Bose QuietComfort 3 Headphones

The rush hour traffic noise makes it difficult to hear music on your mp3 player while traveling. To counter that, most of the times, you pump up the volume to a point where its playing at a maximum. In doing so, you may permanently damage your ears with prolonged exposure to loud noise. Besides, surrounding or ambient noise also ruins your listening experience—a problem faced by frequent air travelers.

Enter the new breed of noise cancellation headphones which block out the ambient noise thereby enhancing your listening experience. There are two types of noise cancellation—Passive and Active. Passive noise cancellation is basically achieved by using headphones that cover your ears or in-ear earphones that plug into your ear canal thereby blocking the outside noise.

Active noise cancellation is a little complex. There is a tiny microphone on each headphone that senses outside noise before it enters your ear. Then the noise cancellation circuitry inverts the captured signal and feeds it to whatever your are listening to, thereby canceling most of the ambient noise.

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And while discussing this new technology, we are looking at Bose’s latest revision of their Noise Cancellation Headphones—the Quiet Comfort 3. The Quiet Comfort 3 comes with passive noise cancellation and also boasts of active noise cancellation. We review the headphones to see how well it copes up.

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**Design and Features
**Unlike the QC2 with coconut shaped headphones that completely covered the ear, the QC3 have smaller ear cups that are just about the size of your ear. This was primarily done to make the headphones more portable but then reduced the passive noise cancellation. To counter that they have used a special type of foam for the ear cushions called the ‘memory foam’. The memory foam shapes according to your ear, thereby giving more effective passive noise cancellation.

**Carry Case
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We particularly liked the CD–case shaped carry-case which has defined compartments to house the headphones, the spare battery, the charger, the dual plug adapter used in flights, and a small section for headphone cables and ‘any other accessory’ as Bose calls it, though you are not left with much space after the cable is inserted. The reason why we are talking about this is that even though there is a separate section for the charger, there is no place to put in the proprietary plug without which the charger is pretty much useless! Anyway we made space by routing the cables along the periphery of the case and fit our ‘India specific’ adapter. Perhaps Users in UK, Hong Kong and Singapore might not be as lucky with their bulky three pin adapter.

Charger,Spare battery, Nation specific Plugs

**6.3mm Stereo phone plug adapter, in-flight dual adapter, 5 feet extension cord
**

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Ergonomics and Performance
As you spend more time with these headphones or rather the whole QC3 eco-system, you realize how each and every small detail has been taken into consideration. This is reflected from the ultra soft leather used for the headphone cups. The combination of soft leather and the ‘memory foam’ makes for a very comfortable fit, ideal if you plan to use it for long hours.

Coming to the most interesting part, Noise Cancellation. You can use the headphones either to listen to music or just by themselves if you want to catch up on some sleep in a noisy environment. But remember the noise cancellation is not 100%, rather somewhere to tunes of 60 to 70%. So if you plan to use it ignore your nagging wife, it wont work.

To put it through the acid test we used it while traveling on Maharashtra’s State Transport bus, popularly known as “S.T Bus”, which (for the uninitiated) puts even the loudest firecrackers to shame! We plugged it in a PSP, powered on the phones and put on an audio track. The noise cancellation feature worked like a charm and audio quality was very good. Though not 100%—with the audio track playing—the noise cancellation was good enough to let me have a pleasurable listening experience. Next, I plugged it out of the PSP but kept the phones powered on to check its noise cancellation ability. Again, it filtered most of the engine roaring noise. In fact, nowadays, I use the headphones to catch up on some sleep while going to office. There’s only one hitch though, remember to put your cellphone on vibration else you are going to miss a lot of calls.

The audio quality is top notch with good bass reproduction, a factor missing in most headphones since the drivers are very small. And the noise cancellation feature enhances the experience by letting you hear those sounds which would have been otherwise masked by the ambient noise.

The QC3’s run on a proprietary lithium-ion rechargeable battery and comes with a spare one. The burnout time on a single charge is 20 hours which we found to be as advertised. With the spare battery it will keep the phones alive for 40 hours at least. And if you plan to buy another spare it will set you back by a hefty Rs. 6000. So cling on to them, they are worth their weight in gold, well almost. In fact if you lose the headphone cable (the one which plugs from the headphones to the player) which is a proprietary Bose cable, you will have to shell out a whopping Rs. 1000.

Conclusion
The QC3 is a piece of art blended with cutting edge technology. It aces every department right from the build quality to audio quality and noise cancellation. The price tag of Rs. 20,000 sounds very steep initially but then as you use it you slowly start understanding its worth. And then, as with other things, you have to pay a price to be on the edge. So if you don’t know where to hide your money, you can surely trade it for one of these. As for me, I am making the most of it for the time it’s here.