Hi everyone, this video is an in-depth,
long term ownership review of the Bose Noise Cancelling 700 Headphones.
But before I jump in to the details, let me layout the summary.
How much do they cost? About £290.
How is the sound quality? Perfectly balanced, no overbearing bass or screeching highs.
How is the noise cancellation be it on street or in the tube or in an aeroplane or in an
office? In one word: Brilliant How is the battery life? Even
after one and a half years of ownership, I get about 17 hours on a full charge and ready to go for even
longer after a quick 15 mins charge How is the comfort? Beyond your imagination.
On average I wear them 8 hours a day! Are they worth buying still? Definitely!
Let me just start by thanking everyone for the kind comments and likes on my previous video
review for the Bose smart home speaker range. That being said, if you are new here please subscribe
for future videos and as always if you like the video, please leave me a comment or a like.
Housekeeping out of the way, now on to the review.
In this video review, I will be looking at What is included in the box;
Built quality and design; Features
Comfort; Sound signature and frequency response charts
Noise cancellation efficiency test with detailed charts
Audio quality test with sample and finally, The conclusion
Don't worry, you don't have to remember all this, i have added timestamps to the video
so you should be able to jump to specific sections using the seek bar or links in description below.
Though I do recommend watching the full video to get an in-depth understanding of the product.
Let's start by looking at what's in the box? So, in the box you get the headphones, Audio cable which has
a 2.5mm jack that plugs in to the headphones and 3.5mm jack to the audio source. The audio cable
can be stored within a small pocket within the carrying case, which is also included. And yes,
the headphones can be used without battery using the included audio cable. You can also connect
the headphones to your audio source using the audio cable with noise cancellation feature working.
Let's jump on to built and design The headphones come with a USB C
port for charging, which is a blessing in disguise. It means one less charger
and cable to carry when travelling. Not only that, they can be charged using any Type C
cable and charger; be it your mobile charger or even if you want to use a MacBook Pro charger; that works fine.
The headphone band is made of solid stainless steel which has a super soft gel like foam
which is covered with silicone. At first, I didn't like the use of silicone, especially
because my previous headphones were Bose QC35 2nd series which has a velvety material but with time
I realised that the silicone is way better than cloth because its super easy to clean
and unlike cloth-based padding it doesn't soak up hair products if you use any in your hair that is!
In terms of cleaning all I have to do is wipe it with a damp cloth and i am done!
The ear cups are covered with foam based cushions covered in protein leather and are
way better quality in comparison to both QC35 and 25. Both the QC35 and 25 cushions wore off
after the first year of use. These have on the other hand, have no signs of wear and tear so far; even though
i use them everyday and even at the gym. The only small gripe being, that they don't stay put when
lying down. So if you like to do decline crunches at the gym, they will fall off.
The cushions are replaceable and you can buy an original pair from Bose directly for £25.
Volume, call and music controls are touch and gestures based. For volume up
and down just slide your finger on the right ear cup; skip to the next track by swiping forward or
previous track by sliding backwards. The material seems to have a some sort of coating which makes
these gestures so amazingly smooth. Gestures is another thing I wasn't sure about before buying
these headphones as gestures are always a bit of a hit or miss. But on this one they work perfectly.
Features Let's start with connectivity.
They allow paring with two devices at the same time. Which means that you can connect them to
your phone and your laptop, TV or any other Bluetooth audio device at the same time. When
you get a call, the the audio on your laptop will pause, or if you had them connected to your TV,
then the movie will pause automatically. Not only that you can use the play pause touch
controls to play pause movies on your TV when connected to the TV via Bluetooth. This might
be dependent on the TV but I have personally tested it with FireTV and it works perfectly.
The touch based media controls also work for your mobile be it you are watching a movie on Netflix
or listening to music. it also remembers all the devices you pair them with and the Bose music app
allows you to choose which device to disconnect or connect to. There is a physical button on the
headphones to allow paring and switching devices it is connected to without having to use the app.
Recently, Bose has also added an equaliser control in the app,
which allows you to edit the output of bass, mids and high. All ranging between -10 to 10.
The headphones also allow for adjustment of the amount of noise cancellation ranging from 0 to 10.
Wherein at 0 the headphones actually push in the surrounding noise in to the headphone in case you
were to have a quick conversation with someone and didn't want to take your headphones off or
may be you were just walking home at night and wanted to be aware of your surroundings.
You can pick the noise cancellation levels and set them as favourites so when you press the
noise cancellation button it will cycle through these presets to adjust the noise cancellation
levels. More details on Noise Cancellation in the noise cancellation section, where in I have
tested out the efficiency of noise cancellation to see how much noise does it actually cancel out.
The headphones also support voice prompts which announce things like who's calling,
what device you are connected to, noise cancellation levels, battery levels and so on.
I personally found them a bit annoying and turned them off but not to worry, these voice prompts are
replaced by audio tones to show acknowledgement of action. There is also an audio alert for when you
lower the volume down to minimum or maximum. Even with the voice prompts switched off, you can hear
the battery life remaining in hours by taping and holding the right earcup. This is super helpful.
The headphones have voice assistants support built in
for example Google and Alexa. I personally don't use these due to privacy concerns and secondly I
don't necessarily find the voice assistance feature very useful on headphones as is.
Comfort Comfort is one of the
most outstanding quality of Bose's headphones. You can wear them for over 12 hours and not feel any
discomfort or tiredness. This of course isn't true when the headphones are new especially because of
the stainless steel headband but after a couple of weeks, the headphones adjust to your head
and the discomfort does away. I personally wear the headphones for hours everyday, even when I
don't have anything playing on them. I just like to turn on the noise cancellation to in order to
relax and enjoy the peace and calm. The best thing about the noise cancellation is that even though
it cancels out majority of the noise it some how makes those tube announcements clearer and easier
to understand when travelling on a tube. And if you live in London, you know how difficult to
understand they can be to understand because of the noise levels on the tube. This is somewhat
of a safety feature on Bose headphones to cut out all the noise but allow some minimal human voice
to make sure you have enough noise cancellation with slight awareness of your surroundings.
I also use them on aeroplanes and my workplace just for noise cancellation purposes. Especially
in an office environment they are great to help you focus on and cut out the surrounding noise
even if you have a quiet office, you will notice a difference with noise cancellation on and off.
Sound Signature and frequency response chart With the launch of this new series of headphones,
Bose changed its sound signature, which was the first thing I noticed with the NC700.
If you look at the frequency response chart that I have plotted as part of the tests for the
headphones, you can see that the overall curve is still pretty 'flat-ish' with a slight more
focus on the bass. The headphones start responding at about 40hz in the low frequency range and go
all the way up to 12khz. This might seem odd but is expected for a Bluetooth headphone. I would
suggest not to compare this frequency chart to the specs mentioned by other headphone companies on
their website as most of the companies specify the frequency response based on the speakers
used in the headphone and not the actual frequency response f the headphone. This is the reason why
Bose doesn't mention the frequency response for its products as it can be quite misleading.
Anyhow, to summarise this section: if you are a fan of a flat frequency response with crisp highs,
balanced mids and not over the top bass, then the NC700 will be a perfect fit for you.
Noise cancellation efficiency test with detailed charts
The noise cancelling 700 headphones use 8 microphones for cancelling noise. Of the
8 microphones, 6 are used for the regular active noise cancellation
and the remainder 2 are used for voice calls. Though when taking calls using the headphones,
the noise cancellation is done for your voice as well in order to cut out the
environmental noise from the voice calls. When on a voice call, the headphone uses
4 microphones wherein 2 of them are dedicated mics for calls and other two are borrowed
from the active noise cancellation microphones. This works a treat in reducing the noise from
voice calls which is an area most of the other Bluetooth headphones consistently perform poorly.
Next up is noise cancellation efficiency samples for when travelling in London tube
during rush hour and flying in an aeroplane. For each, I have recorded 2 samples one with and other
without noise cancellation. This should give you a good idea of how these headphones perform
out there in the real world. I won't be processing these audio samples
in anyway and would recommend getting on your headphones for this part.
In both the samples, the noise cancellation works quite well with a drop of about 20
decibels of noise. Which is amazing! Let's dive a bit deeper and look at the
how effective is the noise cancellation in different environments.
It performs way better in an aeroplane than a tube and that's because the noise is constant
in an aeroplane and there are no screeching high when inside an aeroplane. This
is in spite of the fact that the aeroplane is louder than a tube. In the bar graphs you
can see the performance of noise cancellation at different settings from off to all the way to 10.
Blue colour is for ambient noise and yellow is for the sound you hear post noise cancellation.
I have created these graphs based on the values i captured during my tests for the headphones.
Audio quality test with sample Alright, time for an audio
quality test. I would recommend getting on your headphones for this part. The audio
is recorded on my high definition stereo microphone and is not processed in anyway.
All the equaliser settings are at zero as well. The song I am using for this test has a good
balance of music and vocals. The recording is one minute long and if you rather listen
to the music-heavy part, then feel free to skip the initial 50 secs of the song.
Conclusion
Time for conclusion. I am going to keep this simple.
Sound is very subjective so its difficult to recommend something based on what it sounds like.
But in my opinion these headphones somehow achieve the perfect balance between the audio quality,
noise cancellation and above all comfort. Something a lot of people
don't necessarily consider and is somewhat of a rare find these days.
In one line: I would definitely recommend these headphones over many other out there.
Bose's audio quality combined with comfort, quality of noise cancellation, transparent
sales policy and brilliant customer service definitely make a case for these headphones.
Finally, thanks for sticking around for the whole video. If you enjoyed this review, then please do
check out my channel a detailed comparative review of Bose Home speaker range vs the Soundtouch 20.
Please leave me a comment or a like and subscribe for future videos. Thanks, bye!