to the labyrinth. Didn't know it was a sub.

Thank you for taking the time to show us this

You guys are all knocking it but I own one I’ve been using for over 20 years and I’m very happy with it. The simplicity of getting high quality sound from an all-in-one unit really works for me.

The magic sauce of most Bose music systems is in how they handle the acoustics and not so much about the electronics or the speakers. They spent a lot of time and money in the R&D behind the optimal design of their wave guides inside that junky looking contraption. Nobody can deny that Bose systems produce an outsize volume of sound compared to the physical dimensions of their units. The founder, Dr Amar Bose, had a PhD from MIT in Electrical Engineering. Not exactly a fool.

Loved your commentary about what was going on. I used to have that Bose system, well it wasn't worth the $1000 plus price tag!

you never cease to amaze me bud, always stay interested in what you do lol

Very cool tear down and commentary thank you very much. Exactly what I was looking for.😀

The design is a transmission line/quarter wave that's been around since like the 50s or 60s that's why is called the "wave radio" the speaker basically sits at one end of a long port with around the same area as the woofer cone. You take the speed of sound at sea level and divide it by the fs of the sub and you take that number and divide it by 4 and you get your 1/4 wave in feet. Usually a low QTS SUB WITH .4 or lower is used for the flattest response and shallow rolloff, and other little twist but that's about it. The longer the line area the lower the tuning and the shorter the higher the tuning. That's why they have two different length wave guides for this radio, so they can get a wider frequency response. You can stuff it to extend the wave guide line if not enough room, kinda the same as stuffing a sealed box to slow the waves down and make box seem bigger which lowers tuning

My Grandfather was a huge HiFi fan in the 90's and got the same exact version. For sticking on a credenza and popping in an occasional CD, it sounded quite impressive (if you don't intend to crank it up and listen at moderate levels). The magic in these systems isn't necessarily the wave chamber, it's in all the digital processing that knows how to manipulate and utilize the design.

Fabulous video, so fun to see people teardown classic expensive stereos.

Amazing”””” this is the BEST video i ever seen you really really help me to see inside the boss THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH

Thanks for the teardown. I always wanted to gut one of these and have a look inside. Now I know. thanks

Interesting design. I worked for someone that had one of those in his office. Seemed like a really big sound from such a small package.

Subbing for future bose vids. Interesting stuff, especially the teardowns!

When I was in high school at open gym a kid would bring one of these and blast it while we played pickup ball. I remember it sounded pretty good in a huge gym. Now I want to hear it again to see if my memory is accurate.

This costing 1100$ is an extreme insult.

Wow... extremely low quality mid/high drivers for an $1100 system. Looks like a system worth perhaps $200, which was marketed well, and probably had a huge profit margin.

Thanks for this clear and complete analisys of this music sistem!

If I had that wave-guide up close and personal I would draft it out in Blender or something similar... breaking it down into manageable sections that could be 3d printed. From there I might try scaling it to fit a different form factor. I've always wondered what it looked like inside. Thanks for your time with this breakdown.

I have this, mine has a cassette player instead of CD and it works perfectly.

Some of these comments are laughable. I don't know why people are getting so worked up over a product that's been on the market for 33 years and Bose has made millions on. When the AWMS came out in 1984, Dr Bose thought decent sound should be as easy as a refrigerator. You plug it in and turn it on. At that time, research showed that less than 20% of people owned a system of ANY type because they were too intimidating to buy and set up. The mission of the AWMS was to fill some of that gap and did very well.

I was able to get one off eBay that was actually in decent shape and actually works correctly. I'm glad you made this video so I'll know what to expect if I have to work on mine at some point in the future. It blows my mind how someone could mistreat something so expensive; I saw a lot of Bose Acoustic Wave units on eBay that looked like someone had kicked them across the floor a dozen times. For a cheap $30 radio who cares, but those Bose units cost a grand!

Wow, this was awesome. Although I've never really been a fan of Bose, I DO admit that the little enclosures do sound amazing, for their size! Now the "magic" has been revealed.:). Another awesome video, my friend!

I have the Acoustic Wave Music System 2 and have to admit it has amazing sound for a portable system. I bought it second hand for about $200, but if it ever breaks, I'd buy a new one to replace it for sure. I hope they update the system soon too!

I worked in an electronics store back in 1993. we had a lot of mid-priced stereo equipment. One of our Home theatre setups was the Bose Accousti-mass system (not sure if I spelled it right). Tiny little cube speakers placed at listener and also away from listener to create a bigger more immersive sound stage. At least that was the gimmick marketing copy we were supposed to regurgitate. They sounded like cheap shitty paper midranges in plastic boxes because they were. The outrageous price for this junk simply could not be defended. lots of people wanted to listen, very few ever bought. My only other experience with Bose is my Mother in law has a bose bluetooth speaker. It sounds ok. It looks nice. I could do much better for the price though.

Huge amount of research in this unit. The folded waveguide is correctly called a Tapered Pipe or transmission line. The total length of this one is about 196 cm(going on number from the video, think it was about this). This would be a quarter wavelength of 786cm 7meters! Woah, that's like 45 hertz or so. These lads at bose have managed to avoid introducing distortion and phase issues into the sound spectrum at the ears most sensitive region (900 htz through to around 2000 htz) by avoiding the use of a crossover in this critical region, and have managed to get somewhere down to 45htz from a 4 inch driver. Sure the package is $1100 and I'd personally never buy one, but this is some pretty good engineering. By using a single sound source for highs and mids, they have also managed to maintain a similar spectral balance of tone for instruments such as piano that play notes both below and above the crossover in a conventional 2 or 3 way speaker system- well piano does contain notes below 45htz, but perhaps trumpet or violin would be a better example.

My thoughts on these are mixed, i have owned the soundock 10 which used the same waveguide design but better woofer and smaller tweeters/mids, the woofer was about the same size but with a long throw suspension and appeared much more substantial than the one in this video, it also had a very large and weighty magnet which is usually the signs of a driver designed to handle high power. A large magnet usually results in better control of the driver and hence better performance, it was paper but this isnt neccasarily a deal breaker (paper is still a reasonable material for a speaker albeit somewhat dated) the tweeters/mids were smaller and angled outwards to presumably widen the soundstage and also paper with still decent magnets for the purpose. The integrated amp was endowed with the infamous dsp chip and seperate amp ics for the midrange and bass. Now the bose waveguide is a very interesting concept and many are not understanding how it works, basically a loudspeaker has a front and a rear and when it produces sound the front and rear are 180deg out of phase so if you had no enclosure most of the longer bass frequency would cancel each other out. So what a normal enclosure does is trap the rear waves inside the enclosure and the front facing waves are what you hear so its less efficient and due to the pressure against the cone from the trapped air its ability to move is restrained somewhat so frequency response in the bass department can be limited. What bose do is use a series of tubes to firstly act like a horn to boost the frequency response and secondly the reason that the rear tubes are shorter than the front is to phase correct and align the front and rear sound waves so instead of cancelling each other out when they meet they instead reinforce each other and suddenly you have a very efficient speaker which considering it is amped quite well too becomes very powerfull. Now this is only part of the story, the second part is the reason its all coiled up like that, this is because the length of the horn directly relates to how deep the bass is, and for frequencies as low as say 60hz you are looking at a horn which would be many feet long if laid out straight on the floor so bose decided to fold it up which has been done before but the use of two priciples together both the phase correction and the horn (basically a seperate horn on each side of the speaker will be tuned to different lengths to reinforce differnt frequencies. Now all the people criticising the use of plastic casing and associating this with the price are missing a fundimental bit of info, designing and tuning a true folded horn into a housing that size and for low frequencies is a work of art expecially in the days when bose invented it, they didnt have cad and 3d computer modeling it would have been trial and error and lots of complicated maths and since a folded horn carries nearly all the waves from the speaker out and away there isnt really and viabration and effect on the sound by having a plastic case not like with a traditional speaker when any movement of the enclosure causes colouration. Now to the sound, remember i had the dock10 which is more modern and had much more modern drivers than those taken from the wave in the video and to make a point i own some good hifi gear including some b&w towers and a rega amp so i didnt buy it as a hifi i mainly got one because i was fascinated with the horn design and wanted to dissasemble and hear one, guess its the electronics technician in me! The bass from the soundock was extremely powerfull and i dont mean muddy sloth bass like from a ported sony speaker i mean extremely energetic the type of bass you feel punch you in the chest and reverberate the whole room and it felt alive i have never had anything since, hifi included which could express that much energy in that particular room which was a complete void for bass normally due to its long narrow shape, but this thing nailed it To describe the bass clarity would be that it didnt go very deep probably not much lower than 60hz at a guess but it was very controlled and sharp and the bass within its narrow (but normal compromise for a horn) was some of the best i have heard from anything smaller than a 10inch BUT it couldnt go very low but the energy levels were huge and very precise. Heres where it falls apart, the mids were flat sounding and forced with hardly any soundstage even forgiving its width the beats by dre dock could do a much better job with a wider soundstage and detail, the vocals on the bose were brought forward presumably by dsp processing and didnt sound too bad i dare say better than average however the cost was pushing everything else back and losing detail, in the upper treble there was good detail but a low frequency response all those nice jingly bits on the upper end of the treble were gone and what was there did sound ok but again flat. So is it cheap drivers? Well maybe, maybe not, i have heard paper drivers sound amazing in other setups i think the main issue is the speakers are too small leaving holes in the crossover between the amazing bass and the poor mids and the use of dsp to try and fix it makes it worse and in some cases just sounds wrong, ontop of that it desperately needed proper tweeters to get those jingles back! I think if bose had hornloaded the mids too with larger drivers and installed real tweeters, that thing could have been truely amazing but it seems to be a bose thing to persist with the single upper driver which kills it. If a hornloaded midbass has the same energy as the woofer did and they do these changes i think id give them another try because horns sound amazing when done right. So there you have it an honest review based on the sound not the name. i still think the bass on the soundock will never be beaten on sheer power by anything the same size unless it has a rediculus sized amp and even then i dont think it could with a normal enclosure. But the thing to remember is although it didnt work out all that well the engineering that went into trying to acheive that type of enclosure far surpases any normal box with ports and i give them credit for trying it and thats why i suspect they are so expensive, even the mids had experimental induction horn voids which means a non driven enclosure intended to react to the viabration and tune it, its a totaly different concept to the way any other speaker works and a very interesting one they still fascinate me even though the sound quality isnt as good overall.

very interesting!

A bit of engineering went into making this compact unit. More than the typical boombox. And look at how many years that thing has been on the market, and how much money Bose has made selling these things, based largely on marketing. Bose is genius.

Sad to see one get destroyed. But, this one looks beyond help. I bought mine from Goodwill in 2019. Paid $150 for it. The unit is from 1998. Sounds absolutely amazing! It lasted all these years and plays really good. How can it be bad? If I bought a new one back in 1998 for $1000 and knew it would last that long, I'd say that it was a good value!

Great vid, Thanks BigDWiz!!

BACK IN 2008 I BUILT A BOX FOR 4 15"s MIMICKING THE BOSE DESIGN : THE BASS I WAS PRODUCING WAS UNBELIEVABLE!

Bass, right side, 55Hz ; Bass, left side, 185 Hz

Nice breakdown,...you can learn alot of info from this.

Thank you for showing us the guts of these units. I have a pre-1984 that has been going strong in my master bedroom. Ever now and then I attach my $99 Shiit DAC/AMP to the Bose and enjoy very clear pure sound. There is a bump in volume as well. I know purist slam Bose for being psycho accustic but, since I am already a frilling certified lunatic I might be in possession of the proper music machine. I paid a $1000 for it back then, I suppose knowing Bose the price is still the same. For me, Base has never been a priority for my genre of music taste. Right now, I am thinking of wireless Sonos fulfilling my upgrading wants. I would very much like to see how the newest Wave Machine has improved. In many ways I would buy again if I could be convinced WiFi could be utilized to include overall sound improvements have been made. Cheers! GB

looks like $110 with two times $10 amps and the cheepest CD player i've ever seen... typical BOSE

9:30 The guts......the glory 👍

To be fair, it’s not where the item was produced/manufactured, it’s the engineering work that went into making this entire speaker, bose does an impressive job knowing the speakers use neodymium magnets and are very small but powerful

Good video, about what I expected inside that thing honestly.

No matter what .....Bose is WAYYYYY OVERPRICED!!!!

These things sound so good. I thought Bose was full of crap until I heard one in person.

What a nice RU-vid channel. I just love it. Best Regards!

This was very interesting!

Thanks! The acustic desing is the best of the product! 10% thd lol. Cheers

This was the first video i saw when i subbed. Awesome

Kinda quarter wave transmission line woofer! Cool! Really compact for that type of acoustic. Thank you!

Amazing, 1100$ for 50$ worth of material. And subpar components.

Yeah I ordered one years ago and kept it for 20 days and sent it back. The music was uninspiring to say the least. Went out and bought a Yamaha stereo amp instead. A friend had given me a set of floor standing KEF 103/3 speakers that I have still.

Excellent tear down

I can't believe the condition of that Bose CD-3000. When you think how expensive it was when new, you would think most people would really take care of it.

Bose Owns ACDelco. We had a ACDelco System in our 92 Grand AM. that Fucker Pumped. People thought we had a Sub in it. Nope, Stock 6x9's. AcDelco are the Same as Bose just Lower Wattage.

, love them or hate them. people like Bose because of the simplicity and relatively good sound. not a lot of buttons and adjustments. this is what makes them appealing to a lot of people. I have owned a lot of different Bose products over the years and although not the best, they certainly do theyer homework on producing good sound with small drivers and automated electronics. it is what it is, the end.

Enjoy all of your videos!

I always wondered what was inside. Thank you.

Considering the low cost of the components the AWS gave an impressive performance, disregarding the price to the consumer.

That thing would of sounded sweet back in the day!

Nice! Would like to see more in the future... Maybe some boxes from 'budget' minded vendors back in the day (~90's) for subs or prepackaged component sets...

nice video man!

These units cost a fortune when new, pulling it down shows how shit all the components are.

Bose. Last years tech at tomorrows prices.

I still have a perfect pair of the bose 501s from the 70s and a pair of the 1801 amplifiers and can't even find anything better still to this day

great video. basic, to the point info by someone that knows their field well. thanks!

verry good

Hmm... no response above 7khz. Nothing below 60hz. Bloated, murky radio vocals. 3x the cost of a superior sounding and featured Sangean.

i have a bose 3 2 1 system in my little 10x10 room with the woofer behind my recliner and yea it sounds amazing. sounds as good as a 12 in woofer in a car.Pretty amazing for a tiny woofer.

The 2 different length ports are interesting. Cool tear down I'm sure quite a few people wondered what was going on inside of these.

Buy Other Sound Equipment

No Highs, No Lows, No CD Lid, No buttons, must be Bose! :)

At least this guy told you what you needed to know. 2 amps at 40 watts each, 1 for the mids and highs and the other bridge for bass. 20L, 20R, 40 bass on a 60 inch long pipe by 2 inch PVC pipe. Add a camber to hold the base driver at 1/3 of the length.

love the videos keep them going

These did not sound that bad, better than the 100 dollar boomboxes of the day, but not as good as some of the 250 dollar ones. Thing is it cost $1,000. and used cheap parts.

people can hate on Bose as much as they want . But there innovations and ideas are things we take for granted now . I'm quite a fan of Bose and own a fair few Bose products including the CD10 lifestyle system there first ever lifestyle system and I must say its impressive . also the reason the waveguides are different lengths is for tuning .

Tech ingredients, channel said that 1/3 is the sweet spot in object for the best resonance on a speaker..... Takd a PVC pipe and place a speaker at 1/3 in this Bose setup is actually 60 inches long and that 4 inch was place at 20 inches. My test did produce great sound just make sure that the port is equal on both side and used 1/2 of the size of the rating size .... a 4 inch cone with a 2 inch port, both sides ... or 6 and 3 ... 8 and 4 ...10 and 5 ... etc.

I remember reading something decades ago about taking a Tube, cutting it at 1/3 its length, putting Speaker on the end of one section, then putting the remaining section, on the other side of the Speaker. This pretty much what BOSE did in this thing. I almost bought one, but it, unlike me, wasn't cheap...

$1100 alarm clock

I think we had one of those inside a Porta potty on a construction site I worked on years ago and it sounded like shit. Until now I never fully appreciated the irony.....

This speaker is expensive youbrocked it down it just to educate people You are the real you tuber

Therefore, the woofer that measured 2.3 ohms is probably a 4 ohms and the mid/high speaker that measured 11.4 ohms is probably 16 ohms. Impedance includes the reactive nature of the voice coil.

this video made me take a shower after

Put it on the amp dyno see if it does rated. Lol

Bose should hire you!! great video.

Good video. I have a pair of 901's from 1992 that I purchased from Germany while in the military, that still rocks with no speaker deformations or tears. I will never part from them.

I know what´s inside the bose acoustic wave, the hi-fi illusion!

Bose just isnt worth what they ask for it. They sould come with mids, highs, and lows. All the speakers should be made out of quality materials, not garbage paper. People will learn, one day.

THAT WAS COOOOL !!!! Thank you !!!! 😁😁😁

There is nothing this size that sounds better that I've heard.

Bose EQ the hell out of everything as well as use various psychoacoustic tricks. You never get the pure sound. Great for pop music in a small room. Pretty lousy for classical or jazz in a standard lounge.

no highs, no lows, must be bose

It is surprising the amount of low frequency bass they get from these small enclosures. Thats crazy they got almost 4 feet of port length just on the front side of that 4 inch driver. Pretty cool to see it though, great video.

I don’t give a shit what anyone says I’ve owned 3 models of this stereo looks uniquely awesome, the utilized every inch inside, and my cd3000 fills my whole house with music.BOSE was never intended for high volume its sound reproduction and the way the sound carries amazingly well just shows how bose puts more R & D into their stuff than their contemporaries this is no cardboard box lookin radio its beautiful and sounds awesome after 20 years to me thats a small amount for quality and ingenuity

, he didn't want to "Break" the enclosure with the rubber mallet but he sawzalled the damn thing in half !!!!?? "YOU BIG DUMMY !!!!

Cheap plastic construction, basic components, with a unusually complex front and back transmission line loaded sub woofer. Instead of gong to all that trouble with the enclosure design using bigger and better drivers would have given better results. Bose also seem to have an obsession with using extremely small paper cone drivers, where their efforts would have been better spent with using larger and better quality drivers, and a better power amplifier. Acoustic wave is just marketing? Transmission line and port loaded speaker enclosures is nothing new, and its not exclusive Bose technology either.

cool I've always wondered 👌 now I know ☺

It is a 4,5" if you meassure correctly.. From screw hole to screw hole or edge to edge depending of the design.

why am I here?

4:45 Those amplifier chips are so cheap! They're used in car head units! GAAAH! Bose is so overpriced! I could buy a cd changer, power amp, and speakers for half the price and they would get louder, sound better...

I love reveals on stuff like this. keep them coming! I've always been fascinated by Bose. I find their pricing to be a bit much, but you can't deny they are innovative.

"wave guide" is another name for the 1950's Acoustic Labyrinth Speaker Cabinet. Briefly mentioned in the now out of print book , How To Build Speaker Enclosures, Alexis Badmaieff and Don Davis search amazon