Okay, here goes.

A couple of days ago my son came home with a 1989 31" Zenith TV with unbelieble inputs, real top of the line, even a PC board edge connector to adapt to RGB inputs.

SOUND BY BOSE.

Well, we are using a 19" TV (shut up) in our living room, and decided to see how this one worked.

The picture was okay, but the bass was just gratingly obnoxious. I turned the bass all the way down and it was gratingly obnoxious.

Then I remembered the illustrations I have seen of the way the wave radio works, with its colon-looking sound tube...and I flashed on how one of Bose's insidious inaccuracies and selling points is its insistent bass...yet totally inaccurate bass, sometimes even bordering on a monotone.

MONOTONE! No matter how much I turned down the bass on that TV, even women's voices excited a resonance in the Bose system in the cabinet, and one particular lowish tone came alive. If I did not know better, I would think it was bass.

Here's the problem: Millions of listeners DON'T know better, and they hear that monotone bass, and they think it is bass. Okay, now think of the crappy computer speakers you have heard, where one lowish resonance masquerades as bass.

Now, hold on a moment for this one -- remember the sound of almost every obscenely loud car system you have ever been hurt by at fifty feet. Can you remember that the bass notes were distinct, or were they just one Bose-ish blob?

Now dance music. One big thud, over and over. Forget actual bass notes. Hell, go listen to "Walking in Space" by Quincy Jones -- you will actually hear SEVERAL bass notes, in sequence, actually playing a sort of melody. I was at a client's house today, a retired choreographer, and he had a DJ dance CD which was almost only bass thud and cymbals.

Oh -- My -- God -- has the ubiquity of that crappy Bose sound made us forget that bass consists of distinct notes, with distinct timbres? That you can actually tell if a low E is played on a cello or on a string bass BY THE DETAILS IN THE SOUND?