Well, now I've owned the car for a couple of weeks, I'm now able to give the verdict on the Bose system, especially in comparison to the Bose fitted to the Porsche and the Harman Kardon systems fitted in BMW's and Merc's.
I'll get straight to it...the Maserati Bose is AVERAGE at best and I can't imagine how poor the standard system would be. Why so?
Firstly, it really lacks any sort of depth to the bass - it's there alright, and it's reasonable at higher volumes but at normal listening volumes it really lacks any punch (the Porsche was particularly good in this respect in that you could
feel the bass without it overpowering the overall sound quality). Also, when you do turn it up the doors have a tendency to vibrate a little.
With the above in mind, I thought I'd do some further investigating to see what some of the extra cost of the Bose system gets you and also to have a stab at fixing the vibration in the doors.
Firstly, as you can see from the picture my car definitely does have Bose and it also has the large(ish) sub in the back shelf that non-Bose cars don't have (honestly, I've from what I found, I really had to convince myself that it had it!).
I then proceeded to remove the door trims to see what lay beneath - a remarkably easy task as I got hold of the the step-by-step instructions.
Before....
After - here's what it looked like with the trim off and I could straight away see a few things...
1. The very, extremely, disgracefully poor mid-range woofer in the door. Made of paper and foam and with a tiny magnet, it's a very basic speaker and has no mention of it being Bose at all. It even says it's made in Italy...which I don't believe Bose products are!
Looking at this speaker, I can't actually believe the system sounds as good as it does (!) and I can only assume it's the same speaker as fitted to the standard audio system. Therefore, it appears the Bose upgrade gets you better amplification and a few extra speakers (and I would hope the extra ones are of better quality than these!).
2. The tweeters are actually branded Bose items - how odd that they used these branded (and therefore genuine) Bose units for the tweeters but didn't bother to change the woofers! If I'd have paid for this upgrade on a new car I'd be a bit p!ssed off and I'm actually considering lodging a complaint with Maserati for selling a Bose system that doesn't even have proper Bose components!
3. The metal section of the door that the speaker is bolted to (they're good quality bolts at least) isn't the most solid which is why the speakers can vibrate the metal of the inner skin. This was easily rectified with some sound deadening material called Dynamat - it's a heavy and very flexible rubber-type product with a very strong adhesive that you stick onto any section of metal that could vibrate from sound. This dampens the panel and therefore stops it from vibrating from sound....the car already had some factory fitted on the inside of the outer door skin but it was pretty poor quality and already peeling off so I replaced it with some of my new better quality stuff.
Sorry but I forgot to take pictures of this but I basically covered as much of the entire inner section of the door with this stuff before refitting the weatherproof membrane (the white cover you see on the pics above). In all honesty, this membrane had lost all of it's sticky properties too so didn't fix back on very well - I've ordered a replacement one!
So, I've currently got one door which has had it's inner panel damped and the other door which hasn't....is there a difference? Well, yes there is....the door with the Dynamat doesn't vibrate now whereas the other door still can do so I'll be doing the other one when I get back from holiday in a couple of few weeks. It's a worthwhile exercise and I'll try and remember to tae some pics of the 'modified' panel when I do it.
Ultimately, whilst the system just about sounds good enough, I really think these speakers could do with an upgrade. The problem is the area where the tweeters fit as this is VERY small and as far as I know, there isn't a decent set of component speakers on the market that'll come with a tweeter that could fit in the space available. I'm not sure how effective just fitting a better set of woofers would be so if there are any expert audiophiles on here or if you know someone who can advise me then please let me know!
