Bose 3 Acoustic reviews – what do others think about Bose 3 Acoustic?
Most helpful client reviews
1488 of 1499 persons found the following review helpful.
QC-3 vs. QC-2 (side by side comparison)
By G. Davis
I have applied the Bose QuietComfort QC-2 headphones for in regards to a year, and have traveled to Asia over 5 times with them, and domestic travel as well. About 120 hours of air time. Never took them off. Vastly reduces my jetlag. A pleasure to own and use.
594 of 602 persons found the following review helpful.
QC2 is Same Quality with Less Ear Pain
By Lisa Shea
I was preparing for a long trip to Ukraine. This involved both a very long firstborn flight, then a flight from Kiev to Lviv, plus a lot of 3+ hr long van rides to respective destinations and an for the length of one night train trip amidst the main cities. I knew I would in truth need a noise cancelling headphone. With the Bose QuietComfort 3 just coming on the market, I was more than willing to remunerate the top dollar in order to maintain my sanity.
When I original received my headphone set – only days after it was freed – I was thrilled. It was small, easy to carry in it is slim case, and it had a rechargeable battery. This seemed like the perfective headphone for travel. I already had my 60 gig iPod ready with “sleep music”. Now all I had to do was plug it in, and encounter pure bliss.
The headphones were genuinely comfortable to “put on” – they fit on top of the ears rather than “around the ears” like the former model. They were very light and non-intrusive. Lying sideways on a pillow didn’t pose much of a problem. I waited the proper time to charge up the battery, and then I put them on and turned them on.
WHOMP. It wasn’t a *physical* sensation. It’s not that the foamy earcups pressed versus my ears strongly. It was an INTERNAL sensation – the pressure of the waves of the speaker versus my eardrums. It genuinely hurt. I turned it off. The sensation went away. I turned them on again and WHOMP, there was that pressure again.
This intrigued me so much that I did exploration and made a specific playlist of songs on my iPod that involved left-right sounds, i.e. songs like We Love You, Lightning Crashes etc. where songs only play out of one speaker or the other (left or right). The pain would unquestionably come more strongly out of the speaker that was not playing music. Whenever there was “silence” or soft levels of sound, the pressure of the “anti noise generators” would hurt my ears.
My boyfriend thought I was insane 
He did sense it when I played the left-right song set. We went into a local outlet where they had the demos set up of the QuietComfort 3 and the QuietComfort 2 (the older over-ear model). Both are rather good at blocking sound, to beauteous much an equivalent degree. However even with their store models I could feel that same pain when the QuietComfort 3 headphone was turned in without a strong sound signal coming through. Of course their sample sounds are all loud, throbbing music, perhaps for this very reason. It’s having little impact to mask an “airplane engine simulation” if you’re listening to Santana blasting away on Smooth. I cited my ear pressure issue to the clerk, and he said he found the precise same thing.
Finally after when it comes to 30 days of testing, I called up Bose and asked to interchange this in for the QuietComfort 2. I would much rather have the around-ear headphone (which really, the case is regarding incisively the same size and the headphone itself is just as comfortable for me) and have far less pain. My thought is that with the around-ear shape they didn’t need to blast directly towards your ear as much with the noise cancelling waves in order to counterbalance the ambient noise.
If you’re looking at these, I would genuinely compare the two side by side in a store. I tried my very, very best to stick with the QuietComfort 3 since I already had them in my house and they were smaller. I just couldn’t do it – they bothered me too much to imagine using them for 2 weeks straight.
621 of 638 people found the following review helpful.
QC-2 v QC-3 Comparison
By Paul Noble
I did a reasonably comprehensive A/B test this evening at our local Bose store (their firstborn stock arrived today).
I had given my QC-2s to my wife and purchased ER 6i’s because of the bulk of the QC-2 case when travelling, but have never been wholly comfortable with the ER 6i’s stuffed in my ear canals.
I saw the QC-3 ads and since I am travelling to Europe next week I hoped to secure a pair before leaving.
What I found physically: QC-3s are for me less comfortable with the required pressure on the ear. The QC-2s feel ‘lighter’ to wear, even though they are actually around 20% heavier. The QC-3 case is more or less littler and thinner, but not significantly, and with the battery charger, if anything somewhat heavier.
A small, but potentially critical design flaw: the QC-3 ‘on’ light is integrated into the switch, rather dull and much more comfortable to miss, surely beneath store lighting. But if you leave them on from your last use, since they use a rechargeable battery necessitating a mains charger, you will be out of luck on that long flight! With the QC-2, the danger is far less and the remedy a single spare AA battery (30 hours of use with the QC-2s v 20 hours per charge with the QC-3 rechargeable battery).
What I found aurally: to my ears, and those of a Bose staff fellow member who joined me in the test, the QC-2′s are more or less more detailed, with more or less more depth. This is in a quiet store, not an airplane, mind you, and listening to a CD not (a compressed) iPod source. I would guess that any aural divergence would be much harder to listen on a plane.
Fact is, in a store one has no way of knowing just what the acoustic divergences will be on a plane. Evidently the QC-3s have more inviolable noice cancellation to remunerate for their open design. What is the net effect of this?
I was tempted to buy the QC-3′s to grant an on flight comparison with my wife’s QC-2′s (and of course to be the ‘first kid on the block’!)
But just on a ease level alone, for me, the QC-2′s win out and I purchased another pair (albeit the lately modified version).
So why didn’t I buy them on Amazon? If it hadn’t been for the 4-5 day introductory shipment delay and my imminent departure for Europe, I would have One-Clicked my way to the QC-3′s but in this case I’m glad I didn’t!
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