Bose QuietComfort Earbuds Review

We were excited to test these competitively-priced earbuds from Bose. As expected, they sound great and offer excellent noise cancellation. Unfortunately, an incredibly inscrutable user interface made them too frustrating for us to recommend them to our friends.

Performance Comparison

Sound Quality

After listening to our extensive, genre-spanning playlist on repeat, our panel of audio experts declared the Bose QuietComfort earbuds to sound great but not quite excellent. Higher-tier Bose products are decidedly better, but you can only really tell that in close comparison. We don't think many will be disappointed in these earbuds because of how they sound.

Bose tends to excel in creating a cinematic listening experience — drama, intrigue, it's all there. That's true of the QuietComfort earbuds. The bass is boosted, the trebles sparkle, and the mids are a solid bridge between the two. It's just that their shine is just a smidge duller than the rest. The EQ in the factory settings feels slightly off, resulting in a sound that can feel overly sculpted and slightly blurred around the edges.

It's not the most detailed, precise mix, but it is fun. “F**k a War” by Geto Boys demonstrates their playfully dramatic personality. The demanding bassline grabs your attention while warm vocals and crisp percussion samples add polish. The chorus sounds more excited than shrill at the 2:41 mark and practically demands that you dance.

Bass-heavy EDM sounds especially good. The thumping bass in “The Business” by Tiesto at 0:39 is a solid example. The low frequencies are warm, rich, and powerful, though a bit heavy-handed at times. While they occasionally lack definition, the bass is generally controlled, making for an engaging listening experience.

The highs are clean, vibrant, and exciting, adding a bit of sparkle to the bass and mid frequencies. While they are pleasant and reliable, never sounding harsh or sharp, they lack enough detail and clarity, preventing them from reaching top-tier precision. They also feel slightly compressed and could benefit from more prominence in the mix to truly shine.

Take “Guilty As Sin” by Taylor Swift, the chorus that follows the bridge at 3:14 is a standout moment, bursting in with a dynamic, sparkling, and powerful energy. The percussion delivers a hearty punch, while Swift's layered vocals add an ethereal quality. The earbuds handle these dynamic shifts skillfully, maintaining power without tipping into harsh or tinny territory. There's no need to adjust the volume.

These earbuds are also powerful. They reach normal listening levels at just a few clicks above silence. They maintain their sound quality across volume levels, delivering impressive bass lines with minimal distortion, offering a loud and full sound.

Soundstage

The soundstage of a pair of earbuds describes the sense of depth and spatial awareness they're able to create. Though it's uncommon for earbuds to create a truly expansive soundstage, they are getting better, making it possible to feel like the music is unfurling around you. Our testers are split over how well they accomplish this mission, but we can agree that they do a pretty good job.

They build a relatively broad soundstage, with enough stereo spread to allow you to pinpoint each instrument and vocal note in space and time. However, while about half our testers find the soundstage impressively immersive, the other half experience it as relatively narrow and more compressed than they'd like, pointing to Led Zeppelin's “On Kashmir” as a missed opportunity to capture a dramatic orchestral experience.

The half that were impressed felt classic hip-hop tracks like “Public Enemy No. 1” by Public Enemy soar with these buds, sounding powerful while building a swirling soundscape. And, despite the big sound, details like the soft sneeze at the end of “The Little Shepherd” by Debussy are still audible, offering much-appreciated realism.

In either case, they certainly aren't as cinematic as the Bose QuietComfort Ultras.

After extensive hands-on testing, we brought in our Brüel & Kjaer Type 5128 Head Simulator and SoundCheck software to validate our impressions. We mapped the frequency response of the QuietComfort earbuds, and we compared it to our GearLab House Curve.

The result tracks the house curve very nicely, with just a slight elevation, or emphasis, in the low mid-ranges and a few underemphasized areas in the treble ranges. That explains the slight lack of shine in the higher registers.

User Experience

To test user experience, our test team tried every feature, connected to multiple devices, and wore these earbuds in a variety of circumstances. We found that these earbuds are not easy to use, receiving one of the lowest scores in this metric, mostly due to connectivity issues. They're also really big, making it hard for even some of our larger ear testers (mostly men) to get a good fit.

Even the case feels cheaper than previous versions, just a hull of hollowed-out plastic without the easy-to-use buttons that other versions offered. It's also bulky and hard to fit in a pocket. We expect more from Bose.

Comfort

The large size of these earbuds limits their comfort for many testers despite a generally pleasant and ergonomic design.

Testers with smaller ears found them wildly uncomfortable during their first use. And several of our female testers are unable to wear them properly. To get them in place, you slide the earbuds in vertically before rotating them to the side. A few testers' ears aren't large enough to accommodate the design. Even testers with large ears had difficulty at times.

The 3 silicone ear tips and 3 silicone wing sizes do little to help those with small ears. If the buds do fit, the wing, which forms a theoretically softening ring around the earbud, can twist, interrupting the seal.

Most of us adapted well enough to enjoy the impressive sound quality for at least short periods at a time, but these buds are undoubtedly best for those with larger ears. Even then, they don't always feel great, often feeling heavy, sticking out of your ear further than most, and creating the feeling of cabin pressure in your ear canal as though you were on an airplane.

Stability

The Quiet Comfort earbuds do feel stable though, even in smaller ears — a little too stable on occasion. At times, especially during a sweaty workout, they can almost feel suctioned into your ear, which is pretty gross. Again, our testers with larger ears experienced fewer stability issues.

Customization

The app is significantly different from previous Bose versions. It's much simpler, and not in a good way. While the layout is clean, it offers few adjustable features, and instructions are hard to find online. With so many versions of the QuietComfort line, Bose's links sometimes route you to instructions for the wrong model, adding to the confusion.

There are some of the usual features, like EQ adjustments, including presents and fully customizable sliders, but nothing is intuitive to use. Trying something as simple as adjusting how the touch controls function is extraordinarily frustrating. There are some glitzier options. For example, you can teach the earbuds to learn your voice and use it to control your phone remotely to, like, take a photo. But that's a pretty common feature these days.

The potential for these earbuds, based on how they sound, is really high. With app and firmware updates, some issues may improve or be resolved entirely. We'll check back in a few months and see if any of the bugs get squashed.

Connectivity

In a word, the Bose Quiet Comfort earbuds' connectivity is bad. It's the main reason that these otherwise impressive sounding buds didn't get anywhere near an award.

If you connect them to multiple devices, like your phone and laptop, they will often jump back and forth between them based on which one you are physically closer to. We've had issues with other Bose buds, but we can't remember it being this bad. Previous releases also made it easier to remove previously connected devices or perform a factory reset to address the issue.

They even randomly disconnected with our Brüel & Kjaer Type 5128 Head Simulator every 10 minutes, making some of our tests far more difficult to complete. It's the first time we've had so many complications in our testing process. It doesn't seem to work better or worse with either Apple or Android products; they're equally bad with both.

Noise Cancellation

Bose earbuds consistently offer the most stunning noise cancellation technology on the market. The new QuietComfort buds continue the legacy. While wearing these, we can barely hear ourselves typing at our desks, and the conversations of coworkers nearby fall away completely. If you're looking for a cone of near silence, these can provide it.

Earbuds lower the impact of surrounding sounds by physically blocking sounds, which works best for higher frequencies, and actively canceling out lower-frequency sounds. We tested how well each set of earbuds does each, using the Brüel & Kjaer Type 5128 Head Simulator and SoundCheck software. First, we play cafe sounds without the earbuds in place, then we place them without the ANC activated, and finally, we activate the ANC. Listen to the results in the video below.

As you can hear, simply sealing your ears with the buds does a lot to quiet a room. Turning on the effective ANC feature turns down the volume.

The graph below shows the results of the ANC test. As you can see, the QC earbuds reduce all background sounds by at least 10 decibels. In all but the highest and lowest ranges, they are able to lower them by between 20 to over 40 decibels. It's a pretty good result, though they aren't as strong below 100 Hz as we'd like.

Battery Life

The QuietComfort battery life is above average, lasting 9 hours in our tests, which is longer than the 8.5 hours that Bose claims. We tested them at a 75% volume level without activating the ANC feature. If you tend to leave your ANC on at all times, you'll have significantly shorter runtimes.

Still, we find that these can get you through the workday, especially if you're good at remembering to put them back in the case whenever they aren't in use. Be careful, though; the silicone wings can interfere with the charging pins if they're out of place. There's nothing more frustrating than coming back to dead earbuds because they failed to engage properly.

The case should hold 2.5 charges before you need to plug it in. That's around 31.5 hours of listening time. Bose claims that the case charges wirelessly, but we couldn't get it to work. The QC earbuds also lack the quick charge feature that many earbuds offer, wherein a 5-minute charge will give you an hour or more of runtime. You need to leave the buds in the case for at least 20 minutes to get another round of entertainment, though it will last longer, around 3 hours.

The battery life prediction is often very off base. To be fair, activities like using ANC or talking on the phone take more battery power and are difficult to predict, but these earbuds struggled more than most in this aspect.

Call Quality

To test call quality, we primarily test the earbuds' microphone and its ability to isolate your voice from background sounds. To do so, two of our testers, one female and one male, read a script that we played through the mouth speaker of our Brüel & Kjaer Type 5128 Head Simulator. Then we either left the room silent or played office or subway sounds in the background.

SoundCheck software helped us analyze the results, which you can hear for yourself in the video and audio clips below. These earbud microphones can struggle to isolate and translate voices above background sounds.

With the jarring sounds of a subway platform in the background, the earbuds' microphone doesn't transmit every word clearly. It particularly struggles with the lower tones of the man's voice. The volume seems to cut in and out as he speaks. The same is true for the female voice, though it is less obvious.

They fare better in an office environment. The background noises are eliminated. The man's voice does vary in volume, but it's easy to understand both voices.

In a quiet room, you can hear both voices clearly, but a few words are hard to hear when the male voice is speaking.

Should You Buy the Bose QuietComfort?

Not yet. They sound great and are comfy enough if you have larger (mostly male) ears. But the connectivity issues will drive you bonkers. The price may be enticing, but we don't recommend these earbuds to any of our friends. The lilac color is nice, though.

What Other Earbuds Should You Consider?