Bose QuietComfort 2

Summary

Bose is known for producing headphones that look great and wear well; the QuietComfort2 headphones are no exception. This pair of over-ears have a subtle and classy appearance. The padding has a very soft, pleather-esque covering, and sits very gently over the ears. The cups both tilt and swivel, which help provide a good fit.

The downside, however, is this attention to aesthetic detail comes at the expense of performance.

Frequency Response (1.92)

The dotted lines indicate the limits we look for; if anything were to veer too widely above or below these limits, that would indicate the headphones are either over emphasizing or suppressing those frequencies. The ER6i does well in this test; the curve is smooth and doesn’t go far outside our limits. The curve is also smooth at the left side, indicating there is plenty of bass response for those big drum sounds. As with all in-ear headphones, the bass response is very much dependent on the seal of the headphones against your ear; if they aren’t correctly installed to create a good seal, the bass sounds thin and flat. If properly installed, however, the ER6i headphones produce good sound.

Distortion (6.98)

Distortion is a problem; if the sound gets clipped or otherwise distorted, you don’t get the same sound the producers of the sound intended. The QuietComfort 2 headphones didn’t show a huge amount of distortion, but there is some evidence of minor distortion there. In the below graph, the green line represents the left ear cup, and the red line is the right.

The QuietComfort 2 has generally low distortion, but we did notice a few peaks in the graph, which indicate distortion at particular frequencies, especially at around 2kHz in the left channel. There is also some distortion in the low frequencies, but again this could be caused by the noise canceling feature being active all the time.

Tracking (5.65)

Headphones have one channel for each ear, so it is important that the two sides produce the same sound. That’s what we look at in this test; how well balanced the two sides of the headphones are. The QuietComfort 2s has some minor issues here; the balance of sound shifts to a slight degree from side to side.

Maximum Usable Volume (9.61)

The QC2s managed to reach an ear-splitting118 dBSPL before our testing system called a halt to the test; that’s loud enough that even the most avid loud music fans can enjoy distortion-free tunes (unless you like metal or punk, where it’s kind of mandatory). You should remember that, although our testing system has replaceable ears, you don’t. If you crank the volume up that high, you’re likely to permanently damage them.

Isolation (6.17)

Isolation is one of the big selling points of the QuietComfort 2 headphones; Bose claims its active noise cancelling circuitry identifies and cancels noise, and our tests show that these headphones did a very good job of this.

As you can see, the active noise cancelling (the blue line) does a much more effective job, especially at lower frequencies. With these low frequency noises (such as you would get inside an airplane in flight), the headphones with noise cancelling turned off don’t block anything; low frequency rumbles go straight through them. But with the noise cancelling turned on, a significant amount of these noises are blocked; over the entire frequency range, they block an average of about 18.5 dB of noise. It is also interesting to note that enabling the noise cancelling circuitry seems to make the noise blocking slightly worse in the mid range (where the blue line goes below the green one at around 1Khz); this seems to be at the edge of the frequency range that the active noise cancelling circuitry tries to block, so it may end up actually amplifying the noise slightly.

However, it is worth comparing the effectiveness of these against another type of headphones; the in-ear ear canal ones, such as the Etymotic ER6i and Shure SE210. Both of these blocked more noise than the QuietComfort 2 headphones, because they effectively act as earplugs, blocking the ear canal with an average reduction of about 30dB. They do a more effective job overall than both the QuietComfort 2 and their siblings, the QuietComfort 3, but many people don’t like putting things in their ears. For these people, the QuietConfort 2 headphones do an effective job blocking out unwanted sounds.

Leakage (3.69)

Although the QuietComfort 2 headphones do a reasonable job blocking sound from reaching your ears, they let quite a lot escape to annoy your friends and neighbors; with the headphones set at a high 90 dBSPL level, the sound could easily be heard several feet away. This is because the over-ear design doesn’t form a perfect seal; there are some gaps that allow the sound to escape, no matter how carefully the headphones are place