Bose QuietComfort II Review

The Bose QuietComfort II improves upon the original Bose QuietComfort with better sound, ANC, and microphone quality. While lacking a few premium features of the Ultras, namely the Immersive Audio function and more robust ANC, the Bose QuietComfort IIs perform excellently in every metric that we tested and are often found on sale at a much more affordable price point.

Performance Comparison

Sound Quality

Our expert panel found the Bose QuietComfort II to have an excellent sense of clarity, allowing us to hear the separation between instruments and complex layers of sound in a myriad of music styles. The QuietComfort II is fairly high definition compared to most of our lineup and creates a much more nuanced listening experience.

The well-rounded frequency mix delivers a balanced and enjoyable audio experience. The treble is smooth, while the bass is powerful without overwhelming the mix, ensuring that you won't find yourself wincing from harsh highs or blown-out lows. Songs like “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” by Whitney Houston and “Just Another Honky” by the Faces sound fabulous.

The rich, thick bass frequencies are fully fleshed out, maintaining clarity and balance even at higher volumes. In Marlon Craft's “Something Wrong in Heaven,” the prominent bass line has a distinctive riff during the chorus and continues to shine throughout the verses. From 1:43 to 1:50, you can clearly hear its gymnastic leaps coming through with warmth and power.

These earbuds tend to emphasize lower frequencies, drawing attention to the most interesting and fluid elements of the track. For songs like this, where the bass line is the centerpiece, the earbuds truly enhance the listening experience, encouraging you to savor those hearty lows.

The earbuds maintain sound quality even when cranked up to higher volumes, allowing for a powerful listening experience without a significant loss of clarity.

The mid tones are warm and nuanced, only losing a bit of depth in their lowest frequencies. In Allison Krauss & Union Station's “When You Say Nothing At All,” Krauss' delicate voice paired with the resonant guitar in the introduction showcases the earbuds' ability to flesh out even the simplest of songs. The balance is well-maintained throughout the piece, with Krauss' voice soaring once the drums kick in at 0:48.

At mid-volumes, the treble range sounds gorgeous — bright and clear without any harshness. Even at higher volumes, while it begins to sound a bit thin, it never crosses into tinny or overly sharp territory. Their performance at lower volumes remains strong, with clearly defined instruments and vocal lines, ensuring a balanced listening experience across different volume levels.

Soundstage

Soundstage refers to how earbuds allow you to perceive the location of music in three-dimensional space. While it's rare for earbuds to offer a broad and expansive soundstage, technological advancements are helping music feel like it's emanating from outside your ears rather than being confined within them.

The clarity that the QuietComfort II achieves allows the listener to easily hone in on specific instruments within a song. For example, when listening to “All Too Well (Taylor's Version)” by Taylor Swift, the forlorn guitar intro from 0:01 to 0:22 stands out instead of getting lost in the mix with lesser earbuds. This creates a sense of being in the room with the musicians. You can direct your attention to each instrument and become acutely aware of how they fit into the mix.

Lesser earbuds can often feel muddy and compressed, but the QuietComfort II allows you to hear more of the efforts of what musicians and producers put into their mixes.

When tested against our Gearlab House Curve using our high-tech sound measuring equipment, we found that our expert's assessments were spot on, showing a contiguous following of our curve throughout the frequency spectrum, deviating slightly in the treble and bass. At higher volumes, we did find the QuietComfort II to become slightly compressed, losing its sense of high definition in the treble spectrum. However, at average volume, this phenomenon becomes unnoticeable. In fact, when listening to high-treble audio, like recordings of rain sounds, we found the QuietComfort II extremely clear, allowing for the differentiation of droplets hitting the window pane.

User Experience

We wore the Bose QuietComfort II in a variety of circumstances, with a variety of ear sizes and shapes, and found features like the ear stabilizer wings and the app's ear fit test enjoyable to use. They also have an in-app equalizer, allowing users to customize their own sound profile. However, the QuietComfort II lost points when it came to their overall heft, particularly in smaller ears, and some connection issues when paired with Apple devices.

Comfort

The QuietComfort II offers a collection of three tip and three wing sizes, allowing for customization that can accommodate most ear shapes. After customization with fins and tips, they feel stable in medium to large ears. Their heft and shape can be cumbersome for smaller ears, especially during physical activity. Also, over longer listening sessions we found these to feel weighty and pressuring past the one-hour mark.

Stability

Overall, the Bose provides a fairly stable fit, only coming loose in smaller ears during a headstand test. While stable, they also didn't feel secure enough to do any highly athletic activities (running, mountain biking, etc.) in smaller ears. Our larger-eared testers had fewer stability issues but also noted the heft of these earbuds over time.

Customization

The Bose app is easy to use and offers a variety of features, namely a customizable EQ. It's worth noting that these earbuds do not have Immersive Audio, which is a new premium feature offered by the Bose QuietComfort Ultras. Their waterproofing isn't noteworthy, boasting the minimum sweat protection of IPX4. All things considered, the user experience of these earbuds lends itself to the average commuter, office worker, or music lover whose priority is great sound above all else.

Connectivity

When evaluating the connection reliability of the QuietComfort II, we found them to be less than stellar. We had some issues pairing the earbuds with iPhones specifically but did not experience this problem when using Android devices. In a few cases, one of the earbuds would randomly stop working, and we would have to reset them in the app. Additionally, we gathered together an exact percentage of 1-star Amazon user reviews, tracking the number of folks who were dissatisfied with the connectivity of their earbuds. We found the percentage of complaints for the QuietComfort II showed one of the highest rates of connectivity problems in the group.

Noise Cancellation

Bose has been a frontrunner in the noise-cancelling earbud market for over two decades, and the Bose QuietComfort II are no exception. Noise cancellation not only helps block the outside world so you can focus on your task at hand but also helps isolate the sound playback to provide a more immersive listening experience. We tested noise cancelling by first checking the earbud's passive seal with ANC off. Then, using the same background noise, we tested with ANC turned on.

Before the release of the QuietComfort Ultra, the QuietComfort II were the best noise-cancelling earbuds that we've ever tested. Low-pitched hums vanish, and even high-pitched whirs disappear, which is a difficult feat for ANC to achieve (and rarely achieved by other earbuds that we've tested).

Worth noting, the QuietComfort II buds only have two modes: ANC and Aware. This means that the microphones are either working to let noise into your ears or keep noise out. There is no true passive mode. You can create a custom mode, but to some degree the mics are always active, adjusting your listening experience. There is also a feature called “Activesense” which will kick in no matter what if your listening environment becomes too noisy. This is not inherently negative and does not detract from our scoring in any way, but if you're hoping to be able to completely disable ANC, this might factor into your decision.

The graph above shows the difference in passive versus active noise cancellation of the Bose QuietComfort. As you can see, there's a substantial difference in each frequency range. The Bose manages to cancel out almost 42 decibels of noise in high and low mid-range, making these some of the best noise-cancelling earbuds.

Battery Life

Though not the worst in our lineup, the battery performance of the Bose QuietComfort II was one of its weaker performances. Bose advertises 6 hours of continuous playback and our testing actually found that number to be a little higher at around 6 hours and 40 minutes. You're still getting the better part of a workday or the full duration of a cross-country flight in playback time, which is nice, but compared to today's earbud playing field, this is on the lower end of the spectrum.

We tested our buds by having them play music at a set decibel rating until they died. Bose notes that the charging case can provide a total of three more full charges before needing to be plugged in, which totals almost 20 hours of playback time–not bad, but not the best. It's also worth noting that, in a pinch, 20 minutes in the QuietComfort II charging case gives you another 2 hours of listening time.

Call Quality

We tested the call quality of the Bose QuietComfort II, i.e. call quality, by having our testing rig play audio out of its mouth with increasing levels of background noise. Our ambient noise included everything from background chatter to the whirring and rumbling of transit noise. We then measured how clearly that audio was transmitted through the headphone's mic.

The QuietComfort II microphones do well in the variety of average scenarios a consumer might find themselves in when making a phone call.

When stress testing with transit noise we began to notice some quality degradation, specifically with higher-pitched or feminine voices. While calls were still clear, it was a little harder to hear those frequency ranges.

Our office testing was better, but the womans voice still was not as clear as the mans.

At baseline (with no background noise) the mic is very clear and voices sound full. With office-like noise, we began to hear the background, but the call quality remained high, and the voices were easy to understand.

Should You Buy the Bose QuietComfort II?

Though they did not win any awards, the Bose QuietComfort II were actually one of the best performing earbuds in our entire lineup. If not for the Bose QuietComfort Ultras, the QuietComfort II would have taken the crown as the best noise cancelling earbuds. This puts the QuietComfort II in the unique position of being nearly the best-performing earbuds on the market with a typically much smaller price tag than their premium counterpart. This is contingent on sale prices, of course, but if bleeding edge noise-cancellation and a few less app features–like immersive audio–aren't important to you, the QuietComfort II are a fantastic option. Keep in mind that we don't recommend these earbuds if activity is your highest priority. These shine best in low-impact spaces like at-home music listening, offices, and commuting. Android users will also have a bit of an easier time integrating these earbuds into their tech ecosystem, but Apple users will still get a lot of performance out of these.

What Other Earbuds Should You Consider?

Easy comparisons can be made with the Bose QuietComfort Ultra here, and if the best noise cancelling and its adjacent features are your top priority (and you don't mind the higher price point), they're a great alternative. If you're deep in the Apple ecosystem, the Apple AirPods Pro 2 had only slightly worse scores in sound quality and noise cancellation, but at a cheaper price point. If you don't need the best noise cancelling, the Samsung Galaxy Buds2 Pro also performed quite well and boast slightly better battery life at a much better price point.