I just recently reviewed the Bose Lifestyle 12 system. My review was not favorable, some of the reasons were the lack of expandability, the poor sound and the fact that it was way overpriced. The lifestyle system was however a "home theater" system as well as stereo. It also came with an amplifier and processor as well as a cd player. The AM5 is different. This system includes two bose cubes and their base module (subwoofer). Again as with all bose cube systems you must run the speaker cable (which is incredibly thin by the way, mabye 18 gage) into the sub from the speakers and then into the receiver/amp. The reason for this is so you don't blow the speakers. How this works is inside the base module there is what is basically a light bulb. The funtion of this light bulb is to absorb any excess power that may be coming from the receiver. So in other words you can hook up any receiver and not worry about blowing the speakers. Great. Thats what I want, my 120 watt/channel receiver only putting out 40 watts to the speakers! This leads of course to not getting the value out of your receiver and also translates to terrible sound.

Now the main beef I have with this system is its lack of expandability. Many people will start out their home theater system with a good quality home theater reciever and a pair of speakers. The logic behind this? So if a person is under a limited budget they can go one step at a time, thus aquiring a better system. This makes sense and was something I often told my customers to do when I was in the electronics industry. This however was a great problem when I ran into someone that bought the AM5 system from someone else. The reason being that they would come in and want to expand their AM5 by adding a center speaker and rears. Well I watched many a ticked off customer walk out of the store because I had to tell them that they had to buy a whole new system if they wanted to stay with bose. You see bose only gives enough ports on their sub for two speakers, and since you must run bose cubes through the sub, then you're out of luck. Pretty clever on bose's part? Probably not.

What I reccomend instead is either the energy or Mirage satelite systems. You can run these little guys strait to any amp. They are capable of handling over 100watts per channel. They also offer a seperate mid and tweeter as apposed to bose's sigle mid setup. The mid on the bose system's is made of paper. On the mirage you get polypropolyne mids and a titanium tweeter. Crystal clean highs and amazing imaging results. For the bass, you can optionally (wow!) pick up their sub. The FRXS8 is a 8" powered sub with a 100watt amp built inside. This combination not only sounds great but gives you the option to expand your system when you are ready. One other thing to mention is the price. The Bose AM5 sells for about $999.00 US as compared to the Mirage system that you can pick up for $500.00-$550.00. No contest here. Buy the Mirage.