The premium headphone market overflows with active noise cancellation options from Sony, Apple, Sennheiser, and countless others, but Bose is still the brand that essentially invented consumer ANC and continues to push the technology forward. The QuietComfort Ultra is the top of the line from Bose and marries its most advanced noise cancellation with class-leading spatial audio capabilities that few competitors can match. Right now, Amazon has dropped the price from $429 down to $329, the all-time low for Bose’s best headphones.
Three Modes That Adapt to Your Environment
Bose QuietComfort Ultra has three different listening modes that redefine the way you interact with the world around you: Quiet Mode with full noise cancellation, puts you in a personal bubble of quiet that rejects airplane engines, traffic noise and chatty coworkers. All of this occurs via a series of outward-facing microphones that detect ambient noise and inward-facing processing that generates inverse sound waves to nullify noise. Aware Mode turns the tables, piping environmental sound back in through the headphones so you can hear announcements, conversations, or oncoming traffic without ever having to take your headphones off. Immersion Mode melds maximum noise cancelation with Bose Immersive Audio-their spatial audio technology that envelops your head with three-dimensional space.
CustomTune technology tailors the sound profile to your ears: When you first don the headphones, they play a brief tone and measure how sound reflects off of your unique ear shape. It then adjusts frequency response to compensate for how your ears naturally emphasize or diminish certain frequencies. Two people listening to the same headphones will hear slightly different tuning optimized for their individual anatomy, ensuring that you get the most accurate sound reproduction possible.
The microphone system stands out for good reason: in practice, it really does deliver clear phone calls. It’s powered by six microphones that collaborate to lock in your voice and filter out background noise, wind and more. You can take calls from a busy street or a windy park and the person on the other end hears you clearly without competing noise.
Comfort is essential when you are wearing headphones for hours on end: The ear cushions employ soft, conforming foam that doesn’t develop pressure points, and the headband evenly distributes weight around your head. Materials feel high-quality with a refined finish; professional enough to use in work settings. The 254-gram weight puts these headphones right in the middle of premium over-ear headphones, light enough to comfortably wear but substantial enough to feel well-built.
With noise cancellation on, you can get up to 24 hours of battery life which means multiple days of use between charges. Toggling on Immersion Mode with spatial audio reduces that to 18 hours, still likely more than enough for a week’s listenings for most people. A 15-minute charge gets you 2.5 hours of playback, which is enough to top off at lunchtime and make it through the afternoon.
For $329, you’ll get tech worth upwards of $400, backed by decades of expertise from Bose itself.
