The Best Out There!!! (Bose Lifestyle 8)

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Product:	Bose Lifestyle 8
Date:	12/03/04 (2802 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good Sound , Excellent Build, Ease Of Use

Disadvantages: Cost

Introduction
I travel between two residences during the year. At one residence, a vacation condo, I wanted a very small entertainment system that would provide me with great sound, but practically disappear in the room. I chose a Bose Lifestyle Dolby ? surround system.

System Components
The system comes with a rather large woofer/amplifier box, a slim line AM/FM receiver head with integral CD player that is about 2 inches high. There are five speakers furnished and you have the choice of each speaker being a dual speaker cube unit so you can swivel the two speakers to send sound into the room at different angles, if desired or needed for the best sound. Since I was going for the smallest speakers possible, I opted for the single speaker variety the Lifestyle 8. Saved some money over the dual speaker cubes as well, about $300. The system comes with the speaker wiring as well.

Hook Up
Hooking up the system is very easy. First thing you need to do is locate the woofer/amplifier where you want it. As the instruction says, the location of the unit can be out of sight, but from my experience the closer to where you are going to sit while listening to the system you place the woofer the better. This is because the bass sounds, even though they are omni-directional, they tend to decay in level faster over distance than do the higher frequencies. Want to see an example of this? While listening to a good set of headphones, pull them away from your ears and listen to the deep bass level drop more than the mids and highs. You can increase the volume, but the deep bass won?t reappear. In an apartment every db you can save is a db that will not annoy your neighbors. If you locate the woofer/amplifier across the room from your TV, you will need some extra long cable extensions for the hookup to your video equipment stereo output connections. I would recommend placing the receiver head within the supplied cable distance to the amplifiers, although
the cables between the receiver and the amplifiers could be lengthened as well. There may be a slight reduction of the highs if long audio cables are used.

Standard Hookup
The standard method assumes you will locate the system near your TV and other video equipment. I opted to place the woofer/amplifier behind my big screen TV so you don?t even notice it?s in the room. I mounted the left and right speakers to the sides of the TV and placed the center channel speaker on the top of the TV. If you have an entertainment center, the speakers can be placed on shelves to the right and left of the TV, but you do not want to get them too far from the TV. The speakers are shielded, so there is no problem with the placements interfering with your TV guns. I ran the rear speaker wires under the edge of the carpet in the room and placed the rear speakers on end tables on each side of my couch. Getting the speakers higher would be better, I just haven?t worked all that out yet. Everything you need to hook up the system is supplied and the instructions are very easy to follow. I chose to use the constant level audio output from my TV as my audio connection, but you could use the variable level output on your TV so you can use the TV remote to control the volume. If you use the variable output, you will probably want to set your TV speakers to off. The constant level output is preferred. So you have to use two remotes, not so bad.

System Operation
The system comes with a remote control that is basically a radio transmitter rather than infrared. This allow you to place the receiver unit where it does not have to be within line of sight. This could be very handy should you like to conceal the receiver behind a door or something like that. The placement of the receiver can be anywhere, even in another room, and the remote will still work.

Sound Quality
The sound quality of the Bose Lifestyle system is extraordinary as you would expect from
Bose. The highs are crisp and clear, and the mid range sounds have that bite you associate with theater sound systems. The lows are full and deep and completely void of the muddy sound of most home theater systems. Explosions give you the sense of concussion associated with woofers many time the size. The sound level is sufficient for a very large room even with the single speaker cubes. Got a football field sized room? Go for the dual speaker cubes.

AM/FM Reception
The condo I put the unit in has cable radio as part of the TV cable service. Because of this, I don?t know how the supplied dipole antenna works. The cable reception is, of course, great. The AM antenna didn?t work at all in our condo due to the construction of the buildings, but no other AM radio works in the place either. Besides, listening to AM on the system is like hiring Michael Angelo to paint your car, sort of a waste.

Surround Quality
The surround decoder in the system is one of the best I have heard. Listening to movies is very enjoyable with the sonic placement on most as good or better than a theater experience. I prefer this system to a theater because I am more closely coupled to the speakers. I can also pause the movie to take a break when nature calls, something I haven?t mastered in a theater.

Summary
Want a really great test for the sonic quality of your system? Play ?Dances With Wolves? or ?Saving Private Ryan?. The cannon blasts and artillery in these movies will tell you the story. You should feel a concussion when they are fired, more than just hearing it. The Bose system excels at this.

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