hey everybody its la inside but and we’re taking a look today at a pair of noise cancelling headphones from Bose these are the headphones 700 and they are very similar to the QC 35 and I’m sure you’ve seen out there but there are a couple of differences as well so we’re going to be taking a look at some of the unique features of this device how it compares to the QC 35 s and also give you my impressions of its overall sound quality in this review now I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure if these came in free of charge through the Amazon vine program however all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor is anyone reviewed or approve what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what these new headphones are all about now Before we jump into the review of the headphones I do want to offer a word of caution about doing business with Bose over the long term a couple of years ago I bought these QC 35 headphones at full price and over the last couple of months the headphones have stopped turning off I’ll flick the switch to the off position and they will turn themselves right back on again this is a very widespread problem a lot of people who own these headphones are experiencing these issues after the warranty period ends and Bose is doing nothing about it other than to offer you a coupon to buy a refurbished pair of headphones they don’t even want to repair the ones that are out in the field currently that is not a good way to treat customers especially with a premium product like this if it was a one-off issue that just cropped up after the warranty ended I’d be able to forgive that but given how many people are having problems with these and the fact that the company just doesn’t seem to care about it has me really cautious here about recommending any Bose products to anyone so if you are in the market for these things or these things just keep that in mind as we go through this review because I am concerned over their ability to support their products even if they have a widespread engineering issue
with them that warning aside let’s get into it now and see what these headphones are all about these are a very comfortable pair of headphones in fact I find them more comfortable than the QC 35 s I just wore these on a trip where I had a four hour flight in both directions and it was a very very comfortable to have these on my ears the whole time these are very soft cushions here it’s a synthetic leather it’s got a very soft almost suede like feel to it but it is not made out of real leather it’s got a nice stainless-steel headband with a lot of padding here on the top you can adjust the ear cups here just by sliding them up and down like so and all together it was a very comfortable experience like the QC 35 s they do have a rather large carrying case and these do not fold up like the QC 35 s do so when you put them in the case here you can kind of get a feel for how big this thing will be in your bag so the case itself is actually thinner than the QC 35 case that I have down here but as you can see it is still pretty bulky to carry around with you there so that was my only gripe with these is that they are just a lot so carrier in a bag because it will take up a lot of space in that bag now you have a couple of different options for audio on these you can have them connect via bluetooth of course you can pair I believe up to eight devices with it and you can actually use two devices simultaneously with the
headphones in addition to the bluetooth option you have a jack here for headphones so if you want to connect up to a airplane system or whatever or just connect up your phone with headphones for some lossless audio you can plug in this connector into the bottom here and then connect the full-size headphone jack into your headphones this is one of those smaller Jack’s and these are not hard to find but just be aware if you wanted to make a bear get a separate cable you’ll need to get one end with the traditional sized headphone jack and another with the smaller jack there and you also get a USB C to USB a charging cable in the box but just note that there is no AC adapter in the Box to charge it now these have a few features that are lacking on the QC 35 s one is that they have a greater control over the amount of noise cancellation you have ten different steps of cancellation that you can apply so by default it’ll come on at ten but you can have it step down to varying degrees of cancellation depending on what your preferences are so that’s a nice little extra with these the QC 35s would have a mid point a high point and off again these have ten different levels that you can have them do you also have in place of buttons a capacitive sensor here on the right ear cup for doing some controls and I’ll show you those in a few minutes when we take a look at the app you also on these have the ability to use a waik word with the Amazon a word or the
Google assistant or Siri so you can just say you know the name of your assistant and have that assistant execute things and as you’ll see in a few minutes even on the iPhone you can get access to non Apple assistants without having to load up apps it just works through the apps background tasks so that was a pretty neat feature and I’ll demo that in a minute as well and those are really the big differences here on these versus the QC 35s as for sound quality these sounded more neutral than the QC 35s did they both have a good amount of bass to them but I found the bass to be deeper on these so if you’re listening to music and you really like that punchy bass I think the QC 35s are a little better for that movies especially I think sounded a little better out of these than they did out of the movies I was watching on my last flights the bass is there it doesn’t sound distorted or anything but it just doesn’t have that punch and I often watch a lot of movies and TV shows on flights and that was something that I noticed these didn’t sound as punchy with the base as the QC 35s did but if you like a more neutral sounding headphone I think you’ll like these music sounds great out of these everything sounds good but I think it’s a matter of what your preferences are now the overall noise cancellation on these is exceptional but the QC 35s also do an exceptional job of noise cancellation I really didn’t detect much of a difference between the two so if you are looking for comfort on a flight in so far as all the background noise is
concerned both will do a very good job with that the 700s here do have an edge because you can more finally adjust the amount of cancellation that you get and that might be useful in certain circumstances where you might want to talk to people next to you but still drown out some of that jet engine noise so these do offer more flexibility and better comfort but the overall cancellation effect here is about the same as before now of course you’re pairing these with your phone and if you happen to get a phone call while you’ve got them on you can use the microphone built-in here to have a conversation and if you’re curious as to what these sound like here you go this is the microphone feeding audio back to my phone via bluetooth so the audio is not bad you’re not gonna use this to make your podcast or something but it certainly is good enough for a phone call there is some noise cancellation built into the microphone itself so if you are in a noisier environment it’s not going to drown out the background all that well but it will be good enough that the person on the other side can hear what you’re saying one thing that you definitely want to do though is adjust the setting of the microphone loopback so you can hear yourself talking I found the default setting on these to be a little bit too low and I sounded very muffled to myself so setting that to high makes it a lot more natural to talk on these because you can actually hear what you’re saying these things really drown out so much sound it’s hard to hear your own voice while you’re talking so turning that setting to the high level will really help with that and speaking of settings let’s jump into the app now and see how to configure everything now you can configure some of your headphone settings with your phone
this is the Bose music app that’s on Android and iOS and when you pair it up with your headphones it’ll detect them when you load the app up you can see I’ve got 12 hours and 26 minutes of battery life remaining and I haven’t yet actually charged these things since I got them so I took two four hour flights and have used it off and on a little bit around the house here as well this update has been installing for quite a while I did update the headphones when I first set up everything before I left on my trip but it looks like there’s another firmware update that is coming down to them right now you’ll notice here at the bottom that you can control the level of noise cancellation from the app directly and you can see you’ve got ten different settings here and each will reduce the noise cancellation level slightly until you get to zero where it will be off completely ten again is the default now if you click on these little periods next to the noise cancellation setting you can set up favorites see can see right now it’s got 10 5 and 0 and what’ll happen here is that every time I push the button on the left-hand side of the headphones it will jump into one of those settings so right now it is set to 10 if I push the button it will go down to 5 and then if I push it again it will go down to 0 and if I push it a third time it will go back up to 10 so right now that’s what I have it set to but of course you can set these to be anything that you want if you hold down the button it will turn off the noise cancellation completely you’ve got a couple of other things you can
do in here one is set your sources so right now I just have one device paired up with the headphones but you can manage the 8 that you can pair with it and you can choose which two can send audio to the headphone simultaneously there’s also Bose AR which I played around with a little bit this I believe works on the QC 35 twos as well and what this will do is give you a couple of different scenarios where you can listen to audio based on the position of your head so if you hear something that’s coming from behind you if you turn around it will then be in front it’s kind of a fun little thing it wasn’t as compelling as I thought it would be but if you want to play around with some of the spatial audio that’s something that you might find intriguing there are some services that use this Bose AR so if you’re out doing some touristy stuff you can actually have the headphones your phone kind of work together to tell you what you might be looking at in a particular location so that might be something useful if you do a lot of traveling in the settings section here and with the gear icon you can name your device you can redo the product tour you can manage the Bluetooth connections and then the voice assistance section is where you can pair up different compatible services so I have mine right now paired with the Amazon a word so I have a smart bulb installed in that light over there and of course it works with the Amazon a word and what I’m gonna do now is put on the headphones and issue an a word command to the headphones here and have them turn the light bulb on now these headphones are paired up with my phone and this of course is an apple phone which doesn’t typically like
to play well with other voice assistants but what happens here is that the Bose app in the background interacts with the Amazon API and you’re able to issue commands directly without having to have something loaded in the foreground so they put these things on here and I’m going to say turn on the color lightbulb and there you go we’ve got the light here turning on with a command that went through my iPhone without having to invoke something else first and I thought that was a pretty neat feature of these again it works with the Google assistant and with Siri you can only have it work with one of them at a time but it does seem to do pretty well with that the trigger word has to be uttered by itself you can’t utter the trigger word and then the command immediately after that you have to wait for it to hear it and then activate but still it seems to be working quite well and the fact that it works this seamlessly with a another manufacturers voice command on an iPhone I thought was something unique and interesting to me so that was good now if you don’t want it to be always listening you can make use of the capacitive area here on the right ear cup to turn it off so what you do is hold down your finger here until you hear the headphones respond with the command that the trigger word is shutting down after that you can push this button here to activate the assistant manually so that’s one thing that you can do instead what I’m finding here with the voice assistants is that it’s channeling all of the assistant audio through the headphones so if I ask ask it what the weather is going to be like tomorrow or what the traffic is
looking like I’ll hear all of that through the headphones and I thought that was really well executed here what’s not so well executed though is the placement of the trigger word button I am constantly hitting this button when I take the headphones off my head because where my right hand goes to grab the headphones is right where this button is and I’m always pushing it another thing that’s happening is that this capacitive sensor is also very sensitive so I’m constantly turning the voice assistant on and off inadvertently because my thumb is just resting on this as I’m handling the headphones so some things aren’t so elegantly executed here but again I do think it’s pretty neat that it does seem to work quite well with an iphone using another company’s voice assistant and we got a few other things to take a look at here on the app first is the shortcut option and this basically determines what happens when you hold down the right-hand side of the headphones as I mentioned I was very annoyed over that enable/disable of the waik word I could switch it to having it read off the battery level for example that’s fine but I would prefer maybe to have the option to disable touch and hold completely because it doesn’t seem all that useful to me but your mileage may vary on that self– voice is something that I switched from medium to high and this is that loop back of the microphone so when you’re on a call you can hear yourself better if it’s on high vs.
Medium medium was a bit too muffled for me but again that’s something you’ll want to set for your own preferences now there’s also a setting here for auto off and what this will do is turn off the headphones automatically if they are not getting anything streamed to them for a period of time by default it is set to never but you might want to leave that setting set to never because the headphones will shut themselves off if they don’t detect any motion for 10 minutes bows on their forums say that these are very sensitive to motions so they won’t inadvertently shut down but if you take them off your head put them down the table they will turn off after 10 minutes of inactivity and I do think these might fare better than the QC 35 s will insofar as that power switch issue is concerned because these do have an electronic switch versus the mechanical switch on the prior Edition that of course is very prone to failure so it looks like this is in some ways an acknowledgment of an issue they had on the prior generation of headphones that they were selling because these do not have that mechanical on/off switch and before we close out I wanted to show you the gesture controls on this because this does not have buttons for doing playing and pausing and that sort of thing so on the right-hand side of the headphones you’ll see a Bose logo this is the capacitive area so if I double tap here I can start playing if I double tap again it will pause I believe this is also the gesture to answer a phone call and hang it a double tap you can also skip tracks by swiping to the right here or you can go back by going to the left you can also adjust the volume here by swiping up and down I did find the volume control to be the most finicky but it does seem to work and it’s in some ways a little bit easier than having to feel around for buttons it’s nice just to have a simple gesture that you can use to control everything so overall I’m okay with these actually I like the industrial design a lot better than the prior generation headset and it’s kind of funny that Bose is still selling both of these because these really are from a design standpoint superior they lack that faulty switch they’re more comfortable I like the look a lot better they just look and feel a lot more modern you’ve got the USBC
connector here at the bottom so those things are great I do though for movies and TV shows prefer the audio out of these it’s not a huge huge difference but it’s something that I noticed was missing when I started playing around with the 700s and watching some of the movies and TV shows that I typically watch on airplanes I’ve always really liked the deep bass and the punchiness to these for movies and TV watching not so much for these although I think these might be a little better for music listening because of that so it’s really going to come down to your personal preferences if you have a Bose store nearby it might be worth going in and trying out both to see which will sound best with what you plan to listen to on it but overall these do feel like a nice improvement and I really wish Bose would do right by the folks who bought these and have a bad switch it looks like they corrected it with these new headphones which will likely be the direction of the company here rolling forward but I still have a very bad taste in my mouth from a poor customer service experience with Bose and these super high-end headphones that are really problematic for me right now but overall not a bad set here and definitely worth considering if you want a really nice pair of noise cancelling headphones until next time this is LAN Simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lon TV supporters including gold-level supporters the four guys with quarters podcasts cristela Greta Tom Albrecht Brian Parker in Cali an Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to LAN TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
Read More: Review New Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 (2020 version) – Intel Ice Lake Processor with Iris Graphics
