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Bose 3·2·1 GSX: Review

Posted to Lifestyle/ Mini Systems 2009-01-22

As with many other Bose products, the Bose 3·2·1 GSX DVD home entertainment system is in a class by itself. It's a complete DVD surround sound system with only 4 components - the base unit with DVD player, 2 Gemstone speaker arrays, and 1 Acoustimass hideaway sub-woofer system. The system manages to achieve the effect of a 5 speaker surround sound system from this simple arrangement.

The 3-2-1 GSX features a progressive scan DVD/CD player with HDMI output, a digital AM/FM tuner and video upscaling to 1080p. The unit can also store up to 200 hours of music direct from your CDs and includes a home-entertainment system universal remote control. The uMusic intelligent playback system automatically learns your favorite songs - it plays your favorite songs and skips the ones that you skip. The proprietary TrueSpace digital processing circuitry creates a multichannel sound experience with strong center imaging using just the two Gemstone speaker arrays.

Rating:

3.8 out of 5

Value

Most people are used to paying more for Bose quality, but the price on the 3-2-1 GSX system is a little extreme. You're getting an excellent surround sound experience from only 3 speakers, but the experience is not that much better than much lower-priced 5 speaker systems. You're paying quite a bit for easy installation and an unobtrusive system. This may be worth it to you if you don't want more components crowding your living room, however. The price coupled with the quirky DVD performance mentioned below brings down the value rating for this system.

Performance

The sound performance on this system is impressive. But the DVD player tends to hang or pause at the slightest imperfection on your DVDs. Sometimes not just cycling the power, but unplugging the unit is required to resume playback. And once you unplug it, it doesn't remember where it was and you have to find your spot all over again. This is a serious drawback in a system costing this much - Bose should have put much more error-handling capability into the DVD player.

Summary

You can't really beat the novelty and convenience of this system - it's very unobtrusive, and in these days of multiple components in and around your home theater system the size and number of components is refreshing. You pay a lot for this convenience, though and the DVD quirks coupled with the price add up to not a very good value for the money. Hopefully Bose will address the DVD problem in a future release of this product - then it could well be worth the price for the convenience and compactness it achieves.

Pros

Progressive scan DVD/CD player
HDMI output
200 hours of music storage
Complete surround sound with only 4 components

Cons

Quirky DVD player hangs too easily