- Bose, quiet comfort earphones
truly wireless little dynamites from Bose.
Here's a product that should have come out two years ago.
You would have thought that Bose would have been first
to market with active noise canceling,
truly wireless earbuds,
but they weren't.
I think Sony was.
And actually that's you go to expect them to do it too
but this is a quite a long time coming.
You would have expected Bose to have followed earlier.
I haven't used these yet.
I know sometimes I sneak my unboxings
with ear phones and headphones
and I actually listened to them before the episode.
But with this I didn't, this is a sealed box.
So let's make that not true.
Yeah.
Oh,
simple box.
Oh, okay.
I thought I had a hinge.
I liked the presentation, simple.
Not a tiny case.
Oh my God.
Do I have to actually press this button?
Oh, that's okay.
I mean, it's going to keep it closed in your bag better
I guess.
This is kind of a chunk
and I already looked at the battery specs of this thing.
You get six hours of playback on the earbuds themselves
and then an additional two charges
or 12 hours from the case.
And that's not a lot, really for the size of this case.
This is not a case that I want to carry around in my pocket
but I can chuck it in my bag
and then I'll be able to do that safely
because it has this little button.
You can see there's a battery life indicator.
It looks like I got three out of five dots right now.
But before I open that up and look at the buds themselves
let's go through the rest of the box.
Little presentation stand.
That looks like there's a quick start guide here.
Explains the fit, explains the controls,
has a bunch of Finish language stuff I don't care about.
Yeah. That's about it.
Safety instructions.
Really? What a waste of paper.
Thanks regulations.
No one's reading this crap ever,
ever reading that.
And then we've got charging cable USB type C to type A.
The C end goes into this port on your charge case.
No wall work pretty typical.
This is like 10 inches long or something.
And then we've got two different types of sleeves here.
These look like different sizes of the exterior sleeves.
This is the part of the sleeve that,
actually it's all integrated.
This is the left.
Part of it is the silicone ear tip
that'll go in your ear canal to try to create a tight seal
for base response and passive isolation.
And then you've got the kind of wing tip here,
that's going to go in this part of the ear
just to keep it all in place
so there's three points of contact on the sleeve.
And that appears to be it,
hold on secret compartment.
Oh,
there's a treasure in there.
What does this say?
I can't read what that says.
I'm just gonna eat it.
Mindfreak.
All right. Let's check out the initial setup
using my Pixel 4.
Some earbuds have the pairing button on the charge case
instead of the earbuds themselves
and that's what I prefer.
And yes, inside this glossy box
there is a button with a Bluetooth logo beside it.
Here's the buds themselves.
Glossy just looks kind of cheap to me, but whatever.
Let's try to see how do these work
downward and twist.
Oh wow.
I enjoyed that.
They played like a welcome sound.
Kind of like a THX, like this big rising treble
and then the big boom
like drop the bass and it sounded really lifelike.
And then it said connected.
So that's pretty cool.
This has like a soft touch rubber lid, which is nice.
I guess that's just really gentle
and maybe it would stop a vibrating noise
if these were rattling around.
Just go to my Bluetooth settings here
and before I they're right there.
Wow. As easy as it's supposed to be.
That's great.
I'll press this pair button
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Okay. So they're paired
it's telling me right in my settings screen
that I have 90% battery, which is cool.
If I hit the settings,
these days they pack a lot of features
just right into the Android settings menu.
These earbuds in particular, there's not a lot here.
You can turn on and off HD audio,
toggle whether or not phone calls are allowed on them,
media, audio and contact sharing, which I will keep off.
Even though this does support the Google assistant
so you can respond to your text messages by voice
and it'll type it out and send the messages for you
without having to open your phone.
So if I did plan to keep these
and I wasn't just at work right now,
working for the man.
Then yeah, I probably would,
I would do that.
Oh, let's see if we can use Google play music
for another couple of weeks
before it's like officially dead.
Not now YouTube music.
Oh, I love this track.
Totally underrated tool song reflection from ladder Alice
comes near the end almost completely instrumental.
Now is AC,
is A&C on right now?
These sound pretty good,
but I'm going to open up the companion app
and see how to use these things here.
Cause they're touch.
That didn't pause it.
Swipe, okay.
I think I paused it with a swipe.
Use the touch surface to control your earbuds
view product tips in the app to learn about touch controls.
Ah, I've got a sign up.
I need an account.
Continue with Facebook.
What does this an Oculus Quest 2.
Allow notifications.
The only option is got it.
There's no, yes or no.
No. You don't need access to location.
What.
If not enabled the app cannot discover your Bose product.
Oh my God.
Only this one time.
Thank you, Android for exposing detailed location controls.
Double tap the right ear but to play or pause audio.
So the swipe I did earlier
it must've just been like an incorrect.
Alright double tap.
Double tap to pause and play.
That's kind of a waste of an interaction.
Cause usually it's just one
but I guess it keeps false positives for happening so much.
Maybe like maybe I can change that later though.
Use a shortcut touch and hold the left earbud
to skip a track,
so it's a hold,
or check the battery level.
You can decide.
You can customize your shortcut and settings.
Oh, that's a bad sign to me.
Like I can't just bind any action to any interaction
I have to like, with this interaction there's two options.
I don't like that.
Okay. So noise cancellation's fully on right now.
Okay and I have a bar here.
I can turn it up and down.
That's cool.
And I haven't had that on like say like QC 25's.
It's just a toggle.
It's either all on or all off.
But I feel like active noise canceling and transparency
is more important on a device like this,
where I'm going to be walking around.
I might be at the office.
I might be in the elevator
and a colleague is trying to talk to me
and they're not going to do that with big headphones on,
but this is nice.
And if you put all the way down now,
now it sounds like to me like the mic's
are actually picking up my voice
and reinforcing it into my ear.
So it's actually less isolation
than just the passive isolation.
And I believe I can do that on the headset itself.
So let's find out how that's done.
Settings.
Okay control.
In ear detection.
Auto play and pause.
Let's try see how quick the auto play and pause is.
I've been generally disappointed
with the latency on other headphones,
particularly like the OnePlus ones were pretty bad for that.
I think the Sony ones,
those like working out Sony ones
I covered were pretty bad for that.
So let's see how good it is.
Pretty much similar.
I think it's just a Bluetooth limitation
because on their website it says like it's instantaneous.
It just pauses as soon as these advanced sensors
detect that you moved it.
Like micro sensors are so crap like that.
I would expect that to pause like here.
Pause.
Like, yeah.
It's a little awkward.
Not a deal breaker.
And it seems like that's just the standard, so okay.
Auto answer call.
Yep. Don't leave that on.
That sounds annoying.
Auto transparency.
Noise cancellation changes to level zero
when you're only wearing one earbud.
That's a nice option to have.
Some people just rock one earbud all the time though.
So they would have want that off.
But personally that annoys me.
I hate thinking that one of my ears is gonna wear out
sooner than my other one.
Like, you know how like your ears are kind of like
like an ocean crashing on a rock cliff
and over time your ability to hear
just gets eroded.
I don't want that to happen more to one year than the other.
So I just can't have one in.
Shortcuts.
Touch and hold left ear bud to use your shortcut.
Oh. So you can make your shortcut bound to
hear battery level.
Battery 80%,
or skip to the next track.
Oh, that is not a good sign.
That's it for controls?
Like what the hell is going on in here?
Double click is pause.
It just keeps going quiet for a second like.
So okay, double tap is pause on the right.
Double tap on the left.
Oh, I think double tap
is toggling through the different levels
of noise cancellation.
Yeah. So you can see right here.
I'm full now, I double tap.
Boom I'm at half.
I double tap, it's gone.
Okay. So it's made three tiers by default.
You can access by double tapping. Okay.
And what if I hold on the left?
All right I already did that,
that's my shortcut.
What if I hold on the right?
Hello Google assistant, what's up?
If these are touch then can't I swipe for next and previous?
Why? I'm so,
so disappointed.
I'm like Kevin Sorbo levels of disappointed right now.
Disappointed.
Why you gave us touch controls.
Why can't I like customize what the actions do?
Why can't I swipe for next and back?
That's like so intuitive.
Why can't I swipe for volume up and volume down?
I don't even have the option.
So under utilized.
I could throw this right now.
Before I get like really rage quit on these
let me just listen to them a little more.
I'm critically listening don't look at me.
Don't.
How loud are these.
So noise canceling off.
They're still pretty isolating
with the noise canceling off.
These go loud.
Oh, it's hurting me now.
Geez. Yeah okay they go plenty loud
and they don't sound great when they're maxed,
that's for sure.
That was like harsh.
But the base is nice and low.
I know a lot of people don't listen to metal,
but I always like to test headphones with it
because it is a good test of the highs
because guitars that are loud
they just sound like crap on crappy headphones.
So let's use,
BYOB is a good one.
I like BYOB cause it gets to the point
like pretty quick in the intro here.
Got to do the fit test.
♪ Lies from the tablecloth. ♪
All right. The fact that I started having a lot of fun there
they're good.
They're pretty damn good.
But I still can't really recommend them
because they cost $280.
These are 280 US dollars
and they're not perfect which is why that's too much
especially in light of the competition.
Which is like the Sony WF-1000XM3 are now only 170 bucks.
And they're not alone at that price level.
That's where you find the pixel buds, the new ones
they're are 180 bucks.
That's where you find the galaxy buds live.
They're also like 170.
AirPods pros are like 330.
So they're 50 bucks cheaper than AirPods pro.
So I guess Bose feels pretty happy about that.
But honestly, these are pretty comparable
to those XM3's from Sony,
which have a smaller and more premium looking case.
Like they're way more bougie
and I would feel like way more like when I pull them out.
Like yeah, check out my XM3's.
Like they're sweet.
They have like two tone black and copper.
These don't look that cool.
Like no one who like wants AirPods
is going to see you with these
and be like whoa I screwed up by getting AirPods
even though these sound way better.
They like, they don't look that cool.
They're kind of like big beans,
I'm kind of disappointed with that.
I was hoping they'd be a little smaller than the XM3's,
they're not.
They do sound awesome
but the fact that they screwed up the interface
so royally.
I'll give them this.
They can probably adjust it in software.
They could probably do an update and give me more controls
and they should Bose.
You should.
Oh, you made such a good product,
you're just devaluing it.
Anyway if they fix that
and if the price comes down by a hundred bucks,
like, so they're competitive with that other price tier,
then these will probably fly off the shelves
and then I'll recommend them
cause they sound awesome.
And they're going to have like market leading
noise cancellation as well.
But until then,
I just think they kind of botched it a little bit.
And this case is just kind of big and clunky.
They need to get a lot cheaper.
That's all there is to it.
Okay. A couple of things before we go that I didn't mention
you can charge this wirelessly
it's a wireless charging case.
If you have the correct phone, like a Pixel five
you could even just put it on there.
You get power that way.
That's kind of cool.
They also apply active noise canceling to the microphone
from the right earbud.
So I think you'll have to take calls from the right ear bud
but your voice should sound more clear
cause they'll take out some noise around you.
As long as it's like predictable noise.
And finally they have volume optimized active EQ.
So what this does is it makes the base still sound present
when you're at low volumes.
And the reason this is a thing
is because our ears don't hear all frequencies equally.
We are more attuned to the mid and mid high range,
like where human voices live.
And we don't hear the high frequencies
or the very low frequencies linearly.
So when they master a track at like what's reference volume
which is about 85 decibels and it's pretty loud,
the base compared to the voice
is going to be at a nice proportion.
But when you turn down from reference volume
you're going down the frequency response of the human ear
to places where we don't hear bass
as clearly as we hear voice
and suddenly you're listening to music
and all you hear is the mids and highs
and you don't hear the bass anymore.
So at low volumes you're going to feel like you're
there's no base to your music.
So what they do is they have algorithm
where they account for that roll off
so they boost the base up as you turn the volume down
kind of keeping it consistent across volumes.
So that's what that is.
And that's appreciated.
It's a feature that find in lots of AVRs
like from Marantz and Denon and stuff like that as well.
It's usually called dynamic EQ.
But yeah, appreciated here.
So yeah, I don't hate the product.
I just kind of hate the implementation
and the price right now.
But if you don't care about that and you're a Bose fan.
Great Christmas,
great gift why not hey.
IPEX4 production pretty typical,
you can sweat on them they'll be fine.
So thanks for watching Short Circuit today.
If you like this video,
like and subscribe and come back for more
and just hope you have a great weekend, really.
I don't even know you but,
I wish every human on earth would have a great weekend.