Improved Bluetooth connectivity and immersive audio experience for widely favored and comfortable earbuds
Bose has upgraded its popular QuietComfort earbuds, delivering exceptional noise cancellation and enhanced immersive audio capabilities. Priced at £300 (€350/$300/A$450), the QC Ultra earbuds outshine the excellent QC Earbuds II by £20, positioning them alongside industry leaders such as Sennheiser, Sony, and Apple.
Unlike the redesigned QC Ultra headphones, the earbuds feature subtle exterior improvements, including the incorporation of 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 combination of silicone earbud tips and wings ensures a secure and comfortable fit in your ears. The package includes various sizes for customization, allowing for optimal comfort, and the Bose Music app offers a fit test.
Intuitive touch-sensitive controls effectively manage volume, playback, noise cancellation, and sound modes. Maintaining a consistent six hours of noise-canceling battery life from previous models, the earbuds provide three full charges in the case, offering up to 24 hours of playback. This competitive battery performance places them on par with some of the top contenders in the market.
Specifications
Water resistance: Designed for sweat (IPX4)
Connectivity: 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
Outstanding noise cancellation coupled with improved immersive audio.
These earbuds feature some of the most effective noise cancellation on the market, outperforming many headphones in their category. Comparable to the QC Earbuds II, they excel at minimizing undesired background noise, such as hums, roars, keyboard clicks, and ambient chatter.
The “awareness” mode is impressive, providing a natural sound with an automatic loud-noise reduction system that guards against sudden, loud sounds like screeching train wheels. Similar to the Ultra headphones, these earbuds offer customizable modes, enabling 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 an impressive sound, maintaining Bose’s trademark of clear and controlled audio processing. This technology adjusts the music balance to the volume level, ensuring a rich audio experience even at lower volumes. While they tend towards a bass-heavy profile, the Bose Music app includes an equalizer for users to fine-tune the audio based on their preferences.
A new addition is the 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 enhances 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 lead the way in supporting Google’s instant Bluetooth pairing and Qualcomm’s high-quality aptX Adaptive audio format, in addition to the standard SBC and AAC formats, providing significant 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, which is convenient for calls, they can only connect to one device at a time.
Sustainability
Bose expects the batteries to last for more than 500 complete charge cycles, but they are non-replaceable, and the earbuds currently lack repairability, making them essentially disposable.
Certain replacement components, like ear tips (£15) and a charging case (£90), are available. However, these earbuds do not include recycled materials. Bose offers discounts for returning defective products but does not publish individual product environmental impact reports, choosing instead to release 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 continue to set the standard for noise-cancelling earbuds, outperforming their counterparts by effectively suppressing external noises.
Beyond their exceptional noise-cancelling capabilities, these earbuds deliver pleasing sound quality, reliable battery life, a secure and comfortable fit, and a compact case that stands among the best in its category.
The Ultra model introduces subtle yet stylish metallic accents. Key upgrades include enhanced Bluetooth features for Android and immersive audio for all platforms, offering a more lifelike audio experience for TV and movies, though the impact on music may vary. 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.