Apparently, according to Wikipedia there's a debate about whether Bose's audio equipment is high-end, or whether their pricing is held up largely by marketing and hype. I was always under the assumption that Bose wasn't for audiophiles--that was never the point--it's conspicuous consumption. You buy it because it's expensive, and you can show off how much you spent--sort of like buying a Rolex. There are better watches for that kind of money (as well as much more expensive watches)--and I mean "better" from a horological standpoint; whether this is actually useful is another issue--which extends the metaphor. You can't show off real awesome audiophile speakers because they're made by Japanese companies of which most people have never heard. And anyway, if you really want amazing sound, you probably are spending as much--if not more--money redesigning the space in which the speakers go--than than on the speakers themselves. But it's not sexy to show off your new bafflers.
(Personally, I have never liked the way Bose speakers sound; most of their advances seem to be more about design and other considerations than sound per se.)
The whole thing about audiophile speakers is really weird to me because most music is made with the fact that most listeners will be listening speakers aren't that good, and, really, on such a range of different speakers, that what it means for a recording to be "amazing" isn't well-defined. Motown (the record label) famously mixed their albums assuming people would listen to them through a car dash; for decades, the industry standard speakers ("monitors" in the parlance of the industry) for mixing and mastering music was the Yamaha NS10, which are actually notorious for sounding particularly bad and unfaithful.
The idea of chasing a Platonic ideal of sound reproduction makes slightly more sense if you listen primarily to mid-side (with an old RCA 77) recordings of jazz trios playing in cathedrals. But that's inherently fraught too, because sound recording itself isn't very precise. If you've ever seen, for example, a (frequency) response curve for a microphone, you would wonder why people would spend that much money on speakers: even expensive microphones generally aren't that faithful; in fact, they're not supposed to be, because that tends not to sound very pleasant. (It wouldn't be unlike watching a movie shot entirely with infinite depth-of-field.) They actually do make microphones that are extremely faithful in recording sound--but these microphones are generally not used to record music--they're used primarily to measure other microphones. So it's still weird to me that you would want to spend a lot of money to reproduce perfectly an input that already has a lot of coloration--and this speaks nothing about anything else in the input chain (acoustics, pre-amps, recording medium, &c.).
So yeah, there isn't really an objective "ideal"--trying to make things sound perfect is like chasing rainbows. You can, however, make things sound good, but it turns out that that's a lot cheaper: all you have to do is turn the bass and treble up and turn the mids down.
(In case you're curious--but no one probably cares--I actually use fairly expensive (though people in the industry would call them "midrange") studio monitors at my desk. In my living room, I have the kind of old-school speakers that count as furniture: at the end of the day, I think all you need is a speaker that can push air, and a system that's powerful enough that you operate it mostly within its reasonably linear range.)
