Cheap Bose CineMate digital home theater speaker system, Graphite Gray (Electronics) Price

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Customer Reviews of Bose CineMate digital home theater speaker system, Graphite Gray

Recording Engineer's Thumbs Up
I'm a recording engineer and I was impressed with the cinemate's sound and simplicity. I needed an elegant solution for my media center pc, and the cinemate is just the ticket. My wife didn't want obtrusive speakers in the den, and since I already have a DVD player and PVR built into the media pc, all I needed were speakers and amp. The cinemate is a self-contained system that powers it's own speakers through the bass unit. I was able to simply plug them directly into the media pc. It would have been nice for Bose to include a digital optical "in" but alas the input is analog only. <
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>Some have complained that the bass is weak and the speakers are not as lively as others. However, I found the Bose engineers to be quite ingenious as these speakers are very natural sounding - "accurate" as we engineers would say. Many home theater speakers can sound "hyped", accentuating bass and human voice frequencies (1k-3k Hz). However, good speakers should accurately represent what the recording engineers were hearing in the studio. I'm sitting here listening to "Star Wars - The Phantom Menace" and there is plenty of THUMP when spaceships take off, the music is balanced in the mix, and the dialog is clear. It really sounds quite awesome. The crossover between the satellite speakers and the subwoofer unit is very transparent and smooth. My only comment is that the satellite speakers could be a little brighter at lower volume, but one can easily solve this with some slight eq: maybe a high shelf starting at about 8k. (This is easy to do on a pc.) The brightness problem seemed to go away when the system was turned up. I think the system was meant to run at a healthy volume. It packs a lot of punch and can get quite loud. (For geeks: I don't think this is just the Fletcher Munson effect either. The brightness is the thing that got better with more volume.) <
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>As to the claim of "virtual surround" I think that Bose is going out on a limb on that one. Theoretically it would be possible to have the speakers project to the side walls and then have sound reach you as if they are from rear speakers. However, practically the chance of this happening in a typical den or living room is almost nil. People usually have curtains, hallways, bookshelves along walls and they will most likely absorb reflected rays of sound. In my room, I definitely do not hear the surround effect. <
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>In all, however, I think this is a wonderfully convenient package that sounds great out of the box. Surprisingly, the system has plenty of power and can obtain decent loudness levels. I think the bose engineers knew what they were doing when putting this product together. Thumbs up.

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Good enough for my small family room
I agree with other posters that Bose could've made some improvements here such as adding digital optical audio option and bass & treble adjusting. However, for my purposes, it sounds great. I didn't want speakers wired all over the place and an overpowering sound. I hooked it up to a new 46" Sharp Aquos 1080P which has a less than decent sounding speaker bar attached to bottom of TV (no surround sound capability either). I placed the speakers on stands and set the TV audio out to "Fixed" and the system sounds just right for my room.

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Save your money....
I bought this Bose system thinking it would sound like a Bose system I had befor but it does not. I hooked this up to my 52 inch big screen to get the Bose sound, that did not happen. My TV has a better sound than this Bose. I took it off the next day and put it in my room on my little TV, it sounds better than my TV speakers but having a $500.00 sound system on a $200.00 dollar TV shoud sound better. The base has no sound at all, there is no adjustments for the treble or base. If you going to buy Bose, get the complete 6 speaker sound system as this Bose is no way worth the money I spent....