Make sure to get some Monster Cable to go with the Bose gear! 
I was dining at a restaurant somewhere up in NYC about 10 years ago, and complimented the waiter on the incredible speakers. Couldn’t read the logo on them, but he did: Paradigm. Incredible high and middle ranges.
Oh, don’t even get me started. Saw a 3’ hdmi cable for $150 the other day and it was all I could do not to track down a sales guy and chew him out loudly in front of the whole store for that kind of bullshit.
I’ve been in the rather awkward position of installing Bose Acoustimass a couple times (for a while my boss had a deal with a sort of installation referral agency, we’d get called out to install something someone had bought at a big box store). What do you say when someone asks you to confirm that the system they just shelled out the big bucks for is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but you think it’s crap? I usually just said “I’m sure you’ll be happy with it.”
I contracted at Bose when the Acoustimass speakers were first introduced, over 15 years ago.
Amar Bose rejects mid-range drivers at the cellular level. He thinks you can get equally good response out of any sized speaker if it’s designed right. Their flagship 901 speakers are 9 drivers, 1 facing forware, and 8 facing the back wall to make use of its acoustic properties to magnify the sound.
I worked in the A/V department, who created all the demos. They acknowledged that a good portion of their job was to fill in the great hole in the midrange of that system. Their chief sound engineer at the time, the guy responsible for optimizing the marketability of the sound of all Bose product, didn’t even like the sound of Bose speakers. He thought they were too “cold”.
It was an open secret amongst everyone below top management that if it wasn’t for their marketing allowing them to charge big bucks, they would have gone out of business years ago.
Yeah, some of the oldies are still good units. We have a pair of Klipsch rear speakers that work pretty well with the NHT towers in front on the home audio setup. I still miss my CV! D-7 monitors, though.
Vibration absorbing paint won’t do much. What you want are acoustic panels, typically made of 1" thick dense rigid insulation with a cloth covering over it. These guys make some decent inexpensive ones.
Things like carpet and tapestries will absorb some of the high frequencies, but they are lousy in the midrange and below. The result is a room that can sound ‘boomy’. The thicker, denser panels are good at absorbing broad spectrum sound, and really on stop being effective at the lowest bass frequencies.
If you are interested in good sound quality, here’s the cheapest, most effective thing you can do - buy a couple of 2 X 4 fabric covered panels, and put them at the ‘first reflection points’ on your walls. The first reflection point carries a lot of sound energy, which bounces off the walls and heads for your ears. But since it is traveling a little further than the sound that came directly from the speaker, it arrives somewhat out of phase. This destroys imaging, can cause comb filtering effects, and make your equipment sound muddy. By absorbing energy at the first reflection point, you minimize this effect.
You can find the first reflection point by having someone put a mirror flat on the wall. With you seated in your normal listening position, have the person slide the mirror along the wall until you can see your speaker in it. That’s the first reflection point. Cover it up. If you don’t have acoustic panels, you could try putting a soft chair there, or a wall hanging, or whatever you’ve got that might absorb or diffuse the reflection. Do the same for your other speaker. There are also first reflection points on the floor and ceiling and back wall. The floor usually has carpet on it, which helps. Typically you can’t do much with the ceiling. But speakers are designed to minimize the amount of energy that goes out vertically, so the important reflection points are the ones on the wall.
A lot of home theaters built by people who know what they are doing typically have the entire back wall covered with acoustic panel material, and then the lower 48" of the side walls also covered. This results in a fairly ‘dead’ room with excellent imaging, but with the top half of the room ‘live’ so the ambient sounds from the surround speakers sound natural - which is exactly what you want for 5.1 surround sound. That’s the way I built mine, and it sounds great. If you do it yourself, it’s not expensive. All the acoustic material for my theater was under $300.
They won’t. Bose is very smart about how they demo their speakers - they use a ‘near field’ demo environment, with the speakers very close to your ears. Near field means the only sound you hear is coming straight out of the speakers, and not reflecting off of other surfaces. This allows them to precisely engineer their demo CDs to sound the best - they equalize them to help flatten the otherwise horrible frequency response of their speakers, and control the imaging to really ‘wow’ you. The other advantage of these demo kiosks is that it keeps Bose products away from the other speakers so you can’t do an A/B comparison.
But when you get them home and set them up in a typical listening environment, they won’t sound anything like they did in the demo.
That should be prosecutable fraud, in my opinion.