Bose QuietComfort Buds Review: Excellent Sound Behind a Bulky Build

Bose recently refreshed its popular QuietComfort lineup with the second-gen QuietComfort Earbuds. They’re priced at $180 and available in three colorways: Black, Chilled Lilac, and White Smoke. This is the second iteration of the massively popular QuietComfort buds released in 2020. With the other, more premium QuietComfort model priced at $300, this one is the midrange offering in Bose’s in-ear line.

Bose continued its legacy of providing rich, detailed sound and powerful noise-canceling on these buds, too. The cancelation managed to silence the incredibly chaotic kids at the preschool right next to my house, which a lot of earbuds fail at. However, the unwieldy fit of these buds made it difficult for me to enjoy them properly. They felt bulky in my ears and large enough for my coworker to point their huge size out. The all-plastic body also didn’t help their aesthetic and gave them a boring, bland look. I would’ve also liked to see better dust and water resistance on these buds compared to their four-year-old predecessors and slightly better volume controls. More on that later.

Bose QuietComfort Buds Review: Design and Fit

The Bose QuietComfort buds, just like their predecessors, are fairly bulky. They’re massive oval plastic peripherals that looked quite unwieldy plugged into my modestly-sized ears. I believe the aesthetic could’ve been improved by simply a better choice of materials, even if the size was retained. Master & Dynamic is proof of that. Its earbuds sport a similar bulky look, but they turn out stunning with the inclusion of glass and metal on the body. The bland all-plastic body on the Bose QuietComfort buds doesn’t help their aesthetic. Granted, M&D’s buds are priced at $400, and the QuietComfort cost less than half at $180. But I’ve reviewed far better-looking buds in the same price range. 

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Photo: Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

The bulky body has another disadvantage, too: an uncomfortable fit. These buds weigh a whopping nine grams each. Your average earbud weighs between five and six grams (Apple AirPods Pro at 5.4g, Sony WF-1000XM5s at 5.9g), so nine grams is unarguably sinful. My ears already have difficulty adjusting to in-ear buds, but they happily accept ones with a compact form factor. Google’s flagship Pixel Buds Pro 2 are a recent example. To offer an improved fit, they had been dramatically reduced in size and weight compared to their predecessors, and they hugged my ears perfectly tight throughout. 

My ears were very unhappy with the new Bose buds, though. Though my entire review period was spent with the smallest ear tip size, my ears either kept rejecting them, plopping them out randomly, or started to feel fatigued shortly after wearing them. 

Photo: Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

I had high hopes for the wing tips and stability bands on the buds, but it’s disappointing that they didn’t do much to assist with a better fit, either. I found the ratio of the earbud body to the stability band pretty non-proportional; as in, as compared to the rest of the gigantic body, the bands were quite inconspicuous and didn’t play much of a role in gripping the inside of my ear well.

Bose QuietComfort Buds Review: Controls

The default controls on these buds include tapping once for play/pause, twice to skip the track, thrice to rewind, and hold to cycle between ANC (called Quiet on these buds), Ambient Mode (called Aware), and Off, which is for turning both ANC and Ambient Modes off. All gestures are customizable on the companion app, Bose QCE. I tried adding onboard volume controls via the app and picked ‘hold’ as the gesture. Weirdly enough, it let me tweak that on the app, but it didn’t translate to the action on the buds changing. Every time I’d hold, it would tell me it was looking to pair, even though the buds were already paired, and the hold gesture wasn’t set to pairing. It worked when I changed the gesture to a double or triple tap, though. But those weren’t as intuitive as volume controls. 

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With such a massive surface area, the QuietComfort buds missed the opportunity to assign swiping to tweak the volume. For instance, Samsung’s Galaxy Buds 3 Pro allows up-and-down swiping on the stem, and the Pixel Buds Pro 2 lets you swipe horizontally. With each gesture (single/double/triple tap, hold) already fulfilling an important action, there was a serious need for a swipe option. Due to the unintuitive controls, I ended up controlling the volume on my phone, which wasn’t ideal.

Photo: Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

Bose QuietComfort Buds Review: Sound and ANC

Say what you will about the QuietComfort’s aesthetic, but Bose knows how to do ANC exceptionally well. We crowned the QuietComfort II (now renamed QuietComfort Ultra) one of the best noise-canceling earbuds. I live next to a very loud backyard for pre-school kids, and I judge a lot of earbuds’ ANC by how they can block that noise out. Hearing how well these buds did that for me was pleasantly surprising. Without offering an overly intense experience which often results in an uncomfortable eardrum suck, the QuietComfort buds silenced the children’s constant screams and the traffic’s rumble extremely well. The Aware or Ambient Mode lets me hear the outside world again but in the most natural way. A lot of earbuds make the mistake of overdoing the artificial ambient noise to such an extent that the mode ends up sounding too artificial to be enjoyable. The Aware mode on the QuietComfort keeps your outside noise real.

Photo: Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

The sound profile on these buds didn’t require me to reach for the EQ settings on the companion app. Usually, I mess around on the equalizer a bit, sometimes just out of curiosity. But when you come across a profile as balanced as this, you don’t want to tinker with it. The low-end offers just the right level of thump and oomph and makes sure to never overstep into overly thick. The treble, even at the highest notes, retained its crispness. Sometimes, cranking the volume up on earbuds makes the high-end come off as too harsh and sharp. The QuietComfort buds also maintained the brightness and richness it delivered at lower volumes. Interestingly, I enjoyed the midrange the most. These buds emphasized vocals incredibly well and put them on a separate layer before the high and low ends.

Bose QuietComfort Buds Review: Battery and Water Resistance

Like their four-year-old predecessors, the new Bose QuietComfort Earbuds also sport an IPX4 water resistance. The ‘X’ indicates a blank space, which means there’s no dust resistance on these buds. The ‘4’ refers to their endurance against water, but considering that number goes up to 8, that isn’t really an impressive score. I expected a slightly improved water resistance on a version launched four years after the first generation. 

The buds last around eight hours on a single charge, which is standard for wireless earbuds. They support wireless and quick charging, giving you three hours out of a 20-minute charge. Bose claims the charging case holds 2.5 full charges, so you’re looking at over 20 hours on the case. 

Photo: Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

The QuietComfort Buds’ Bluetooth 5.3 supports multi-point connectivity for up to two devices, which means they can simultaneously connect to two of your gadgets (phone and laptop, for example). They also support mono-listening, meaning you can listen to your music on just one bud or not miss your content when you take a bud out to hear someone better. The buds feature wear detection, too, so they automatically pause your content if you take both buds out of your ears. 

Bose QuietComfort Buds Review Verdict

Bose is an old player in the audio peripherals industry who has mastered sound and noise cancellation well. Its QuietComfort line is one of the most popular wireless earbuds. Despite the bulky build of these buds, I can’t deny the unarguably balanced sound profile and powerful noise cancellation. The battery life is long enough to easily last you a week of typical usage (around three hours daily). Its features, such as wireless charging, quick charging, mono listening, and wear detection, are all supported.

In a time where every earbud manufacturer is trying to streamline their products as much as possible (Samsung drifting away from its standard Galaxy Buds design to adopt an AirPods-style stem approach on the Galaxy Buds 3, Google shrinking its Pixel buds even more on the second-gen), it’s confusing why Bose didn’t consider trimming its enormous peripherals. Overall, though, the company prides itself on its industry-leading sound, and it did do justice to that. If you can get past the aesthetic, heft, and ergonomics of the Bose QuietComfort buds, you will enjoy them.

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