This was a banner year for both earbuds and somespectacular wireless headphones, and none brought the sound, fit, and finish of theBose QuietComfort Ultra. It’s little surprise that the Ultra handily won the vote among our team for the annualAndroid Police Awardseven though the price tag here is a bit steep. These aren’t the first Bose headphones to feature multipoint audio, but Bose has thankfully fixed the issues found in the last generations and brought us the company’s take on spatial audio. The QuietComfort Ultra was my favorite product that I reviewed this year, and since the evening they arrived back in October, I’ve usually spent 7-12 hours a day in them. The ANC modes here have been an absolute godsend for noisy neighbors and merciless migraines, and the controls on the Ultra can seem downright magical at times.
The Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones are AP’s 2023 headphones of the year
Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones
After you slip them on, you’ll never want to turn the Bose QuietComfort Ultra off, and with automatic power controls, you’ll never have to. On-head tracking for playback and sleep/wake is among the best we’ve seen in wireless headphones, with multipoint audio and Bose’s unique take on spatial audio rounding out an almost magically smooth experience.
The long-awaited successor to the2019 Bose Noise Canceling 700, the QuietComfort are rounder, plusher, and shinier, but unlike the 700s, these can still fold up for easy transport and storage. While the volume controls are still touch-sensitive in the form of a slider bar, playback controls are now a multifunction button alongside the power/Bluetooth button. You might not even need to use the buttons that often, though, as the headphones can automatically wake themselves up when you slide them on and will pause/play your current music or video should you pull one ear out to hear a knock at the door or slide them down to quickly answer your boss.
Bose had to bring its A-game to the QuietComfort Ultra to compete withSony’s WH-1000XM5, which are a whole $100 cheaper and were our favorite headphones of 2022, and while Sony still handles multipoint better, the QuietComfort Ultra take the edge for portability and noise canceling. I do wish Bose allowed you to pin media audio to one device the way Sony does, so that notifications don’t kick audio back to my phone from the TV, but calls will still go through as intended, but Bose does a great job juggling connections.
Sound quality here is exactly what we’ve come to know and demand from Bose, and Immersive Audio takes the gimmickiness of spatial audio and uses it in a way that makes you feel like you’re listening to stereo speakers in a room rather than streams of sound coming from everywhere and nowhere. I’ve never managed to stand more than a few hours of spatial audio on other headphones and earbuds before I have to shut it off, but I’ve never turned off Immersive Audio outside the review testing window.
And, of course, wearing them all day, every day makes me infinitely grateful for the 24-hour battery life. That may seem a little on the low side for over-ear headphones, but they didn’t die on me after wearing them 19 hours straight with both ANC and Immersive Audio turned on, and I only need to recharge them every 2-3 days. My only complaints about the Ultra relate to their two ports: $430 headphones should support USB-C audio output, and using a 2.5mm audio jack instead of 3.5mm feels like an unnecessary deviation from the standard, especially given the size of these cans.
Expensive though they may be, the Bose QuietComfort are the best premium ANC headphones to buy if you’ve got the cash and want something that’s incredibly intuitive. But if you need to rein in the budget a bit, there’s still a way to get 85% of this same experience for significantly less.
Why you’re probably going to buy the Bose QuietComfort instead
As ardently as I adore the Bose QuietComfort Ultra, even I can admit that $430 is a hard pill to swallow, especially when the Ultra launched alongside a “regular” pair of QuietComfort headphones priced at $350. There are precious fewdifferences between these two models:
I love my Ultra, but I do use a secondary headband cushion to help them sit properly on my head, so for women or younger listeners, you might need to go with the QuietComfort. After all, if the headphones don’t fit and seal properly, that fancy ANC will be rendered useless.
The QuietComfort are also seeing deeper discounts than the Ultra. The $430 Ultra have only dropped to $380 so far, while the $350 QuietComfort have already been down to $250 and will likely see it again soon. So if you don’t care about spatial audio — it’s still very source-dependent for quality — you’re able to get some great-sounding Bose cans for almost half the price of the Ultras when a deal drops.
Bose QuietComfort Headphones
Yeah, they’re not quite as fancy, but they still sound great, offer exceptional noise canceling, and should last you through years and years of all-day listening.
