From the power of a symphony to the intimacy of an acoustic guitar, the experience of a live performance is unmistakeable. The challenge for Bose® engineers was to recreate this listening experience in people's homes. The concert hall became the Bose® laboratory and ultimately led to the discovery of patented Bose® Direct/Reflecting® speaker technology, and the entire versatile product line it inspired.

Bose® engineers first began to understand why the ratio of reflected to direct sound is so important to live music. Their experiments revealed it was the spatial characteristics of the concert hall that gave music its live quality; to get the same effect from a loundspeaker, they would have to emulate those characteristics.