Bose Lifestyle 48 Review

Coming in at the princely sum of just under £4,000 the The Bose Lifestyle 48 should be a killer a home cinema system, and we were as eager to test it as anyone. Not only promising to revolutionise your TV viewing experience, the Lifestyle 48 also guarantees to provide an ideal system for your music too, boasting on-board hard disk storage for up to 340 hours of music.

Getting the Bose Lifestyle 48 out of the box was like a little boy opening a Christmas present, but the result was slightly disappointing, at least aesthetically. The subwoofer unit looks like a PC cabinet, and although the eight (yes, you heard it right, eight) Jewel Cube speakers are cute, the main unit could be a bargain-basement unit from Dixons, not a £4,000 piece of kit. But looks aren't everything - lets take a look at the specs.

The Bose Lifestyle 48 provides playback for Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound and DTS. It can read DVDs, CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RW and MP3 CDs. It also comes with an RDS-enabled AM/FM radio built in. So far so standard. In terms of nifty technologies, well it does come with progressive scan, which is a bonus. Outputs provided are S-Video and composite video and there is one S-Video input. It also provides co-ax and digital audio inputs.

And yes... that's everything. Pretty mind blowing really - the specification could have come from any of the other units on this site and for £4,000 you might be expecting something a little more. But obviously specs aren't everything, lets hope its all in the performance...

Setting up the Lifestyle 48 proved to be no problem. Bose have provided a nice, helpful calibration configurator, which makes the arrangement of the speakers a breeze. Once you've tucked the subwoofer and the DVD unit away somewhere it doesn't look too beastly, and the speakers are even more cute once they're in position.

The performance test was next, and the sound quality is no disappointment. It is crisp, loud, clear and perfectly balanced. This is definitely a Bose unit - emersion was total. However the video was not quite up to scratch - the S-Video output made movement not as crisp and clear as it should have been, and even still images weren't as sharp as others in the range. Even worse, halfway through our test movie (War of the Worlds in this case) the DVD player froze. A bit of browsing on the net seems to show we weren't the exception either - other users have experienced the same issue.

So to sum up:

Pros

Reasonable specification
The Jewel Cube speakers are nice
Progressive scan support
Easy to set up

Cons

Very, very pricey
Not nicely designed
No SACD, DVD-A, DVD-R, DVD-RW support
Limited video outputs
Unimpressive video quality
DVD player reliability problems

Conclusion

The Bose Lifestyle 48 is a major disappointment. For an asking price of around £4,000 the functionality provided is slim and the functions that are provided don't seem to work properly anyway. However, the audio is exceptional, so if you're wanting a top quality system to use with your music collection, then it might be worth it, especially if you have a DVD player already that you can use. But just for home cinema - you'd do better with the other much cheaper units.

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