BOSE PROFESSIONAL

Earlier this year, Bose Corporation announced the sale of its Bose Professional division to private equity firm Transom Capital Group (Transom), effectively making Bose Professional its own standalone company. Soon after, Transom appointed John Maier as CEO of Bose Professional. Here, Maier discusses his background in the industry, his role in the transition, and the ideas, vision and excitement he has for Bose Professional moving forward.

www.boseprofessional.com

Left: The new PowerShareX adaptable power amplifiers build on the success of the existing PowerShare amplifier range, providing even higher power levels and enhanced features, making them the perfect complement to Bose Professional loudspeaker systems.

Right: Cathedral Basilica of Christ the King, located in Hamilton, Ontario Canada, completed its renovation in 2022. The Cathedral moved from a pew-back audio system to an integrated solution consisting of MSA12X steerable array loudspeakers and DesignMax loudspeakers. This ensured both music and spoken word were rich and clear throughout the sanctuary and balcony, while also blending into the nearly century-old architecture.

“Bose Professional has been a part of Bose Corporation for more than 50 years, and I like to joke internally that in a way Bose Professional has been something of a ‘pirate ship’ within Bose, because it is a very specific channel with specific customers, yet there is a lot of brand crossover. Consumers of headphones or home speakers may recognise the Bose name on products used in restaurants, hotels or stadiums, but those products and its customers are very different because it’s a very technical sale.

A few years ago, Bose Corporation made the decision to sell the Professional division –quite a big deal since it’s not often a leading global brand sells off a successful part of itself. Transom Capital Group was the partner selected, and effective 1 April of this year, Bose Professional is owned by Transom. Since then, we have worked quickly in the background to move through the steps required to carve out Bose Professional as an independent company.

Throughout my career, I have held various positions including CEO of Blue Microphones and TC Group Americas, where we built several brands including Tannoy, LabGruppen, TC Electronic and Lake. I then had the opportunity to join Transom as an operating partner for several years overseeing Mackie before they asked me to lead Bose Professional – a chance I jumped at because the idea of focussing my attention on a brand that I really admire was very exciting.

At this point, we are three months into being an independent company. And while we are still working with Bose Corporation, we are adding operational resources and have rounded out our leadership team including the appointment of Mark Ureda to the Board of Directors. Mark brings nearly four decades of experience across a variety of strategic leadership roles, including many of them in the pro-AV industry.

Transitioning away from Bose Corporation like this enables us to make sure there is no disruption of business so we could ship and deliver products to our customers – and so far the process is going very well.

For us to be fully focussed on our own destiny is important and I have had a lot of discussions – both internally and externally with customers and vendors – to understand where our biggest opportunities lie.

The main thing for Bose Professional to remember is what got us where we are today – and leads us to focus on what we call our ‘middle market’, which includes hospitality, retail, houses of worship, higher education facilities and corporate.

In Europe and Asia, we are involved in larger projects, such as soccer stadiums and racecourses, but our core is more aligned with those aforementioned markets. With that, we are looking at what we currently offer right now, and assessing those options to see if there are any gaps in our product offering where we don’t have the whole solution to fulfil certain projects in those markets. On the other side of that coin, we want to make sure that what we do have provides robust and flexible options as well. It will be a case of doubling down on what has been the key to our success, making sure this is maximised, and then moving on from that point of strength and expanding on it.

Examples of our expansion includes the move into video conferencing with the Videobar VB1 and VB-S devices, and collaborating with other leading brands like we did recently with the launch of our new PowerShareX adaptable power amplifiers.

Our relationship with Powersoft enabled us to take advantage of a robust and proven technology platform to develop products that are fully integrated into our ecosystem –helping our customers create a wider range of audio solutions, faster and more efficiently. It is a very exciting time for us and our customers. We are in a unique position to build up and expand the business as we separate from Bose Corporation – keeping the parts of our heritage that make us great while adding to them. As all of this continues taking shape, we will assess what this means as we evolve our brand.

It’s not often when an opportunity presents itself to create a new company with such a rich legacy whose main purpose is to create incredible audio experiences. And we are working extremely hard to roll this out in the coming months.”

PROJECTION: WHAT’S THE ATTRACTION?

By Mark Wadsworth, Vice President of Global Marketing for Digital Projection.

www.digitalprojection.com

With guest expectations at an all-time high, it’s never been more important for visitor attractions businesses to invest in the right technologies. From theme parks to museums, galleries, heritage sites and resorts, demand for interactive, participatory attractions has led to the development of immersive AV technology that places the visitor inside the show – with projection, despite recent challenges, continuing to offer the best experience for companies operating in this important industry vertical.

Why Projection?

Despite the popularity of alternative display technologies, such as LED, in other sectors, projection remains by far the most suitable technology for museums, visitor attractions, art exhibitions and other cultural sites, given its unique mapping, blending and 3D capabilities.

People are no longer content to view an exhibit or attraction passively – they want to be immersed in it, exist within it, and interact with the attraction and its content – and it is projected images, with their with their unrivalled image quality, ability to completely fill a visitor’s field of view, and suitability for mapping onto buildings and irregular shapes, that provide the optimum means of delivering this experience.

Ahead of the curve

This is borne out by consistent growth for Digital Projection in the attractions sector, especially in expanding markets such as the Middle East, with some huge projects on the horizon. This growth is driven partially by recent advances in projection technology, such as Digital Projection’s Multi-View and Satellite Modular Laser System (MLS) systems, whose ability to deliver realistic immersive experiences that engage all the senses – be they large-scale projection-mapping visitor attractions, traditional exhibits in museums or the next generation of dark-ride content and interactivity – is elevating the visitor experience to previously unheard-of levels.

With the ultra-fast frame rates (360fps) exclusive to the Multi-View projection system, for example, a single projector can for the first time provide multiple visitors with a collective 3D experience, allowing them to see and interact with stereoscopic content and with each other in a truly shared, collaborative way. Tailor-made for visitor attractions, this award-winning technology can enable virtual tours of ancient buildings, 3D rides in theme parks, or a lifelike experience of an invaluable artefact exhibited in a museum. Though still important, brightness and resolution are no longer the only factors to bear in mind when it comes to display technology.

When it comes to visitor attractions, smaller, quieter and brighter is also a constant requirement. No one wants big, heavy and noisy projection systems in a museum or planetarium which can distract from the content being shown. It is for this reason that we developed Satellite MLS, which allows very small and compact projection heads to be used in almost any situation, with all the heat, noise and bulk situated up to 100m away thanks to a proprietary fibre connection. This makes it possible to meet the growing yet seemingly contradictory demand for brighter, yet smaller and quieter, projectors.

Smaller and/or modular systems really come into their own in environments with limited space, which includes many museums and visitor attractions venues. These systems make installation a reality in places where previously it was very difficult – in heritage sites and historic buildings, for example, where it is often impossible to hang big, heavy projectors.

Additionally, accurate colour reproduction, such as that offered by 3-chip RGB laser projectors, is becoming more and more important, given many attractions’ reliance on visitors’ social media photos and video to help build buzz. Though once the preserve of very high-end applications, the cost of RGB laser is now at a point where they are accessible to a wider market.

Challenges and opportunities

PThat’s not to say it’s all been plain sailing for projection technology, particularly in recent months. According to Futuresource Consulting, market volume in the front projection sector fell 10.4% in Q1 2023, compared to −8% in the worldwide flat-panel market overall, as economic headwinds – including the supply-chain crisis, low economic growth and high rates of inflation – hit projector manufacturers, integrators and end users. However, this data is skewed by the fact that the same period last year was characterised by a post-Covid ‘boom’, which saw many major projects finally going ahead after years of delays. Additionally, experts believe that the global chip shortage, which has wreaked havoc on the pro-AV business as a whole, will ease as 2023 progresses as governments and industry continue to invest in superconductor production.

With its unique market position and technological offering – along with strong demand from the attractions sector, as well as other verticals, such as education, simulation and the workplace, creating new pathways for immersive technology – the outlook is bright for high-end projection.

Above: The Spirit of Japan art exhibition at the Kadokawa Culture Museum deployed more than 30 Digital Projection E-Vision Laser 10K projectors. Below: Digital Projection technology is helping to breathe new life into the work of Alphonse Mucha at the Eternal Mucha exhibition in Paris. Photo by Maxime Chermat.