Out with the old Bose and in with the new
In-ear headphones | £259| whf.cm/QC_Ultra_Earbuds
The arrival of the QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds was a surprise, since they replace the barely-a-year-old and Award-winning QuietComfort Earbuds II. At this top end of the wireless earbuds market there’s some serious competition, not least from the Sony WF-1000XM5 and Apple AirPods Pro 2, both of which can be found discounted, especially around big sales events.
The Ultra’s design is pretty much identical to their predecessors save for a tweak to the finish on the outer stems of each earbud and to the way the stability bands attach to each earpiece. On the top edge of each bud is a small notch which helps you to line up the bands more easily and lock them in place more securely.
The Bose tips are super soft and, although they don’t burrow into your ears, they still manage to maintain a great seal. You just slide and twist them into place and they sit there – during testing, the general consensus is that they are more comfortable than the Sony WF-1000XM5.
The big news for the Ultra is Bose Immersive Audio, the company’s spatial audio tech. The idea is to make the sound feel less like you are listening to headphones and more like you’re listening to an image served up by a traditional pair of stereo speakers. There are two modes of Immersive Audio: Still, recommended for when you’re stationary and you want your music to be in a fixed position; and Motion which introduces head tracking. During testing, we get mixed results. When it works well, it feels like there is a greater sense of spaciousness, and it does feel as if the music is coming at you from a slightly different, more immersive angle. However, with some tracks, it just doesn’t come together. In Motion mode in particular, you can hear a delay and phase issues as the processing struggles to track your head movements. Even with the slightest head movement, there is quite an abrupt and distracting shift in the imaging.
Class-leading ANC
During testing, we find there to be a big step up in call quality. Background noise is more heavily suppressed and breaks through less often, while our voices come through much more clearly. They are still competitive on the ANC front and we can confirm they are still one of th
