Not everyone likes to be isolated from their surroundings when enjoying mobile music, but this effect can hardly be avoided with in-ear headphones. Bose is now addressing this problem with new clip-on earbuds.
Wireless in-ear headphones have established themselves as the most widely used solution for listening to music and podcasts on the go. Most users particularly like the fact that they can acoustically exclude their surroundings by plugging the barely visible eavesdroppers into their ear canal. Many people even swear by active noise cancellation, which maximally reduces ambient noise by canceling out sound waves. However, there are also people who don’t like this isolated feeling at all. There is also a risk of no longer being able to adequately notice important things such as the traffic around you. The only alternative in such cases has so far been wearing open-back headphones. These, in turn, often seem a bit silly and are disruptive in many situations. Now manufacturer Bose is pushing forward with a completely new approach.
Clamp instead of plugging
In cooperation with the fashion brand Kith, the company recently launched the Ultra Open Earbuds presented. These are wireless mini headphones that users do not stuff into the ear canal, but rather clip them onto the auricle using a plastic clip. Using Bose’s in-house Openaudio technology, the headphones deliver sound to the ear from outside, creating an open feeling that does not cut off the person wearing them from their surroundings. A test must show how this approach performs in practice. The main questions that come to mind are the wearing comfort and radiation behavior of the headphones. At first glance, the black ear clip doesn’t look too comfortable and the large distance between the speaker and the ear suggests that the music being played can be heard much more clearly than with in-ears, even for outsiders.
Hardly any technical details are known
Bose has not yet provided any detailed technical information about its new product. This is quite surprising because the Ultra Open Earbuds are scheduled to hit stores in very limited numbers on January 22, 2024. They will then only be available via Kith online shop as well as in selected branches of the fashion brand – at the proud cost of 300 US dollars (around 276 euros). Bose has not yet announced a price for the German market. All that is known is that the earbuds should have a battery life of around 7.5 hours when the Immersive Audio with Spatial Audio function is deactivated. If you switch on the surround sound simulation, the running time drops to 4.5 hours. The Ultra Open Earbuds come with a charging case, but Bose does not reveal how often the clip-on headphones can be charged with it. Solid data on supported codecs and built-in Bluetooth technology are also in short supply.
