The Bose® Wave® Music System is the successor to the Bose Wave® Radio, arguably the heavy-weight champ of table-top radios. But a new competitor has emerged: the Polk I-Sonic. Both offer an AM/FM radio as well as CD and MP3 playback. The Bose is renowned for delivering great sound from a small package. The Polk adds more features, such as HD Radio, XM Satellite Radio, and a built-in DVD player. I decided to take these two heavy-hitters home to see how they stack up against each other in terms of sound quality, radio reception, features, and overall performance.
Bose Wave Music System (left) and Polk I-Sonic (right)
Setup and first impressions
After unpacking both units, I placed them on an end table and plugged them in. I then took a step back to check out the styling of each system. The Bose Wave® Music System has a clean, somewhat elegant look, reinforced by the fact that it doesn't have any buttons (more on this later). The Polk I-Sonic has more of a modern appearance with a semi-circle of unmarked buttons above the display. Based solely on appearance, I could easily see people with traditional décors choosing the Bose, and those with more modern homes opting for the Polk.
After turning both units on, a bright, easy-to-read LCD display lit up on their front panels. The I-Sonic automatically goes into a setup menu so you can set the clock. I simply followed the onscreen commands using the included credit card-style remote. I needed to take a quick peek in the owner's manual to find out how to set the clock on the Bose, but setting the time was quite simple on both units.
As I mentioned earlier, the Bose Wave® Music System has no buttons, so the included credit card-style remote controls all of the system's functions. This actually works quite nicely since the remote is intuitively laid out and labeled well. However, as we all know, remotes can get lost. Fortunately, if you do lose the remote, a replacement is available directly from Bose.
What's on the radio?
It was now time to fire up both systems. For my first test, I decided to check out the reception and sound quality of local FM radio stations. The Wave® Music System did a fantastic job here. Reception was great, even with weaker stations. Stronger stations had very little, if any, perceptible static. Treble was clean and bass was surprisingly rich.
This system also has a nifty feature called "talk radio." This function improves sound quality when listening to (not surprisingly) talk radio stations or programs. It removes the low frequencies that can sometimes cause spoken voice to sound abundantly bass-heavy. The result is much more natural-sounding voices. A push of a button on the remote toggles this feature on and off.
Reception on the Polk I-Sonic was also good, though not as consistently good as the Bose, at least in my area. For example, I heard a small, yet discernable, amount of static on some stations. However, one advantage the Polk has over the Bose is its built-in HD Radio tuner. It was able to tune in a digital HD Radio station here in the Charlottesville, Virginia area, and it sounded great — better than the same station did on the Bose with its analog tuner.
The Polk I-Sonic also lets you enjoy XM Satellite Radio if you add an optional XM Mini-Tuner. According to our product research team, the I-Sonic controls the tuner, with artist and song information appearing on its LCD screen. I wasn't able to try it out personally since I don't have an XM Mini-Tuner, but I'm sure satellite radio fans would appreciate the I-Sonic's XM capabilities.
