These are the new bose noise-canceling headphones 700. So when I first saw that Bose announced these they kind of took me by surprise. The more you think about them and use them, the more it makes perfect sense. These are a prime example of competition driving things forward and making better products for consumers.
Minimal Design
The most striking part is, of course, the new pretty minimal design. Personally, I don’t love it, I mean it’s a unique look. “I think the look they’re going for here is minimal and clean.” There’s also a silver version. It’s pretty lightweight. But they’ve kind of seemingly gotten rid of any visible hinges or any broken lines at all. It just kind of looks like these smooth ear cups attached to one single stock. But you can still rotate them around and it still gives you pretty much a hundred percent of the flexibility you had before. The top band is still soft and the clamping force is still pretty solid. You put them on and even before turning them on they’ve created a nice seal.
The only thing I don’t like is the adjustability for height. Then pretty much all the new features that they’ve added are a direct response to all the headphones that have been coming out over the past year that had all kinds of cool features that have sort of passed them up.
Features
Type C
Many of these new features are just straight from what we just got in this new competition. So 700, now finally have USB type-c, where all the quiet comforts were micro-USB. These will now also they’ll connect to two different Bluetooth devices at once and can instantly swap back and forth between them.
Touchpad
You now have also a touchpad on the side of the right headphone with MIDI controls. So double-tap the touchpad to play and pause. Swipe up or swipe down to change the volume up or down, and swipe forward to go forward swipe backward to go back.
Physical Buttons
There are three physical buttons so on the right side there is the power/Bluetooth button. So single tap turns it on and off and a long press goes to pairing mode.
On the second button over here is your assistant button so you tap it. It’ll pause your music and use the excellent built-in mics to let you ask Google assistant things.
Then on the left side is a noise cancellation adjustment button. So you can cycle between a maximum of 10/10, 5/10 or 0/10 noise cancellation. These presets are customizable.
The Bose Music App
The Bose Music app is all fresh and clean and it’ll tell you exactly how much better you have left to the minute. It’ll let you dial in any noise cancellation level from 1 to 10 at any time which is super-specific. You can change what assistant the assistant button triggers.
What that Bose app notably doesn’t have is any sort of EQ control. So if you’re someone who wants to have that extra bass. You want to add to messing with the way it sounds out the box, these don’t do it from the Bose app.
I’ll say these sound just about as high quality as any Bluetooth headphones have. Their sound signature the way they sound is unsurprisingly kind of flat. Like that’s just the way Bose headphones have sounded for the past couple years with the quiet comforts. It’s not all roses, there are a couple of other things to consider aren’t just upgraded features.
2.5mm Jack
So like I mentioned it has USB type-c which is great but on the other side, they have a 2.5-millimeter headphone jack instead of 3.5. So if you run out of battery or you want to plug in wired audio for some reason you have to use. I guess they’re included 2.5 millimeters to 3.5-millimeter cable. Instead of any old regular audio cable that you have ready to go, that’s kind of disappointing.
Case And Accessories
The case also compared to the competition is decently compact but not the smallest I think the Sony’s would win again for the smallest overall travel size. Because they fold but the Bose case does have this neat magnetic flap covering the pocket to put in the cables. So that’s pretty cool but I also noticed it doesn’t come with the airline adapter anymore
They’ve come with Bose QuietComfort ones in the past. I feel like just including this made me remember that this was like the default headphones that you listen to on a plane. But they’re not included with the 700. So I don’t know maybe they just assume you already have one
Conclusion
Overall though just as a package this is the upgrade that we’ve been waiting for from Bose. The sleeping giant of noise-canceling headphones finally got poked enough times into making a move.
If you’re buying headphones for noise cancellation. Bose is back on top as far as the actual quality of noise cancellation the quality of the built-in mics are incredible. The overall build quality of the Bose headphones is superior
