Bose QuietComfort 45

Bose’s latest effort in the QuietComfort series offers excellent noise cancellation, good audio, and an updated design. In that respect, they’re as good as they’ve ever been. If you’re in need of smarts and customisable features though, the QC 45 are rather sparse.

Bose is clearly catering to QuietComfort fans with the QC45. The new model maintains everything that makes this line of headphones so popular with noteworthy upgrades to noise cancellation. It’s also apparent that Bose is content to put its latest tech to work in entirely separate models like the 700, keeping the QC family going as long as there’s still demand for it. And if I had to guess, the clamoring will remain for quite some time. If Bose can manage to get the price closer to $300, future QuietComfort headphones become an even more intriguing proposition.

The Bose QuietComfort 45 deliver on their promise of quiet and comfort but are light on smart features and audio customisation.

Lacking a few features we’ve come to think of as standard, but Bose are still right up there when it comes to no-nonsense noise-cancelling.

Great comfort, super sound, spectacular active noise-cancelling. These are ideal travel headphones. The only thingnot to love is the competition - which has grown stronger over the years, including from Bose itself.

The $329 Bose QuietComfort 45 is an excellent upgrade with enhanced ANC, sound, and battery life.

I can certainly recommend the QC45 -- you'll be happy with these headphones if you buy them. However, they'd ideally cost a little less to create more of a price delta between themselves and the 700 (and the Sony), making them feel like a slightly better value. I feel like their list price should have been $300, the same as what the QC35 II cost (that model started out at $350 but dropped to $300 after the 700 came out). I suspect it'll get there soon enough.

The QuietComfort 45s are Bose at its best. They’re not some grand departure, and they adhere so closely to what’s come before that it’s easy to perceive them as less ambitious than the Noise Cancelling Headphones 700. But with their enhancements to noise cancellation, a useful new aware mode, and other tweaks, Bose has added ample appeal to what was already a solid foundation.