Enhanced Bluetooth and immersive sound for popular, comfortable earbuds
Bose’s popular QuietComfort earbuds receive an upgrade, featuring top-notch noise cancellation and new immersive audio capabilities. Priced at £300 (€350/$300/A$450), the QC Ultra earbuds surpass the excellent QC Earbuds II by £20, positioning them alongside leading competitors like Sennheiser, Sony, and Apple.
In contrast to the redesigned QC Ultra headphones, the earbuds undergo subtle exterior enhancements, incorporating metallic accents. Despite these changes, they maintain a similar appearance to the Earbuds II, characterized by their relatively large size and flat stalks pointing towards the mouth.
The pairing of silicone earbud tips and wings ensures a secure and comfortable fit in your ears. The package includes various sizes, allowing you to customize for optimal comfort, and the Bose Music app offers a fit test.
Intuitive touch-sensitive controls manage volume, playback, noise cancellation, and sound modes effectively. Maintaining a consistent six hours of noise-canceling battery life from previous models, the earbuds offer three full charges in the case, providing up to 24 hours of playback. This competitive battery performance puts them on par with some of the top contenders in the market.
Specifications
Resistance to water: Suitable for sweat (IPX4)
Connection: Bluetooth 5.3 (SBC, AAC, aptX Adaptive)
Battery life: 6 hours (up to 24 hours with the case)
Earbud dimensions: 17.2 x 30.5 x 22.4mm
Earbud weight: 6.24g each
Charging case dimensions: 59.4 x 66.3 x 26.7mm
Charging case weight: 59.8g
Charging case: USB-C
Exceptional noise cancellation paired with enhanced immersive audio
These earbuds boast some of the most effective noise cancellation available, surpassing many headphones in their category. Comparable to the QC Earbuds II, they excel in minimizing unwanted background noise, including hums, roars, keyboard clicks, and ambient chatter.
The “awareness” mode impresses, delivering a natural sound with an automatic loud-noise reduction system that protects against sudden, loud sounds like train wheels screeching. Similar to the Ultra headphones, these earbuds offer customizable modes, allowing users to create various combinations of noise cancellation and sound modes for quick switching.
Remarkably, call quality is excellent, effectively isolating your voice from background noise and maintaining a natural sound on both ends of the call.
The earbuds deliver impressive sound, upholding Bose’s trademark clear and controlled audio processing. This technology adapts the music balance to the volume level, ensuring a rich audio experience even at lower volumes. While they lean towards a bass-heavy profile, the Bose Music app features an equalizer for users to fine-tune the audio according to their preferences.
Introducing the new immersive or spatial audio mode, where sounds emanate from virtual speakers surrounding you, creating a sense of space rather than being directly channeled into your ears. The “still” mode synchronizes with head movement, consistently anchoring audio to a fixed point ahead, enhancing realism. This feature significantly elevates the immersive experience of movies and TV shows and is compatible with phones, computers, and tablets of any brand—a departure from most systems.
These earbuds pioneer support for Google’s instant Bluetooth pairing and Qualcomm’s high-quality aptX Adaptive audio format, alongside the standard SBC and AAC formats, offering notable advantages for Android or Windows users. As standard Bluetooth 5.3 earbuds, they effortlessly pair with a button on the case. While each earbud can be used independently, convenient for calls, they can only connect to one device at a time.
Sustainability
Bose anticipates the batteries to endure over 500 complete charge cycles, but they are non-replaceable, and the earbuds currently lack repairability, rendering them essentially disposable.
Certain replacement components, such as ear tips (£15) and a charging case (£90), can be obtained. However, these earbuds do not incorporate recycled materials. Bose provides discounts for returning defective products but does not release individual product environmental impact reports, instead opting for annual sustainability reports.
Price
The Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds are priced at £299.95 (€349.95/$299/A$449.95).
In contrast, the QC Earbuds II are priced at £279.95, the Sony WF-1000XM5 at £259, the Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 3 at £189, the Jabra Elite 10 at £230, Google Pixel Buds Pro at £199, and Apple AirPods Pro 2 at £229, providing a spectrum of options for comparison.
Verdict
The Bose QuietComfort Ultra earbuds maintain their status as the benchmark for noise-cancelling earbuds, effectively suppressing external noises more proficiently than any counterparts.
In addition to their impressive noise-cancelling capabilities, these earbuds offer a pleasing sound quality, dependable battery life, a secure and comfortable fit, and a compact case that rivals the best in its category.
The Ultra model introduces subtle yet stylish metallic accents. The key upgrades include enhanced Bluetooth features for Android and immersive audio for all platforms, providing a more lifelike audio experience for TV and movies, though the impact on music varies. The additional £20 compared to the already outstanding Earbuds II seems justified for those in the market for a new set, but it may not be worthwhile for an upgrade.
While there are alternatives with superior sound quality, platform-specific features, and more discreet designs, the Ultra earbuds excel in effectively silencing the daily commute. Despite the availability of spare parts, the inability to repair or replace the battery diminishes their longevity, resulting in a deduction of one star.
