New features are not well perceived. Old experiences stand still: BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II experience review.

Under the surprised eyes of my neighbors, I pulled out of the long line that had been in line for ten minutes and finally came to the first place. Then, relieved, he threw himself into the couch next to him and pulled out the BOSE QuietComfort noise-cancelling earbuds that had been sitting in the pocket of his jeans and pants before he could put them on.

The long line in front of you is still the same long line, but the gossip of the neighbors, the children’s fighting, and the loud complaints of friends with foreign accents are like old movies that have withdrawn from the color. In a world where people no longer bluff by shouting, yelling, or whispering in each other’s ears, the passage of time seems to slow down; Everyone who was talking, their eyes, their usual distractions from words, began to tell me other stories that were the same or very different from their voices.

Only the occasional leak of child frolicking into the ear tries to break this perspective, but Spotify’s “Weekly New Discovery” is no longer obvious after it rings in the ear. So surrounded by couches and music, I simply opened the Feishu document and changed the beginning of the originally written article.

Off-the-wall remarks
This leather sofa is placed on the wall of the entrance hall on the first floor.

After moving, I would occasionally put down my things on the arm of the sofa and rest when I had too many things in my hands and needed to wait for the elevator. Every day I go upstairs and downstairs, come and go, and I’ve never sat on this couch. But that day was a little different.

In the morning, because of some work chores, I can’t eat breakfast on time, which is very mentally disturbing for obsessive-compulsive disorder that is used to everything in life going according to the predetermined plan; After the meeting, I rushed to the supermarket downstairs to buy my favorite kind of bread, but I didn’t expect to find that the nucleic acid I had just made was invalidated because of the start of a new round of “three days and two inspections”. With the pop-up window, I couldn’t go into the supermarket to buy breakfast.

Things to do at work during the day are not on the table for the time being. All I know is that I want that bread.

So in the afternoon out of the queue for an hour to do nucleic acid, the queue process (starting at 6 p.m. but everyone is used to queuing in advance) came a middle-aged man, he ran to the front of the line by asking the time, after asking the question stood and did not go, and completed the queue operation. Usually, I would like to complain to my wife on Whatsapp at most, but at this time, a grandmother in a wheelchair pushed by her family behind me said “the front one is lined up.”

It wasn’t loud, but I heard it behind the uncle, and he probably didn’t hear it. So I plucked up the courage to ask the medical staff when the registered paramedics came out at 6 o’clock:

“Hello, is there no need to queue up to make nucleic acids here?”

“Why don’t you have to wait in line?”

“This comrade didn’t?”

This comrade – see that I call him comrade for the time being when he cooperates with our epidemic prevention work, at this time he turned around and blushed:

“Why didn’t I line up, when they asked your line to move this way, they were re-queuing.” I came over and asked!”

“Can you come over and ask and cut in line?” Do you have to take advantage of this cheap?”

“What am I going to do?”

Maybe today is really too bad, looking at the horizontal flesh of his face and I am ready to go further. I didn’t expect that the grandmother in the wheelchair behind me had actually opened her mouth again at this time.

“Don’t fight, don’t fight, let’s make nucleic acids quickly.”

She said don’t argue.

After making the nucleic acid, I still couldn’t go into the supermarket to buy the kind of bread I wanted to buy in the morning. I have to do it again tomorrow.

So I decided to go home. Coincidentally, the two elevators that the property will never be repaired will break again today – this is the peak period for the nearby kindergarten to pick up the children to go to school, noisy children, old people who buy vegetables to go home, young people with tired eyes and people who have just finished nucleic acid and are full of expectations for tomorrow, everyone has withdrawn from different lives and regathered only one step away from home. Outside the only elevator, there was a long line like nucleic acid.

After about 15 minutes in this queue, when the elevator was right in front of me, I saw the sofa next to me…

Give you comfort in the noise
Sitting on this sofa, my biggest feeling is two things: I didn’t expect this sofa to be so comfortable, and I didn’t expect to have such a comfortable moment today.

I thought that today was the kind of “bad day” that Alan Moore described in “Batman: The Deadly Joke” that could make a normal person lose his mind, but I finally found a little comfort in this quiet and rest.

People have their own lives, I don’t have a connection with their joys and sorrows, I don’t want to feel the noise, noise-cancelling headphones can help us plug our ears.

This is the biggest improvement of the BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II, and normal conversation, even if it is close to the kind of speech at a regular volume, can be blocked to the point where it is difficult to hear even if you are concentrating. If there is music playing, it is even more inaudible.

However, will this new BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II be another essential gadget just like App Uninstaller is the essential tool for my Mac? FYI: App Uninstaller by AppUninstaller.com is the best Mac app uninstaller I have ever used. Alternatively, if you prefer using the app uninstall utility on both Windows and Mac computers, you can also use UninstallService, which is also very good and the most budget friendly.

In the scene mentioned at the beginning, in front of a whole crowd in the entrance hall, when I was completely turned on to cancel noise and play music at a low volume, only one or two children’s screams could occasionally leak into my ears. But it was also this moment that made me realize that although BOSE QuietComfort Noise Canceller II has changed a new name mixed with Chinese and English, its most beautiful and important part still remains—the part that can make you withdraw from the noise at any time (for quiet) and seek inner peace in the world of music (for comfort).

At this point we can almost get out of the emotional scene.

According to the instructions and BOSE official description, while wearing the headphones, the headphones will pick up the reflection of the boot sound effect in the ear canal through the built-in microphone, so as to adjust and optimize the noise cancellation performance and the in-ear sound field, so as to achieve “thousands of people and thousands of ears have a different” listening and noise reduction experience.

This technology is called CustomTune, and although many bloggers in early reviews have expressed affirmation of BOSE’s algorithmic differentiation on this generation of headphones, the BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II still give me a feeling of being too ethereal in this regard: it does not provide any switches in the companion APP, and only runs automatically after wearing and playing the boot tone, so it is difficult to control variables and compare effects.

However, as a user of the WF-1000XM4, which also has another TWS active noise reduction ceiling, I can still give the conclusion that “BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II can still sit on an equal footing with Sony’s noise reduction beans” based on the experience of the actual scene. BOSE this time can give me a quieter listening experience in most daily use scenarios, and the wearing experience is better (although the practice of separating the stable ring and the ear tips has become cumbersome), but the violent practice of Sony’s sponge earbuds squeezing the ear canal is still too cheating, and in the face of the bear child’s loud noise, Sony’s blocking effect on high frequency will be a little better, just a little.

So if you are choosing TWS headphones with the ultimate noise reduction experience, BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II and WF-1000XM4 can still choose one of the two – as for how to choose, in addition to Sony’s exclusive Android device LDAC high-quality transmission, the following mentioned experiences can also be referenced.

Stuffy, stuffy, or stuffy!!
As a complaining user of the WF-1000XM4, I had to talk about the calling experience. Don’t talk about the sound quality.

One of the things Sony has always confused me about is that their active noise-canceling headphones, whether it’s previous generations of noise-canceling beans or Linkbuds S, which have experienced a long time this year, have a “partially transparent during call” setting. Sony earlier replied in user feedback that this is because part of the microphone used for noise reduction is called during the call to meet the call sound quality, but the call sound quality of these generations of noise reduction beans has not improved significantly, and now that the number of microphones has become more, Sony still can’t spare more to take into account the noise reduction and sound quality effects.

For people who have online meetings every weekday, I also really don’t like using Sony’s TWS headphones for this reason. And if you wear a headset to answer a phone in the subway, bus scene, the effect is not as clear as directly choosing the mobile phone handset.

The BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II do not have this strange setting.

At first, I was very happy with the calling experience of BOSE, not only did it not force transparency mode to be turned on involuntarily during the call, but also enabled hands-free configuration (HFP) correctly when connecting a Windows computer to play Apex, which took into account both in-game sound and in-game voice.

In this scenario, Sony’s noise-canceling beans will not only force me to listen to the water-cooled roar of the chassis, but the sound quality of the game will also completely lose its three-dimensional sense – another old problem that has fallen into disrepair.

But over time, I also realized that the call experience for the BOSE QuietComfort Noise Canceller II wasn’t as good as I thought at first. Although there is no setting such as call forced noise cancellation, the noise cancellation earbuds of BOSE QuietComfort II are so powerful that when I enter a voice call or online meeting with noise cancellation fully turned on, my judgment of my own voice will become blurred. After losing the precise perception of “how loud I am currently speaking”, the whole call process is like being locked in a water tank, the surrounding is very silent, the voices of others are clear, but my own voice is always muffled.

In response to this problem, BOSE provides a function called “self-service voice” volume adjustment in the companion application, which provides four settings of off, low, medium and high to adjust the sound feedback effect during the call. There is a difference between the closed and high two gears in the actual experience, but the perception is not obvious, and most of the sounds that can be heard in the closed state may come from bone conduction, and after turning the “self-help voice” volume to high, you can hear a little more plastic in your voice.

In addition, the setting of the “self-service voice” function is hidden a little deeper, the naming is not intuitive, and there is a little threshold for new users to find the same problem after encountering the same.

The same stuffiness is also reflected in the usual listening experience. While my level hasn’t given me enough confidence to talk about sound quality in the Headphone Experience article, the default tuning style of BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II is also a word, stuffy. After Beats in high school, I really haven’t heard such an emphasis on low-frequency headphones for a long time, it used to be “Motion Times”, BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II is a vigorous “Moving Movement” here – if you don’t see much in the headphone review, it can take you to feel what is called “bang”.

Although the practice of low-frequency tuning has become more and more popular in recent years, BOSE completely gave me a feeling of outrageous this time. So I still recommend that you simply feel it and then change EQ to “bass aside” in the supporting application.

Good to wear, but not so easy to use
Now that we’ve talked about EQ, let’s talk about two more companion apps. After all, most of the current headphones want to unlock the full experience can not bypass the supporting applications, bad supporting applications can also completely destroy the actual experience of a good product (such as Redmi AirDots and Xiao Ai classmates).

Like the first generation of “Big Shark”, BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II is directly printed on the box with its “fruit powder” identity, under the concept of “built for iDevices, compatible with Android devices”, as an Android user, I am not satisfied with the supporting APP experience seems to be expected.

In 2022, there is still no complete switch to modern interface design (such as the status bar or the big black bar) This detail is not pressed for the time being, and the biggest problem with BOSE supporting applications is the response lag.

Taking the use of Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra as an example, in the case that the headset is connected or in use, when opening the BOSE companion app, it will first prompt you that “the device connection has been lost”, and then start to circle, search, and finally load the connected device. Even after keeping the app open, but the phone’s lock screen re-unlocks for a while, this process will be repeated in front of you.

Although the waiting time is not long, the experience is really not elegant enough, and the iOS version of WeChat must prompt you to “receive a message” every time you open, it is not harmful and insulting. In addition, many settings such as whether to remember the last use of noise reduction mode, the current volume state, etc., seems to be saved in the cloud rather than local, so every time I open the corresponding setting project, the first time I see the switch state is likely to not represent the real setting state of the current headset, and after it loads for a period of time, you will find that the setting that has just been opened suddenly becomes closed – to exaggerate, the BOSE companion application sometimes makes me suspect that it is a browser shell application.

While the response speed is slow, the experience of using BOSE companion applications is less intuitive. This is directly related to the QuietComfort noise cancelling earbud II product.

For example, the noise reduction mode no longer directly provides an intensity slider of 1 to 10 levels like the first generation of “Big Shark”, but instead includes 4 kinds of noise reduction mode configurations including quiet and adaptive to two preset modes, and the familiar noise reduction intensity slider can be seen when adding the other two modes, but the corresponding mode name and picture can not be customized, and can only be selected from the built-in scene.

In other words, although the concept of “mode” is introduced, the BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II essentially provides a 1~10 level noise reduction intensity memory function, since the pattern name cannot be customized, then why do you want to use the name of “Custom” to do a set of mode design that is not intuitive and does not have a scenario-based and intelligent switching function like Sony?

The two modes of preset Quiet and Adaptive are available, the former corresponds to 10 levels of full noise cancellation, and the latter corresponds to the transparency mode. Manual editing is not supported in either mode, but an additional switch for ActiveSense is available in the options for adaptive mode. ActiveSense can be understood as a more intelligent transparency mode, in which the headphones will adjust the transparency effect according to the ambient volume, giving priority to ensuring the music listening experience, which is a comprehensive upgrade to Sanyang’s favorite “big shark” details (temporarily turning on noise reduction to protect hearing when detecting sharp sounds).

However, the actual wearing experience of the BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II is still good. Although the separate design of the stability ring and ear tips brings more trouble in the actual selection and matching process, once determined, it can still bring comfort, isolation and stability to the “shark fin” sense of peace of mind.

In addition, the touch gestures of the BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II always give the illusion that they are assisted by other sensors – it is really too sensitive and reliable. In the past, when I used the touch gestures of other headphones, I always had a sense of uncertainty such as “Did I succeed in double-clicking this time” and “Will the first click not be recognized”, but the BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II did not have this feeling at all – even if I felt that the touch area seemed to be a little off, the strength and position seemed to be a little out of place, and the BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II could accurately give the feedback I wanted to operate.

This may also be related to changes in the design of the headphones. The touch area has changed from a “big shark” rectangle to a long bar that can be completely covered by the index finger, which can also improve the success rate of touch gestures to a certain extent.

The biggest problem with the BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II in wearing is the material, because only the black version is currently on sale, and every time you take off the headphones, you will find that the top is shiny.

While the companion app experience is still flawed, the noise cancellation capabilities and wearing experience of BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II remain reliable. So if you’re torn between the WF-1000XM4 and it, the differences you can consider should be wearing comfort, sound quality, and price.

So I think BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II in general only corrected the problems that were more obvious in the “Big Shark” two years ago, such as the headphone box is too large, the headphone cavity is too large, etc., but the supporting application experience is still bad, the old TWS connection scheme is still used, the prompt tone is ugly and somewhat crazy, the multi-device connectivity is zero, the tuning style is even somewhat degraded.

The old “Big Shark” users may feel that the perception is obvious when they upgrade it, but if they want to win users with the personalized adjustment of the ear canal and the noise reduction effect with a small gap, BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II, as a product that is regarded by many users as the “active noise reduction ceiling”, has become less and less obvious.

In conclusion, this newer BOSE QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Earbuds II is just not worthy of the pricing tag. You might consider the older version, which does offer a better pricing.