Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones (2nd Gen) review: still the quietest, still not the best-sounding

Bose announced the second-generation QuietComfort Ultra Headphones on 10 September 2025 and put them on sale on 2 October at $449, the same launch price as the model they replace. As of August 2026 Bose.com lists the QCUH2-HEADPHONEARN at $399, presented as a reduction from $449, and Amazon street pricing has been running around $379. That puts the headphones $50 below the Sony WH-1000XM6 and Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 at list, and $100 below the Sennheiser HDB 630. Five finishes are available: Black, White Smoke, Midnight Violet, Driftwood Sand and Desert Gold.

The changes are a list rather than a rethink. Battery life goes from 24 to 30 hours with ANC engaged. USB-C now carries digital audio at 16-bit/44.1 or 48 kHz, so the headphones can be used as a wired lossless output rather than only a charging endpoint. The ANC is now fully defeatable and manually adjustable on a slider in the app, which the first generation notably would not allow. A new Cinema Mode joins Immersive Audio and spatialises video and podcast content instead of only music.

Everything else is carried over, and that is the crux of the review. The industrial design, the folding mechanism, the case, the touch strip and the CustomTune ear calibration are all recognisably gen 1. Bose has not published a driver diameter for either generation; TechGearLab's teardown-style measurement puts it at 35 mm, and we treat that as a third-party figure rather than a specification. Whether a feature list of this shape justifies flagship pricing depends almost entirely on how much you value the one thing Bose does better than anyone.

Bose lists the headphones at 0.583 lb and TechGearLab measured 265 g on their own scale, so 264-265 g is the figure to work from; some outlets have cited 250 g, which we could not reproduce and are not using. That makes the QuietComfort Ultra heavier than the Sony WH-1000XM6 but meaningfully lighter than the Px7 S3 and HDB 630, both of which are around 300 g. More important than the absolute number is how the mass is carried: the clamping force is light, the protein-leather cushions are deep, and the headband spreads load well enough that ten-hour sessions do not become an endurance test. TechGearLab awarded 9.5/10 for comfort, the highest in their 26-headphone group, and our experience matches that.

The earcups fold flat and inward into the included carry case, which remains one of the better cases in the category and one of the few genuine practical advantages over the Sony and B&W alternatives. Build quality is solid without being showy: matte plastics, a metal-reinforced headband slider, and no creaking under torsion. There is no IP rating of any kind, so these are not headphones to take to the gym or wear in rain, and Bose does not claim otherwise. For a $399 product that will spend its life in bags and on aircraft tray tables, the absence of any ingress specification is a fair criticism.

Controls are a hybrid and they work better than most. A power and Bluetooth button and a multi-function button handle the discrete tasks, while a capacitive touch strip on the right cup handles volume and user-assigned shortcuts. On-head detection pauses playback reliably, and the headphones can store up to ten saved listening modes that you cycle through with the multi-function button. Google Fast Pair and Spotify Tap are both supported, and the touch strip is precise enough that we stopped reaching for the phone.

This is where the money goes. TechGearLab's measurements put attenuation at 26.5 dB in the low frequencies, 30.2 dB through the midrange and 40.2 dB in the highs, for a broadband average of 32.3 dB. Those are the highest figures in their comparison group and they translate directly into the subjective experience: aircraft cabin rumble does not merely recede, it stops being a thing you are aware of, and office HVAC drone disappears entirely. SoundGuys, using their own weighting, scored isolation 7.1/10 — a different scale, but the same ranking relative to rivals.

The next-generation ActiveSense system also handles transients better than most. Sudden loud events — a door slamming, a train announcement, a colleague dropping a laptop bag — are clamped without the pumping artefact that cheaper adaptive systems produce. Quiet mode is the full-strength setting, Aware is the transparency mode, and everything in between is now available as a manual slider, which is the single most requested change from the first generation and the one Bose delivered most completely. You can also switch ANC off entirely, something gen 1 simply would not do.

Aware mode is the weak spot. Transparency is natural in timbre and pleasant for conversation, but there is an audible white-noise hiss underneath it, particularly in a genuinely quiet room. It is not severe enough to make the mode unusable, and it is largely masked once there is any ambient sound at all, but it is a step behind the cleanest transparency implementations. Given that Bose wins the active cancelling comparison this decisively, the hiss reads as an odd blemish rather than a dealbreaker.

Bose does not publish a frequency response for these headphones, so the best available reference is SoundGuys' measurement, which shows a bass-tilted curve running roughly 3 to 6 dB above their house target through the low end, extension out to 20 kHz, and an uneven region between 3 and 8 kHz. That description matches what we heard: a warm, full, easy-listening presentation with plenty of weight under electronic and pop material, and a slightly recessed, occasionally glassy upper midrange that costs the headphones detail on acoustic and vocal-led recordings. It is a tuning designed to sound impressive immediately and to survive noisy environments, which is a coherent choice for a travel headphone.

The problem is the comparison set. What Hi-Fi and Trusted Reviews both landed on 4/5 and both explicitly deducted for sound relative to price, pointing at the Sony WH-1000XM6, Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 and Sennheiser HDB 630 as better performers at the same or lower money. TechGearLab, which ranked the headphones first overall at 88/100, still scored sound 8.6 against 9.2 for ANC and 9.5 for comfort. The consensus is unusually tidy: Bose keeps the noise cancelling crown and does not take the sound crown.

CustomTune, which calibrates output to the shape of your ear canal at each power-on, does real work here and makes the seal-dependent bass response far more consistent between users than it would otherwise be. What it cannot do is compensate for the limited correction available afterwards. The app offers a three-band EQ — bass, mid, treble — and nothing more granular, so if the 3-8 kHz unevenness bothers you, there is no tool to address it. Sony's parametric approach and the ten-band controls on several rivals make this feel dated on a 2025-generation flagship.

Bose claims 30 hours with ANC on, 45 hours with ANC off and 23 hours with Immersive Audio engaged — the first figure being a six-hour improvement over the first generation. SoundGuys' standardised battery test returned 27 hours 12 minutes, roughly 9% short of the claim, which is a normal shortfall for this class of test and still a strong result. Trusted Reviews reported around 10% drain over three hours at 50% volume, which extrapolates to the claimed 30 hours being within reach in ordinary listening. Our own use fell between the two, and the practical takeaway is that a week of commuting or a long-haul return trip fits comfortably inside one charge.

Charging is over USB-C, with a full cycle taking about three hours and a 15-minute top-up returning about three hours of playback. The more interesting change is that the headphones are now wearable while charging, which combined with USB-C audio input turns them into a viable desk headphone for a laptop. That USB-C path carries lossless 16-bit audio at 44.1 or 48 kHz, and it is the headline addition of this generation for anyone who found gen 1's Bluetooth-only limitation frustrating.

The analogue side is less generous. Bose includes a 3.5 mm to 2.5 mm cable, but it requires battery power to function — there is no passive mode, so a flat pair of QuietComfort Ultra headphones is silent regardless of what you plug into it. For a product aimed squarely at air travel, where seat-back systems are still analogue and outlets are unreliable, that remains a real limitation and one several rivals do not share. Wireless connectivity is otherwise strong: Bluetooth 5.4 with roughly a 30 ft range, SBC, AAC and aptX Adaptive via Snapdragon Sound, and two-device multipoint managed from the app.

Immersive Audio remains Bose's head-tracked spatial system, and it is still the most convincing implementation among ANC flagships — Digital Trends and What Hi-Fi have both said as much. It widens the stage without the hollow, phase-smeared quality that most virtualisers introduce, and the head tracking anchors the image to the device rather than your skull in a way that feels natural after a few minutes. The cost is battery: 23 hours instead of 30. New for this generation is Cinema Mode, which applies the same spatialisation to video and podcast content rather than music only, and it is the more useful of the two for long flights.

The Bose app is comprehensive without being cluttered. It handles CustomTune calibration, the three-band EQ, the ANC level slider, shortcut mapping for the touch strip, the multipoint manager, a per-cup battery readout and over-the-air firmware updates. Mode management is the strongest part: you can build and store up to ten configurations combining ANC level, EQ and spatial settings, then cycle them from the headphones without touching the phone. The EQ ceiling is the only serious complaint, and it is a significant one for a headphone at this price.

Call quality is the clearest functional weakness. Bose does not disclose the microphone count, describing the system only as a beamforming array with echo reduction, and in practice callers described our voice as thin and noticeably processed in anything busier than a quiet room. Trusted Reviews flags the same thing specifically, and it is the one area where a $200 headphone will often do better. If your headphones double as a conferencing device for several hours a day, this is the detail that should push you toward a rival.

The competitive picture in mid-2026 is unusually clean, because each rival wins a different category. The Sony WH-1000XM6 matches the 30-hour battery claim, is lighter at around 254 g, adds LDAC and offers far deeper EQ control, and most reviewers place its tuning ahead of the Bose. The Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 pairs a 40 mm driver with aptX Adaptive and aptX Lossless and is the choice for listeners who care most about fidelity, at the cost of around 300 g on the head. The Sennheiser HDB 630 asks $499 but claims roughly 60 hours, twice anything else here, alongside a 42 mm driver and aptX Lossless.

None of them cancels noise as well. That is the whole argument, and whether it wins depends on the room you sit in. For someone flying twice a month or working next to an air handler, 32.3 dB of broadband reduction is worth more than a better-behaved 4 kHz region, and the comfort score means you can actually wear the thing for the full flight. For someone listening at a desk in a quiet home, the calculus inverts completely and the Px7 S3 or the XM6 is straightforwardly the better headphone for the money.

It is also worth weighing the two things Bose does that the spec sheet undersells: the folding case-friendly design, which none of the three rivals matches for packability, and Immersive Audio with Cinema Mode, which is the only spatial system in this group we would leave switched on. Set against that, the lack of a passive wired mode and the mediocre microphones are the two places where the QuietComfort Ultra is beaten by cheaper products. Our 85 reflects a headphone that is decisively first in one dimension and mid-pack in another.