Bose - Hearphones Conversation-Enhancing Headphones - Black

Bose Hearphones Conversation-Enhancing headphones. Let’s start with the power cord supplied. It is 11 inches long, under a foot, how is this even usable. No charger is supplied however the manual state to use any USB style phone charger. You’re going to need a cord as well because the 11 inch power cord is useless. The headset comes with 3 sizes of ear adapters, small, medium, and large. These should cover almost all the ranges because they are very soft and form well to your ears. Charging took about 1 hour to complete. They are comfortable to wear, just remember they are ear buds and will at some point be irritating to your ears. The noise canceling works great. By changing the world volume with the control or the app, all outside background noise was gone. They can pair with 2 devices at one time. The real drawback to this is if they pair to a phone and a music player, the music player gets no adjustments from the app on the phone. The phone app only sends the world volume to the headset, the sound adjustments did not go to the headset. They only worked if the music was coming from the phone. When music was playing from the music player they sounded like very cheap ear buds. I think I might not have it set up correctly. The headset was very hard to get it paired with the phone and the music player. It would stay paired to the music player but lose the phone connection (Android 8.0) IOS 11.2 worked well and stayed connected. Once the connection seemed to be sorted out I found that starting the app resulted in the app wanting to re-pair the headset (not with IOS, only with Android). As far as being a headset for the phone, they are great. You can kill off outside noise, take calls, listen to music, all without any issues. The issue comes in when you want to use them as a headset with your phone but listen to music from another source. In this respect the app need some work, both in Android and IOS. As far as amplifying a conversation while removing background noise, they don’t handle this very well. You can kill off the background noise but the conversation, or TV goes with it. Adjusting for location of the source sound doesn’t really do anything except change the tone and background sounds. I attempted to use them because I need the TV turned up to enjoy it and my wife would like it turned down. I found that when the TV was adjusted to her listening level, I could hear every little thing in the room when I set them to TV. I tried adjusting them by myself and found a setting a little better but still all other noises, including eating chips, was just too loud. We switched places the next night. I set the TV where I wanted it and she put them on. This proved extremely successful. I was able to hear the TV with no issues and she was able to turn down the volume of the room and have a listening level she enjoyed. Next we tried them in a restaurant with mild background noise. While I was able to remove most of the background noise, most of the conversation went with it. When set to conversation mode they boost treble and attempt to remove sounds coming from other directions. Again they failed to provide me with acceptable results for their intended use. As a noise canceling headset for your phone they are great. As a volume leveling device to turn down conversation, or the TV, they work great. Don’t expect them to allow you to boost the volume of something like a hearing aid, they don’t do that. They do a superb job of lowering the volume of a room to a level that you are more comfortable with. I wanted to use them to listen to the TV and have my wife not get so annoyed because I turned the volume up to far. Turns out they work much better the other way around. I turn the TV up to where I want it and she uses them to turn the room volume down to what she enjoys. I don’t use my phone to listen to music, I have other devices that are far superior to a phone for that. My wife almost always listens to music from her phone, she loves them. To be able to listen to her music while turning down the outside noise is great for her. Overall they are a good set of noise canceling headphones with a few extra features. Weigh the cost before purchasing these. For me they would have been a complete waste. However my wife loves the extra features and she uses them all the time.

Review for Bose® - Hearphones™ Conversation-Enhancing Headphones - Black As a reviewer of a certain age, I was really looking forward to trying these earphones out. I have some trouble hearing in crowds, at restaurants, and when the TV volume is low. In many ways, these are a better answer than hearing aids. They help you focus sound in the direction you want: head-on, mostly front, or all around. You can adjust the volume, and the bass/treble for your personal liking. You can adjust the volume for each ear. The Hearphones come with three sets of tips to adjust for the best fit for your ears. It is important to find the best tip to get the most out of this device. Sadly, I found the tips a little difficult to change and tore one. The instructions show the best way to change them, and if you follow them carefully, you can avoid my mistake! Most of the settings can be adjusted using controls on the the neckband or cable, so I found it frustrating that I had to have my phone nearby so it could connect to the app. Don’t get me wrong, adjusting your personal preferences with the app is great, but once that is done, it would be nice to use them without the earphones searching and not finding your phone if it’s not nearby. This seems like a very forward-thinking product; the number of people who could benefit from it must be huge. I’d like to suggest just one other change. Older people with hearing issues also sometimes have mobility issues from things like arthritis. I think the controls on these earphones are very typical, but not very practical for older people. I especially found the on/off button hard to press and hold to power the unit on and off. A larger, easier to press button, tested by people likely to be using it, would be a great change to see!

I ordered these for my mom. Contrary to how she feels, she's struggling with hearing loss. Admittedly, she has looked to see if Medicare/Medicaid will cover hearing aids, which they don't. Hearing aids are incredibly expensive. Enter Bose. Everyone knows Bose for their audio products. You'll read different opinions of the quality/frequency response of their products. That aside, the Hearphones are outstanding. The benefit all comes from the free app available on the app store of your choice. You can control the level of outside sound, treble/bass, direction of sound as well as balance left/right. So how does it work? What's pretty interesting is you can play music as well as allow the sounds around you coming in. Normally, I'd say this is annoying, but I prefer to be aware of my surroundings. Given you can control the level of what comes in, this is a pretty great feature. To use as a hearing device, the app allows you to control the direction from where the sound comes - all around, 180* and focused. If you're in a noisy room, setting it to focused will allow the background noise to be less. If you're watching a movie with surround sound, set it to all-around and enjoy the same as your friends and family. I felt the default settings were too bass heavy. Once I changed the EQ to reduce the low end, the sound was more enjoyable. As we age, we tend to lose our high frequency hearing, so having this control is an awesome idea. Visually, the Hearphones are a bit large and not very discrete. Convincing those with hearing loss they need to have hearing aids is a tough conversation. Giving them something that isn't as obvious, would help sell the idea. I love the control that Bose is offering. Given everything is customizable based on the scenario users are offerered huge benefits over typical hearing aids. The biggest improvement would be to make it smaller. I still need to get my mom's feedback on the Hearphones. I'll update, but I'm sure she'll be impressed. Worst case, I don't have to hear her Facebook videos on full volume @ 7:00AM.

I have about a 70% hearing loss between 3-6KHz in my left ear. I don’t mean to gush, but I have a lot of high quality headphones, yet I find myself enjoying these Bose Hearphones more and more. The quality is superb and they’re very comfortable causing no wear fatigue. I love the fact that I can adjust the volume balance to compensate for my one-sided hearing loss. Not sure whether I like them better as substitute hearing aids or high quality earbuds for streaming music. They excel at both. And there’s the Bose Hear app! I’m a retired software engineer and I know quality software when I see it. Kudos to the Bose development team for building a high quality app with a very intuitive, interactive user interface. And it works great on both my Android smartphone and my iOS tablet. As a music streaming device I love the fact that I can dial up the music volume while at the same time dialing down the outside world with a separate control appropriately named World Volume. I have some very good hearing aids, but even those don’t have the incredible directional capability of these Hearphones. For instance, I was sitting at the dining room table reading the newspaper. The Hearphones were set on Everywhere (omnidirectional) when someone started making noise in the kitchen behind me. The Hearphones were picking up every bit of it. So I opened the app and set them to Front and then Focused Front. The irritating background noises behind me just faded away. It was amazing! My wife and I were dining out one evening and I had my Hearphones set to Everywhere. They were picking up too much background noise so I switched them to Focused. The restaurant noises faded away and I could hear my wife much better. There are a few slight negatives to mention. The Hearphones full battery charge only last about 5-6 hours and not the advertised 10 hours. About three times over as many weeks, the Hearphones just shut off for no apparent reason. And finally, the Power/Bluetooth button is very hard to engage. I have to press so hard I’m worried I might damage it. But, so far no problem. Overall, I’m very impressed with these Bose Hearphones and can highly recommend them to anyone who wants to improve mild to moderate hearing loss.

My father is in his late 60's and on top of suffering from some hearing loss is also dealing with tinnitus in his ears. He has some hearing aids, but he always complains about them falling out and he doesn't like to wear them around the house. So, consequently, when we visit, the volume on the TVs is SUPER loud. I have the Bose QC30's and I really like them, so when I saw Bose was making a version of the headset that was designed to help people with hearing troubles, I jumped on them. My Dad loves these things! Now, he can watch his NCIS, JAG, and Law & Order marathons while streaming the audio from his Apple TV without driving my mom insane. He also said that when he turns the volume up, there's white noise that helps drown out the tinnitus, which he really appreciates. He did say that Mom's had to watch what she says around the house now, because he can hear her better - so jury's out on if that's a plus or a minus. His only gripe with it was that the collar kept rotating, and this is a struggle I also have with my QC30's. For all the time and R&D Bose put into these, you'd think they could also had some counterbalance to the collar to keep it from moving. My Dad loves these things because he gets to listen to what he wants, when he wants and that these don't hurt his ears like some other buds I got him before. If you have a parent who has hearing troubles, or have some yourself, I highly recommend you check out this headset from Bose. The quality is amazing - and my only reason for rating this 4-stars is for the collar's inability to rest still around your neck. While these are not as good as "real" hearing aids, they can go a long way with some added benefits.

I have little to no high frequency hearing ability. I have trouble hearing dialogue at movie theaters, television at home and sorting out conversations at noisy restaurants. I have tried behind the ear and in the ear hearing aids in the past and either found they were uncomfortable or just didn’t work well. I choose the Bose Hearphones as a last resort. In short, the best decision I’ve made to restore my hearing in the aforementioned situations. In the movie theater, I not only hear every word but it sounds as if I’m listening to my own private high fidelity movie track. At home, I would normally have the tv volume up to 30+ and the rest of my family would complain. They wanted the volume set around 14. With the Bose Hearphones I now can hear perfectly even at a volume below 14. The app is incredible and allows you to personalize every environment. The background noise in crowded restaurants actually disappears to a level which allows me to hear table discussions. Not only would I recommend this product but I actually did that earlier to to an old friend of mine. One more feature that I love is that when I leave the situation where I need hearing support I can easily take the buds out my ear and they just drop over my shoulders until I need them again. Quick charging and long lasting charge is fantastic. Please try these. You can thank me later. AND no I don’t work nor am paid by Bose :) but I do love their products!

It is hard to imagine any better noise cancellation or isolation for the wearer. And the directional microphone feature is magical, quite frankly. I tested these while at the airport where there was a family with a large number of small children behind me and a guy flirting with a couple of women in front of me. When I activated maximum noise cancellation everything was pretty quiet and muffled. When I started mixing in all the sounds around me I was astonished at the additional clarity these headphones added - and it was very noisy where I was sitting. Even more impressive was when I activated the setting to ignore voices behind me. In this mode the conversation of those in front of me we clear, and I couldn’t hear the family behind me anymore. And when I activated the very focused mode, I could hear the responses of the women, but could barely hear the guy’s questions. Magical (with eye rolls). When my wife called, she could literally hear everything and there was not a thing I could do about it. Bose says if you want to isolate your voice for callers you need a boom mic. I do agree that a boom mic is best; however, this product kinda makes that answer sound flippant. Why couldn’t Bose figure out where your mouth is with the multitude of knowledge it has and isolate the sound from it, while subduing the sound from elsewhere? I’m sure there’s a reason, but I’ll just say that it is for this reason that I am still considering whether to return these. I spend quite a bit of time on the phone and having a set of cans pick up so much of the background noise in my environment that I cannot hear, and that is amplified to my callers, is NOT acceptable. While on the plane and in the air, I thought I’d experiment with my QC35 (1st gen). I put them on in noise cancelling mode over the HearPhones and it made not a bit of difference. I was expecting it to be a little bit quieter but I couldn’t tell if it was. So I removed the HearPhones and put on the QC35 set and found that the HearPhones were much quieter, so away with the QC35 - they are now my backup to HearPhones. It was also nice I could bleed in a little of the plane noise when I needed to hear announcements, without having to unplug the HearPhones.

Bose does active noise cancellation well, which is why they have always been my go-to wired headphones (used a QC20i prior to this). Now, with the Hearphones I enjoy the same active noise cancellation benefits in a wireless package with the added bonus of being able to not only dull sound as needed but amplify it as needed too (Bose calls this world sound). The ability to amplify or nullify sound proved useful during flights. I peacefully listened to music and watched Netflix on my iPhone during the flight without the nasty sound of jet engines. When I saw the flight attendant making the rounds, I simply adjusted the world sound so that I could hear what she was asking instead of pulling the earbud out. One of the problems with the QC20i was that I did not like the popping sound it made when I turned off the active noise cancellation, thus the habit of yanking the earbuds out instead. With the Hearphones I do not get the unpleasant popping sound when deactivating the active noise cancellation. The Hearphones are not as packable as my QC20i, but the improvements in the Hearphones merit the extra footprint of the case. PROS: -Best noise cancellation -Best travel headphones I have experienced -Can amplify noise which is beneficial to those who are hard of hearing. -neckband wireless design -great battery life -minimalistic design CONS: - Surprisingly none