Review of Bose QC35 Headphones

Working in software development, a decent pair of headphones is a must. I’ve lost count of all the pairs that I’ve owned over the years! I’ve had some really good wired pairs but they’ve tended to die an early death when kicking my chair back to scoot across the office to speak with a colleague and forgetting I have them on my head or around my neck. I did try wireless headphones once before, a pair of Sony’s but the limited range, background noise, poor battery life and tendency to suffer from interference sadly had them quickly relegated to the cupboard. After trying a pair of QC-25’s in the office and being impressed by their sound cancelling functionality I decided to splash out on the (at the time) newly released pair of QC-35’s.

So I’ve had them for a while now and have been meaning to write a review, which fits in nicely with a new year’s resolution to update my blog a little more regularly than I’ve managed over the past couple of years. In a nutshell, I love them and whilst I hope that they survive many more years yet, I would replace them with another pair at the drop of a hat if anything was to happen to them. Yes, they are expensive, insanely expensive for a pair of headphones but if you use something every day it’s probably worth splashing out on getting something amazing.

• Sound Quality: There is almost no background noise at all and I’ve yet to suffer any interference from other sources. I’m really happy with the overall sound quality too. Whilst I’ve not done any technical tests they sound as good or better than any other headphones I’ve owned.
• Comfort: For me, they’ve got this spot on, they neither over grip your head nor move around because they’re too loose. Most of the time you can almost forget you’re wearing them. I wear glasses and some headphones just never fit right or squeeze the glasses into your head and in the worst case start to hurt after an hour or so. I’ve worn my QC-35’s all day and not suffered this problem or got too hot (another common problem of over-ear headphones).
• Wireless Range: I’ve read several other people saying how amazed they are with this. For Bluetooth the range is amazing, I can walk around our open plan office with no problems. Likewise, I can walk around most of my house too, even going between floors. Depending on how many walls/floors the signal has to go through I can get about an 8-10 meter range.
• Noise Cancelling: This can be so good it’s a bit worrying when someone makes you jump as they want to speak to you. We’ve had building work going on next door to the office and I’ve only become aware of it as I’ve taken my headphones off. In fact, the noise was so loud at that point I wondered how many of my team were managing to concentrate/work. For this reason alone, if you need to concentrate on your day job I would suggest you invest in your career by buying a set!
• Battery life: Never been a problem. I do hook them up to charge on a regular basis but I’ve never had a point where I’ve not been able to use them because they’ve been out of charge / on-charge. The battery life is just at the right level that you never need to think about it.
• Value for money: They are expensive, there’s no getting away from that fact. But as I said earlier, if I need to replace them, I would straight away. It’s probably fair to say I can’t hear a difference between these and a much cheaper (£50-£100) pair of wired headphones, but these are wireless and sound cancelling. They also aid focusing on tasks whilst at work, which for me makes them a worthwhile investment.