Bose QuietComfort 3 Headphones Review - Performance |
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Published on April 04, 2008 Comment on this |
| The primary selling point of the Bose QuietComfort 3s is their ability to cancel outside noise, and they do an effective job of this, blocking a lot of outside noise. However, we found their audio quality isn't anything to write home about. All tests are carried out using a high-end electroacoustic audio analysis system consisting of a Head and Torso Simulator (HATS) and a professional audio analysis program called SoundCheck, produced by Listen, inc. The HATS simulates the human head and ears, and has two microphones in the ears that respond to sounds in the same way your ears do. The Soundcheck system produces a series of test signals and captures the output from the headphones using these microphones, allowing us to do very precise, scientific testing of headphones. For more information on how we do our headphone quality audio testing see this article. Frequency Response (1.66) One of the fundamental aspects of performance in headphones is frequency response; how good a job do the headphones do taking the electrical signal the music player produces and turning this into sound? Our testing system analyzes the frequency response by sending a frequency sweep to the headphones that goes from the very low (about 80Hz, which sounds like an earthquake) to the very high (10kHz, which is a high-pitched squeak). How well the headphones reproduce these frequencies is shown on the graph below: low frequencies are on the left, high on the right. The green line is for the left channel, the red is for the right. 
The dotted lines indicate the limits we look for; if anything was to veer too widely above or below these limits, that would indicate the headphones are either overly emphasizing or suppressing those frequencies, which makes the music sound unnatural. The Bose QuietComfort 3 headphones have some problems here; the response curve gets somewhat erratic at the higher end, with sizeable peaks and troughs. This may be a problem for the audio quality; it means two nearby frequencies are reproduced at quite different levels, which wouldn't sound the way it should. We like smooth response curves, but the QuietComfort 3 headphones produces curves that are anything but smooth. However, this erratic response is only a problem at higher frequencies; the curve for the important low frequencies is reasonably smooth, so the big bass frequencies should be clearly reproduced.
It is possible these peaks and troughs could be caused by the active noise cancellation the QuietComfort 3 headphones use; this is generating sounds to cancel noise, so it could be interfering with the music. Since the headphones won't work without noise cancellation turned on, we weren't able to test this theory.
 As you can see, the active noise cancelling 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 turned off don't block anything, and 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 15 dB of noise. But like the QuietComfort 2s, there is an odd spot in the middle where the headphones block more sound with the noise cancellation turned off than with it turned on, possibly because of a quirk of the noise cancelling system.
It is also interesting to compare the effectiveness of these against another type of headphones, the in-ear ear canal ones like the Etymotic ER6i and Shure SE210. Both blocked more overall noise than the QuietComfort 3 headphones because they effectively act as earplugs, blocking the ear canal with an average reduction of about 30dB. They do a more effective job than both the QuietComfort 3 and their sibling QuietComfort 2s, but many people don't like putting things in their ears. For these people, the QuietComfort 3 headphones do an effective job blocking unwanted sounds.
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