I've had a funny time with Bose. About 10 years ago when I had 0 experience with actual stereos and lived in tiny places I lusted after Bose equipment, and the only reason I did not purchase any was because it was out of my financial ability to do so.
About five years ago when I first started playing around with stereo, I stopped in to one of their showrooms they maintain in outlet malls (that should have been a clue). The salesperson did this demo for me, to show the superiority of the Bose system. One part of the demo involved listening for certain differences between the systems Bose offered at the time, to see what more of your hard-earned dollar bought you. I seriously could not tell much of a difference between many of their models, much to the consternation of the salesperson.
This year, I actually had my first objective experience with a Bose system. I'd been over to people's houses that had them, but never had the chance to seriously evaluate them for one reason or another. But recently, a non-audiophile friend of mine has started getting the itch to see what this madness is all about. He uses a Bose system in his living room, mainly because it was given to him, and with two small kids and a smallish house he uses them out of convienience. He uses a Bose sub and two sats. I don't know the model number, but the cubes are the larger type. The sub has output for 5 speakers, but he's running 2. When you sit on his couch, all of the equipment is in front of you, about 12 feet away. When I visit, we usually drink beer (the best system tweak), bitch about life, and listen to music. He's in to world and reagge, and I enjoy visiting because he's always listening to stuff that would otherwise be off my radar.
So, one day I bring a pair of A/D/S/ L300 over. The medium sized "aluminum can" with a 5.25 inch or so woofer and a dome tweeter. Not a very large speaker, also a bit older like my friend's Bose. In a listening session the results (for me, at least) were staggering. The Bose had NO MIDRANGE. I mean, there were guitar parts that you could hear clear as day on the L300s, that were NOT THERE on the bose. If you could hear them at all, they sounded like they were part of the background! It was like someone went and made a "smiley face" on an EQ. The Bose system went much lower, and much louder in the low freq, but if this would have been a totally fair test the L300s should have had at least some in-line passive subwoofer like the Bose did (ADS actually made such a thing, but they are rare and I don't have one). I did not hook up the L300s in place of the Bose sats, for fear of blowing one, the other, or both up. My friend liked the high end of the Bose more, and I liked the ADS. He thought the Bose "had more sparkle", I thought anything brighter than the already bright (IMHO) and very detailed ADS tweeter could also be used to peel paint off of walls, and to stun cockroaches. Frankly, I found it overly bright and "tizzy".
The system sounded "best" to him (I cringe to use that term) when he played both sets of speakers at the same time. He wanted to explore the possibility of buying the L300s, or another conventional bookshelf speaker to reinforce the mids of his system. I told him to ditch the Bose, and if you're married to the sub/sat combo get some smallish "sat" speakers (like the L300s, or whatever) and a smallish powered sub. This was 6 months ago, and he's still with the Bose (with no "extra help"), but he's asking questions that make me think he's starting to wonder...