I had a 08reg A4 with the Bose system and the bass was full and present. Very deep. I loved it. Listening to music was a pleasure.
Now I have a B8.5 A4 with B&O system and I have to say the bass is extremely underwhelming. I've done some reading on this and come to the following conclusion:
The 12 speaker setup is all marketing BS. Music simply doesn't sound good with surround sound. Movies, yes! The B&O system has no setting for the Subwoofer level, whereas the Bose did. The B&O sounds good, but you have to turn Surround off.
You also have to adjust the settings according to the music source which you didn't have to do in the Bose. I know the Bose gets a lot of bad comments, not having nice fidelity and having boomy bass, but I don't find it to be boomy at all. The bass was deep and tight. I used to have the Subwoofer setting at 2 clicks past middle and it was beautiful.
The B&O just lacks deep bass. It's present, but if I wanted the same result as on my previous car, I have to increase the bass right up, but then it makes a thudding sound rather than tight bass. If there was a separate setting for Subwoofer like for the Bose, I would be interested to see the difference.
And as I eluded to earlier, the right music source is required, and the settings need to be adjusted according to whether you're listening to BT source, DAB or CD which is a bit of a nuisance.
Bottom line is if you want the B&O to sound good, or have better bass, you have to faff around with the settings, and if you like your deep punchy bass, it's simply not there. With the Bose, you had plenty of it and you had the ability to adjust subwoofer level. The 2 speakers worked perfectly fine as well
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