Bose's excellent AirPods Pro rival earbuds just got much cheaper - Daily Record

These stellar earbuds offer great noise cancellation and sound quality - now with a cheaper price

Those looking to upgrade their audio experience often turn to Bose. Not only is Bose known for its famous QuietComfort over-ear headphones, but in recent years, the earbuds from this family have been a popular alternative to Apple's AirPods.

The Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds have a £100 discount on Bose, reducing the price to £199.95. That's also about the cheapest that these buds have been since they originally launched in 2023.

Bose is also offering a 10% discount for those signing up to its newsletter, so there's the potential for an additional saving, bringing the price down to below the £199 that Amazon is currently offering them for.

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The Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds come in three colours - Black, Smoke White and Diamond 60th Edition - and are best known for their noise cancellation performance. This will eliminate background noise so that listeners can hear music more clearly and not have to listen to the sound of the rest of the world around them.

There's also the option to have ambient sound let in, of course, to increase awareness, which is great for when walking on busy streets for example. Those skills also extend to calls, with the microphones filtering out background noise so the person on the other end of the line can hear the conversation nicely and clearly.

These Bose Earbuds will work with iPhone or Android phones - as well as other Bluetooth devices like tablets and laptops, although they don't have the same level of seamless switching that Apple's own headphones offer when working between iPhone and iPad, for example. Those wanting to stay in the Apple ecosystem might prefer the Apple AirPods Pro 2, which are £169 on Amazon.

The Bose headphones offer six hours of battery life, recharging when they are returned to the case, which charges via USB. There's no wireless charging on this model, unfortunately, as this price reduction is for the first generation of Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds.

The newer model from 2025 is more expensive and offers wireless charging as well as slightly tweaked performance. The Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds picked up plenty of awards in their time, while getting rave reviews from shoppers too: "Can’t find words to express how amazing the sound is from these earbuds," said one buyer.

While another added: "Dynamically excellent, with rich immersive sound across the frequency range, bringing new life to old favourite tracks." There's no questioning the pedigree of the sound quality, What HiFi giving them five stars too.

But some shoppers say that the call quality isn't good: "The people on the other end of my phone calls complain that they cannot hear me at all," said one. Another saying "Mic is really poor, especially with Teams and WhatsApp calls".

One of the highlighted improvements for the second generation is an improvement in the call quality with a new AI filter, but for those who are just interested in noise cancelling and sound quality, the originals should be just fine.