I'm the kind of guy who has to have my fave tunes close at hand at all times. At work, on the daily commute, and on long-distance trips, a stash of CDs and MP3s are my constant companions. At the end of a long, hard day, music's my favorite way of winding down and inviting Morpheus in. I pull the covers up to my chin, slip on headphones, drop a disc in my portable player, and waft away on the wings of some choice tracks (much to the chagrin of my spouse who goes to sleep the moment her lovely head hits the pillow).

The way I do most of my listening is with headphones. Over the years I've been on a quest to find cans that meet both my audio standards and physical needs without success. My big, closed-cup studio 'phones deliver excellent sound but they're way too bulky. After hours of listening, their heft begins to wear heavily on my head. I've gone through a heap of cheapo open-air 'phones-the kind that are usually thrown in with portable players. Most of them are worthless at delivering anything approaching faithful sound. To make matters worse, their output is anemic requiring me to crank the line level on the player deep into distortionville.

Things were even worse when traveling. The roar of Amtrak and the waves of pink noise that inundate jet cabins thwarted my attempts to enjoy my tunes. I tried ear buds, but their generally lousy fidelity coupled with the offputting sensation of having a plastic bolus jammed into my middle ear caused me to quickly abandon them. So it was with keen interest that I agreed to check out and review these two headset models from Bose.

Born in the air
The origins of the QuietComfort 2 Headset go back to a 1978 transatlantic flight taken by the company's founder, Dr. Bose. He was eager to try out the recently-introduced electronic headphones that were then replacing older pneumatic tube phones. Bose was disappointed to find that cabin noise and the distortion caused by increasing the volume to overcome the ambient roar negated the benefits of the new technology. That got the good doctor thinking. Before the plane had landed he had completed a mathematical analysis that pointed the way to far better performance. Upon returning to headquarters Bose launched a research program to study the problem.

That program led to the company becoming a leader in the development of active noise reduction headsets for aviation and military use. Bose continued to improve and refine this gear and better than two decades after Dr. Bose's original calculations, the QuietComfort 2 Headset hit the consumer marketplace.
 

How do they do it?
Bose Acoustic Noise Canceling technology works by creating an "anti-noise" signal which is the opposite of unwanted noise. Microphones in the earcups monitor sound at the user's ear. Circuitry then compares that sound composed of the audio source plus external noise with the isolated audio source alone and creates a precisely equal and opposite signal. This results in three signals reaching the user's ear: 1) noise monitored by the earcup mic; 2) the sound the user wants to hear (music or silence); and 3) anti-noise from the system's electronics. The noise and anti-noise cancel each other out leaving just the music (or silence).