Celebrating 60 Years with the Ultimate Rewind

To commemorate 60 years of world-class sound innovation, Bose Corporation is celebrating the company’s Diamond Anniversary with a number of multi-media, virtual, and in-person promotions, offers, giveaways, and more.

As part of the Bose 60th-anniversary celebration, we launched an immersive, digital timeline experience to honor our history and explore the cutting-edge ways we’ve transformed sound over the decades. While our official story started when Dr. Amar Bose founded Bose Corporation in 1964, the Bose Automotive narrative began to take shape during an era marked by the first space shuttles, the launch of the PC, and the launch of Super Mario Bros.: the 1980s.

The timeline kicks off the decade in 1983 with a particularly groundbreaking GM project. This initiative resulted in the launch of the first car with a factory-installed, custom-tuned premium audio system to ever hit the road: the ’83 Cadillac Seville. From there, the Bose team was led to think about other ways to enhance the audio quality experience in an automobile. How could they bring the same performance and realistic sound quality from a large, multi-component speaker system into a vehicle? After a decade of research, they had their answer: the Acoustic Wave Music System—the first compact, all-in-one loudspeaker. By 1986, the team introduced an innovation that, for the first time, enabled high-performance woofers to be built into the doorframe of a vehicle: the Neodymium Driver.  

The Bose audio innovations not only made their mark in the automotive world; they paved the way for groundbreaking technology in aviation, with noise-reducing headsets that enabled clearer communication across airline pilots.  

Revisit one of the most dynamic eras of creativity and advancement by visiting the ‘80s decade in the Bose timeline here. And be sure to check out the Diamond drip earbud giveaway here.