Bose Bows Mini Bluetooth Speaker, Noise-Canceling Smartphone Headphones

Despite the price premium for neodymium magnets, Bose turned to that rare-earth metal for a new compact transducer that’s been custom-designed for the company’s downsized Bluetooth SoundLink Mini speaker. Bose launched the speaker, along with noise-canceling earbuds, at a press event in Grand Central Terminal in New York Tuesday.

"If we could have done this three years ago, we would have,” Bose President Bob Maresca told Consumer Electronics Daily. “We actually didn’t know how to get that much bass out of a small package like that,” he said, and the company “didn’t want to want to sell something that sounded thin and tinny.” Bose engineers finally had a breakthrough with the design of the transducer, and neodymium was critical to the design, Maresca said. “It’s expensive,” he said, “but you just can’t get that performance any other way.” The new transducer moves twice as much air as traditional drivers, he said.

For the SoundLink Mini, weight and portability were the primary motivators for the design “so neodymium was just the right choice for this kind of product,” Tim Saeger, Bose vice president-home entertainment product development, told us. The company has moved to other less costly magnet materials for other products where size and weight weren’t overriding factors, and the company “might make different decisions for other products that aren’t mobile,” Saeger said. “It’s something we've had to watch on the cost side,” Saeger said, “but we really wanted to have the right experience for a mobile product.” The speaker is designed to be a tag-along speaker to amplify the sound streamed or stored on a smartphone or tablet. The transducers in the SoundLink Mini are matched with a pair of passive radiators for bass and Bose digital signal processing handles overall tonal balance, the company said.

Bose will leverage the development cost of the new transducer in other product categories across the company’s various divisions, including automotive and pro audio, Maresca said: “You find a way to take advantage of performance like that.”

Prior to the demo of the SoundLink Mini, shaped like a curved, thin brick, Brian Maguire, Bose product marketing manager-headphones, took the powered speaker out of an inside breast pocket of his jacket to demonstrate the “portability” of the 24-ounce playback unit. We wondered how anyone’s inner pocket could hold the roughly 2 x 7 x 2-inch speaker after we held the hefty speaker. Bose spokespeople compared the Mini to a tablet PC in weight, and the two would make a weighty combination of electronics to tote around town. The Mini delivered a more full-range sound than most Bluetooth speakers we've heard, though. The device stores six Bluetooth devices in memory for quick pairing, but only one phone or tablet can be used at a time, he said. It also has an auxiliary input for non-Bluetooth devices. The $199 speaker will be available July 11 and pre-orders were to begin Tuesday, Maguire said.

SoundLink Mini uses Bluetooth A2DP for streaming to a smartphone or tablet, said Eric Freeman, vice president-home entertainment product development. Potential issues with streaming include the interference that could occur if a user stands between the speaker and the mobile device, Freeman said. “We've engineered the antenna to be powerful enough to tolerate that,” he said. The antenna was engineered so it could work effectively regardless of positioning so that consumers could get good reception “no matter which side of the product you're on,” he said.

In its second production debut Tuesday, Bose unveiled the new QuietComfort 20s “headphones,” although they could more aptly be categorized as noise-canceling earbuds. The $299 headphones are Bose’s first in-ear noise-canceling product, and Maguire said the QuietComfort 20s incorporate more patents than any other Bose headphones. The QC 20s run off a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that’s rated to run 16 hours on a charge.

Amid some 6,000 models of headphones on the market today under more than 700 brands, Bose is hoping to set this model apart on sound quality, versatility and comfort. The phones have a button on the side that puts them into “aware” mode, in which music keeps playing but ambient noise isn’t blocked out. That enables consumers to hear sounds, voices or announcements around them without having to take off the earphones, Maguire said.

The QuietComfort 20s will be available in two versions: a three-button 20i set for iOS devices and a version for smartphones or tablets outside the Apple world, Freeman said. The three-button iOS version has controls for volume up and down and track advancing, he said. The standard version has a single button for answering a phone call. The iOS version uses Apple’s chip with a dedicated user interface standard for headphones, said Dan Gauger, senior research engineer at Bose.

Both in-ear headphone models list for $299 and will be available this summer, Maguire said. The QuietComfort 20 headphones, SoundLink Mini speaker and associated accessories will be sold through Bose stores, Bose.com, and select authorized dealers, the company said.