Bose Wave CD/Radio Needs Redesign

Problem of the month —
Power Outage

At first glance, the battery back-up feature in a piece of audio equipment seems superfluous. Does it really matter if you have to tune in a couple of stations after the loss of AC power? Actually, it does.

In modern digital CD/radio units, tuning is a time-consuming process, especially if you’re not sure of the exact station frequencies you want to set. Up-Down buttons are a poor substitute for the direct-feedback, continuous action of an analog knob. That inconvenience aside, modern equipment allows you to store ten or more settings for AM and FM, the time, and perhaps the mode in which you prefer to listen to your CD tracks-sequentially, randomly, repeated, and so on. So, if you actually take the time to use all the capabilities of the equipment, then, yes, it is a big deal when you have to do it all over again just because of a power outage.

Thus, battery backup is a boon to even part-time radio/CD listeners. The problem with the Bose Wave Radio/CD unit I recently purchased is that the battery backup is only specified to maintain the stored settings for 24 hours.

I live near Tampa, Florida, the lightning capital of the US. We often have power problems. I lost power for two days recently when a tropical storm came through, but I didn’t lose the station settings on my $100 RadioShack short-wave/AM/FM receiver. The settings in that product are maintained for months or until you run down the batteries through heavy use.

Not so with the $500 Bose unit. When power was restored after two days, the time display blinked at me, demanding to be reset with the same urgency of the clock in my electric stove. Of course, the stove has no battery back-up feature at all. However, the Bose equipment does have a feature that allows me to test the battery to see if it needs to be replaced. I marvel that the designers could take the time to include that capability but chose not to design the backup feature to have at least the capacity commonly found in less expensive products. The heavily-promoted Bose Wave CD/Radio needs a redesign to make it more user friendly when there is a power problem as described.

Tom Lecklider
Engineering Editor, 
TLecklider@nelsonpub.com

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