I've got quite a bit of experience with applying for trademarks in Australia, so here's my five cents (rounded up because we don't have one-cent and two-cent coins).
If the name is too generic ("soundwave" for example) then you'll get knocked back on the grounds that it's too common a term. If it sounds at all like another trademark (mis-spelled, phonetic similarity, etc) then you'll get knocked back, too. The same goes if there's a trademark that is built around that word or term: no go. They're far more critical on trademark applications than anyone could logically anticipate, I promise you.
An alternative to registering a word is to register an image containing the word(s). In this case, nothing fancy is needed: it can be as simple as just tweaking one of the letters within the term (elongate a tall letter, for example). You'll have to make sure that this difference is noticeable and substantial enough to be simply described on your application, though.
I've found that
TMarque (
http://tmarque.com.au) is a great site for checking out the possibility of trademarking a word or phrase within Australia. It will allow you to step through the classification process and will alert you to any problems which you may face in submitting/registering the trademark. You can also call the guys that run TMarque with any questions you might have. In my experience they're more than happy to answer a potential customer's enquiries regarding the trademark process and will also offer you advice on how best to get your word/phrase registered (they're lawyers by trade, by the way).
Once you've submitted the trademark to be registered and it's passed by "the panel", your pending trademark is published in a gazette for all other Australian trademark holders to view (not that they necessarily do, obviously). They have three months from that point to lodge any concerns they might have about your trademark, which is plenty of time for Bose (or whoever else) to make a move. Once the three months has passed and providing that no entity has raised an objection to your trademark, it's registered. At that point you pay around two thousand dollars
per class for a ten-year trademark.
You probably know most (if not all) of this already but I thought I'd best write it here just in case you're not aware of a few of the points mentioned above. I'll also add that the most important thing you must do is to seek legal advice
before you lodge the trademark so you don't end up wasting your money by making uninformed decisions (as I did when I first started out).
Feel free to contact me if you've any other questions or need some Australia-specific guidance. Best of luck!
Cheers,
Entropy