Bose A20 upgrade

I don’t know what kind of cable is this about but €150 and sending them your cable and making your headphones unusable before getting replacement sounds ridiculous to me.

The ‘special limited time offer’ is EUR 150,- per cable assembly

Does that mean it’s 150 euros for a limited time, to generate a frenzy, and then the price drops to 80 euros or something when it’s just an upgrade offer?

Especially as you can get music etc into the A20 via the 3.5mm jack socket. After all, the headset has to be plugged into the headset socket anyway… it’s not as if you had a wholly-bluetooth headset, and I would never have one such anyway because it would rely totally on battery power which is another big hassle.

Bose charged GBP 150 for replacing the mike assembly on the Bose X, some 10 years ago. They shipped thousands with faulty mikes (output about 50% down), and processed them under an indefinite warranty in the USA but they washed their hands of this in Europe. I replaced four of the mikes (£600) and then sold them on US Ebay where somebody got them swapped under the US warranty

As I am still looking for a good offer on the A20 (they had one worldwide where you got 200 EUR gift for any other Bose product but I missed it), I will try to get the new one directly. Hopefully the European sellers will not sell the old one secretly.

I’ve had the old headset for about a year now and love it. I’m still going through my PPL formation, so I am not really listening to music at all, but would certainly be interested in the upgrade for using skydemon etc. in the future, as long as it doesn’t render my headset useless for too long :/ .. Reading Bose’s reply, it certainly also seems a little ridiculous to me. Currently I’m flying 3-4 times a week and would not be interested in using another headset. Surely there is a more logical way than what is currently described!?

How does skydemon relate to the bluetooth capability?

What I can’t understand is why Bose did not fix up their various dealers, say Headset Services at Shoreham, with swap-over mike assemblies. But this doesn’t seem to happen anymore; when I went into HS a while ago over that A20 recall (vague memory) they didn’t want to know at all. Maybe they just repair out of warranty gear… things have changed a long way since the days of the faulty Bose X mikes.

I’m still going through my PPL formation, so I am not really listening to music at all

Pilots seem to fall into two camps. Those who listen to music and those who don’t.

It very likely correlates with who does a lot of flying in an environment where one can be non-radio legally and practically, and – many will disagree but hey that’s what we are here for – there isn’t much opportunity for that in the UK or even I would say in N Europe. Even though you can fly all over the UK in Class G and legally non-radio, it deprives you of the opportunity to work with ATC where it helps them (e.g. flying past Farnborough at 1500ft non-radio (like most traffic down there does) is not great when they would prefer you at 2400ft because they are trying to get a jet out of there… and then when Farnborough puts in a request for CAS the whole UK GA scene goes berserk and moans about their loss of civil liberties) and it deprives ATC of the opportunity to tell you that you have screwed up and are about to bust airspace (and we all do that sometimes). Also traffic service is worth a bit…

The place I can see myself flying with music would be in some super scenic place like crossing the Alps, and I have the full audio-in functionality built into my plane whereby the music is automatically muted (not suddenly but with a progressive ramp) if I or ATC speak, but normally I really dislike it. Some passengers like it but I then have to disconnect them so I don’t hear it, and anyway passengers have other options e.g. smartphone earpieces worn under their headsets. And finally the most irritating thing of all is when I am flying as a passenger and the pilot puts on some music which I can’t stand So this may be an issue for you, or it may not, but I think it’s fair to say that most pilots don’t listen to music while flying.

But the headsets are also worn by passengers, so they can all listen to what they want, from whatever device they have. They definitely won’t bring 3.5mm cables unless you tell them to, and they probably won’t have any, anyway. They could also wear their regular earbuds under the headset, though.

For myself, I am not interested at all, but my wife’s will get the upgrade. The other passengers will have to make do with the inferior wired-in Bose X’s.

Hi Peter,

The reason I mentioned Skydemon – Is that they offer voice over warnings if you are entering into a particular airspace, to low in certain areas, or off course . Not saying that I use it, or that I wouldn’t find it annoying, but it is something that I would be willing to try if I would be able to get audio from my iPad through my headset. I don’t have the experience or knowledge of majority of the pilots here, so I really am still finding my feet (so to say), and have not tried it.

I also have no idea if I will listen to music once I am fully licensed, or not. I just mentioned I would be interested in the update, if it didn’t render my headset useless for too long.

Lets see how it all goes .. First I need to earn my stripes :)

they offer voice over warnings if you are entering into a particular airspace, to low in certain areas, or off course

Isn’t that what someone rightly called “Volksverdummung” ? I mean, you need to be quite stupid to enter into such a course, but of course we all have our moments of stupidity. But even then ATC will generally be quick to assist, and generously. This seems to me a solution to a problem that isn’t really there.