The Bose Quiet Comfort 45 has all the pieces to be a great ANC headset, but it’s not quite complete. The sound quality is not that good, even if the ANC is best in class.When most people think of active noise canceling (ANC) headphones, they think of some iteration of Bose’s cans. For a long time, its offerings were among the most popular on the market, known for their effectiveness and relatively painless interaction. It’s been two years since the release of the Bose Noise Canceling Headphones 700, and five years since the original QuietComfort 35 hit the shelves. Do we need a new headset with the Bose Quiet Comfort 45? We spent a week with the Bose QC 45 to learn everything you need to know before you buy.
Bose Quiet Comfort 45 Quality
Bose’s ANC headphones are a bit of an archetype, and for good reason: they’re pretty good at providing comfort and ease for most people. The Bose QuietComfort 45 is no different. If there’s one major positive about the QC 45, which looks nearly identical to its predecessors, it’s that you’re not in for any big surprises.
The ear cups are great, and while the headset weighs 240 grams, it distributes its weight well enough not to cause too much fatigue over long periods of time. The synthetic leather pads are dense enough to offer decent isolation, and the band also provides a bit of padding over the top.
Inside the Bose QuietComfort 45’s packaging is a travel case, 3.5mm TRRS cable, USB Type A to C cable, and various documentation. There are no airplane adapters of any kind, which is either a funny nod to the state of the world, or another reminder that I’m old and should probably stop expecting these things.
One of the biggest updates to the Bose QuietComfort 45’s new design is the jump from the old microUSB port to USB-C. Of course, this is primarily for charging your headphones, so it’s nice not to have to futz with microUSB anymore.
Controls
Controlling headphones like the Bose QuietComfort 45 is pretty straightforward once you get used to it, but there are still a few quirks.
The buttons on the back of each earcup are intuitive enough, but can be a bit awkward to get used to in the world of touch controls. However, for those who don’t like to rely on sensitive controls to fail in colder climates, the buttons are a good fallback.
Playback controls reside on the right headphone, and the voice assistant plus ANC toggle lives on the left. Unfortunately, you can’t turn off ANC if the headphones are on. You can only toggle a mode called “Aware” that allows some pass-through of your surrounds using the Bose QuietComfort 45’s external mics—an unfortunate feature we found in the Microsoft Surface Headphones 2. Seen together.
Battery Life
With noise canceled, the Bose QuietComfort 45 lasted 24 hours, 49 minutes, beating Bose’s official 24-hour battery life for the headset. Our battery tests are performed by subjecting the headset to continuous output of music peaking at 75dB(SPL) until the batteries die, so if you’re listening at low volume, you’re likely to see the 25 hour mark. will go beyond and then some.
You can use a USB-C cable to charge the QC 45 quickly. A quick charge of 15 minutes gives 180 minutes of playtime.
Active Noise Cancelling
The Bose QuietComfort 45 does a great job at canceling out outside noise with its updated ANC system. In particular, it does a surprisingly good job of reducing noise in the mids and highs that most headsets don’t reduce very well.
This sounds amazing, but in practice, this means that instead of sounding a quarter as loud, an airplane engine should be about an eighth louder than earth shattering, but still. A significant improvement. The redesign of these headphones improved isolation somewhat, and it pays dividends in the form of increased high frequencies.
While we’re hesitant to crown the Bose QuietComfort 45 the king of ANC, Bose is definitely moving forward after a few years of leapfrogging Sony and Apple up there. Keep in mind that there is no way to disable active noise cancellation on the QC 45 without enabling Aware mode. At least with the Bose QC 35 II, which lacks Aware mode, you can turn off ANC and enjoy the music.
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Sound
As much as I’d love to tell you that the Bose QuietComfort 45 offers some improvement over its predecessors, I can’t. It’s okay, decent even — just not great. Many of our gripes with the headset have to do with the high-end being louder than we were aiming for. It works well in making speech intelligible. However, it makes busy tracks with a lot of loud sounds like punk, badly mixed 90s-2000s music, and some pop tracks sound awful. Of course, a lot of the blame falls on the producers of these tracks—but at the time, they were mixing for the “Bass Boost” crowd, and as a result they didn’t think the world would ever be so good. Stuff will have to be dealt with. Emphasis on the high end. It’s not Bose’s fault that these tracks weren’t mixed well, but the Bose QuietComfort 45 is much more appealing with a sound like this.
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