This is not your father's stereo — or your iPod. The Bose Lifestyle 38 combines elements of both and adds its own share of functionality and flexibility. The Lifestyle series has been a Bose mainstay for years, offering DVD playback with 5.1-channel surround sound in an attractive, easy-to-use package. This latest addition to the family goes beyond home theater, introducing both hard-disk storage and the uMusic intelligent music-management system. You rip up to 200 hours worth of CD music to the internal hard disk in MP3 format, and as you make selections, uMusic “learns” your tastes so it can automatically play the music you enjoy the most.
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System control is handled by a universal remote with a very friendly button layout, easy-to-read labels, and a rubberized feel. Best of all, the remote issues its commands via RF (radio-frequency) signals instead of the usual IR (infrared) approach, which requires a direct line of sight for operation. With this baby you can operate the system from another room.
SETUP As Bose suggests, I placed the bass module on my front wall, a third of the way out from the corner, which happens to be where I usually put subwoofers. Similarly, I arranged the satellites around the listening position in the well-worn spots where my speakers normally go. The top and bottom sections of the cube arrays can be angled for better sound dispersion.
Since my listening room is fairly compact, I left the dual cubes of each front left and right speaker firing in the same direction but slightly angled the center speaker's cubes. I put a wide angle between the two cubes in each surround speaker to achieve a wider, more open rear sound field. The adjustability of these speakers might seem like a small point, but their flexibility can dramatically improve sound quality.
Ready to hook everything up, I discovered that the system offers only composite- and S-video output jacks but that these can be configured as component-video outputs using supplied adapter cables. That's how I hooked up my TV. I used Bose's setup disc to verify the speaker hookup and then loaded in the ADAPTiQ disc to optimize their performance. Feeling only slightly silly, I sat in my comfy chair and put on the supplied “headphones,” which actually contain no sound-producing elements but rather microphones to pick up the sound from the speakers as it reached my ears. The system plays test tones, reads the signals from the microphones, and automatically adjusts equalization, phase, and level for each channel to produce the best sound given your room's acoustics.
The Lifestyle 38 allows multiroom expansion with stereo playback — up to 14 remote rooms, or outdoor spaces, each with independent volume and mute control over one of two audio streams. For example, you can listen to CD in one room and the radio in another. You use Boselink cables to connect the Lifestyle 38 media center to powered speakers, a speaker/amp combo, or another Bose DVD or CD system in each remote room. A 50-foot Boselink B cable with four output connectors for different components or rooms is supplied with the Lifestyle 38, but you'll need to buy another remote control for each additional room. If you connect several rooms, you may need additional cables. For my test, Bose supplied a 3•2•1 GS Series II system ($1,299) and an RC-38S remote ($149). I placed the system in an adjoining room and connected the Boselink cable. When I powered it all up, yep, I had a dual-zone thing happening.
DVD PERFORMANCE Setup chores completed, I started my audition with a DVD showing of Animatrix, a revisiting of themes from The Matrix trilogy via nine short subjects featuring computer-graphics animation and Japanese anime. Final Flight of the Osiris has amazingly realistic animation, and the Bose progressive-scan DVD player reproduced it cleanly. The veins across the computer-generated male actor's biceps were clearly visible, and so was the texture of his skin. The diffused light shining on the skin of the characters, as well as their swords, looked just right. No signs of oversaturation. The Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack was convincingly reproduced, with the satellites and Acoustimass bass module providing the kind of room-filling, high-quality sound that is a Bose trademark.
The Matrix-related Animatrix anthology helped the Bose system show off its DVD-playing chops.
MUSIC PERFORMANCE This sophisticated system put me in the mood for some sophisticated music, so I loaded a new DVD-Audio disc of Mahler's Symphony No. 1 with the Utah Symphony Orchestra conducted by Maurice Abravanel. The 1974 recording captured a great performance. The system isn't designed to play the disc's high-resolution tracks, but the Dolby Digital mix was still impressive. I could hear a good amount of detail in the massive orchestra, and the acoustic space of the Mormon Tabernacle was vivid in the surrounds. The long delay and reverberation added a sense of grandeur to this “Titan” of a symphony. In case you have stereo favorites you want to hear in surround, Bose provides its own Videostage 5 surround sound processing to synthesize multichannel playback even from mono source material.
Of course, the gee-whiz factor in the Lifestyle 38 is uMusic. To test this, I ripped a bunch of CDs. Getting your favorite music into the system is a cinch. Load the CD, press Store, and a few minutes later you're ready to load your next disc. Coldplay's A Rush of Blood to the Head, which runs close to an hour, ripped in about 4 minutes.
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When ripping is complete, the media center accesses its internal Gracenote CDDB database (covering 500,000 CDs) and identifies the album's title, artist, and genre, track titles, and so on. No problem with the Coldplay album. Trying something more esoteric, I loaded Lionel Hampton's Swingsation . It found that one, too. If an album isn't in the database, you can manually enter info using the remote and a character grid on your TV. Also, Bose issues quarterly CDs to update the database. Once my music was on the hard drive, it was easy to find any album or song, searching by album title, genre, artist, or track.
The coolest thing about uMusic is that it tracks your preferences so the system can play stored music with similar profiles when you select the uMusic playback mode. While I listened, I could indicate — using buttons on the remote — my strong like or dislike for a song, ask it to skip a tune, tell it to focus on more songs like that one, or ask it to play all the tracks on that album. Based on that input, uMusic then automatically prioritized my music — essentially assigning probabilities that a given selection will be played in the uMusic mode.
But what if you like classical and your wife likes jazz? No problem — uMusic has nine presets that can be assigned to different users, or you can use them yourself for party music, workout music, whatever. And you can select two uMusic presets for simultaneous playback in different rooms.
The uMusic system did a good job of playing the music I identified as my favorite type. I stored CDs ranging from Madonna to Mozart, but repeatedly told the system how much I liked Philip Glass. It dutifully gave his works a higher playback probability. Madonna, on the other hand, only rarely got the call. The system also had no problem sending different streams to my main and remote room.
Most important, I was happy with the sound of the stored MP3 files — pretty much what I would expect from original CDs encoded at a reasonably high bit rate. It wasn't quite CD quality but close to it. The highs were slightly dull, but there were no obvious distortions, and dynamic peaks seemed a tad softened. The stereo image was also slightly less clear than on the original CDs. I wouldn't want to store 200 of my favorite discs in the media center and then throw them away. But I'd be perfectly comfortable using its hard drive as a convenient way of playing music. After all, if I wanted full fidelity, I could always load the CD.
BOTTOM LINE The Lifestyle 38 system is a fine example of how technology inexorably evolves and improves. It builds on the essential features and quality of the previous Lifestyle home theater systems but adds the advantages of hard-disk music storage and instant access. Interestingly, the uMusic features tip the balance of this home theater system back from video to audio — something music lovers will surely appreciate. Bose has shown that a hard-drive music library can be managed with complete simplicity, and that even with 200 hours of music tucked inside, your favorites will never be far away.