Bose QuietComfort 20 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones for Apple Devices (Black)

Product Information

The ATV exhaust sounded much louder than I expected; it was like the system dampened the noise from the lawnmower but couldn’t cope with the sharp rattle of the exhaust. From “P.O.” (September 2013): “I bought them to ride with my C 650 GT, I wear them under my Silky motorcycle helmet liner and it exceeded my expectations. Also, sometimes the in-ear headphones will move out of correct location in the ear canal when the helmet is being put on, and this will affect the noise cancelling system performance. Examples: like wind whistling and ripping around your helmet, as well as erratic sounds like exhaust “pops” or pulses that change with engine RPM.

The Bose system is better than average in this regard and it does stay inserted, but it still isn’t as deeply fitted into my ear canals than a pair of disposable ear plugs. During testing, we get mixed results. When it works well, the sound does appear to raise itself out of your head, so to speak. It feels like there is a greater sense of spaciousness, and it does feel like the music is coming at you from a slightly different, more immersive angle. I’ll have to be careful to watch it and make sure the switch doesn’t break; it just doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in the way its designed, built or how it functions.I’m also surprised that the Bose system doesn’t reduce the voice or talking sounds as much as I had hoped. To me, it’s a sign of intelligence and intellectual integrity. It makes your opinion as a journalist all the more valuable. This may be a deliberate design feature by Bose, but there’s nothing I see in their information that indicates this is so. Fitting headphones (as Bose refers to them) or earbuds under a motorcycle helmet is always a problem also and the silicone tips of the Bose QC20 system don’t fit very deeply in the ear canal.

In reality, it seems to bypass about half the noise cancellation function and allows “raw” noise from the outside to enter into your new quiet world. There are two lights: an Earbud status light inside the case between the earbuds, and a Charging Case status light on the outside of the case. Earbud status light (inner): Once paired, you can use the app to toggle between Quiet and Aware modes, which you can already do on the headphones. You can also connect to different sound sources you're simultaneously paired to, letting you easily get audio from your phone, laptop, or other device. Other than that, the settings menu only provides some basic options, like adjusting automatic power-down times and the level of mic monitoring (how much of your own voice you hear on calls). It will reduce noise whether or not it’s connected to an MP3 player or cell phone; simply throw the switch to activate the noise cancelling feature.

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A better, more sound isolating interface between the earphone and the human ear canal would help a lot. I’m a bit surprised that Bose calls these “Noise Cancelling” rather than “Noise Reducing” earphones, although I suppose that in the end, it’s a matter of semantics. The general idea is to get the sound out of your head so it feels less like you’re listening to headphones and more like you’re listening to an image served up by a traditional pair of stereo speakers. I suspect that, when combined with active noise-cancelling technology, would accomplish a lot for us motorcyclists. The problem is volume — on bike, in-helmet noise can approach 120dB. Very, very few full size headphones are capable of this volume and we won’t even discuss earbuds (peruse a few specs sheets).

You would thus be amplifying the ambient high frequency noise. That would obviously be counter productive. So I am comparing the Bose QuietComfort 20 in-ear headphones to other noise cancelling earbuds we have reviewed on webBikeWorld and also to the Moldex PuraFit 6800 ear plugs that are a favorite around here. But after riding a few different types of motorcycles and the BMW C 650 GT scooter (blog), we’re a little disappointed that the noise reduction seems about the equivalent of wearing a good pair of foam disposable ear plugs. As with their predecessors, you can preset different levels of noise-cancelling for different situations and you can cycle through them using the touch controls on the earbud stems. Again, the Bose’s ‘Aware’ mode impresses as it balances out your music with surrounding noise so you can hear just enough of both worlds and not be completely sealed off in your own sonic bubble. If Bose would have used a foam earplug like Shure does on their seemingly excellent “sound isolating” earphones, Bose would have done much better at dampening (not cancelling) higher frequency sounds waves.But they don’t reduce the types of motorcycle noise as well as I’d hoped, including wind noise and exhaust noise. However — and also by coincidence — a neighborhood kid decided just at that moment to tear up the street on his ATV, which apparently had been modified with an aftermarket exhaust.