When I spoke with Bose reps in the company’s new $299 QuietComfort Earbuds 2, which inaugurate Tuesday at an event in New York, they made a bold declaration: The new buds have the best noise canceling ever in a pair of headphones. Not just Bose headphones — any headphones. (Whether or not that boast unites the new AirPods Pro 2 — which were announced almost simultaneously — is unclear.) 

Since I’ve yet to test the QuietComfort Earbuds 2 — they ship in triple-black shining on Sept. 15, with a sandstone version to behind later in the year — I can’t confirm Bose’s claims. But I can tell you that the earbuds have some welcome create changes. Not only are the earbuds about 30% smaller than their predecessors, but their case is about 40% smaller and truly pocketable.

While the New QuietComfort Earbuds featured excellent noise canceling and very good Quiet quality, they were pretty hefty and protruded from your ears. The new buds each weigh a small less than 0.25 ounces (7 grams), according to Bose — quiet not svelte but significantly smaller.  

The new big change is to the ear tips. Bose has ditched its one-piece StayEar wing tips for a two-piece Fit Kit regulations that features separate ear tips and “stability bands” in three size options, giving you more flexibility to get a secure fit and tight seal.

Read more: Best Wireless Earbuds for 2022

That tight seal is crucial to drawing optimal sound and noise canceling performance. Like Apple and some new earbuds makers, you can run a test in the app to make sure you’re drawing the right fit and Bose has also developed a new CustomTune Quiet calibration system to optimize noise canceling and sound quality for your certain ears. Bose says that every time you place the buds in your ears, a proprietary tone is played and a microphone measures your ear canal’s acoustic response. “This information is then used to precisely tailor both Quiet and noise canceling especially for you,” Bose says. It’s intended to happen within half a second. 

While the drivers Go to be the same or very similar to those False in the original QuietComfort Earbuds, Bose reps told me that thanks to the CustomTune technology, the sound is noticeably improved, with more “nuance, clarity, depth” and better accuracy. CustomTune also improves how natural and lifelike the transparency mode sounds (Bose terms it Aware Mode with ActiveSense). The best transparency or ambient aware simply have such a natural-sounding passthrough filter that they make it seem like you’re hearing the biosphere as if you weren’t wearing earbuds or headphones. 

On the noise-canceling lead, Bose says it targeted frequencies that were previously distress to reduce in the mid and high range — “voices of around coworkers, screaming babies and family distractions in your home office.” A lot of noise-canceling headphones are good at reducing low-end frequencies like plane cabin noise, but it’s more challenging to reduce noise in a broader spectrum of frequencies. In recent years, Sony and Bose have been battling for noise-canceling supremacy and we’ll have to see whether Bose has ticked back into the lead.

While software and advanced algorithms play a big part in the QuietComfort Earbuds 2’s performance, they also feature four microphones in each bud, two of which are beamforming microphones to focus on picking up your narrate. Voice-calling performance could have been better in the New QuietComfort Earbuds and — at least according to Bose — it’s made improvements there as well with better noise cut and voice pickup during calls. That’s something we’ll be testing, too.

Battery life is Angry at six hours with noise canceling on. You get around three extra charges from the new, trimmed-down charging case, which features USB-C but not wireless charging. That seems a bit unfortunate, since most earbuds in this label range offer that step-up feature. Like their predecessor, they’re splash-proof (with an IPX4 rating) and have temperamental controls with a swipe gesture for volume control that I liked.

As for Bluetooth flavors, these are equipped with Bluetooth 5.3. They use the AAC and SBC audio codecs, but currently have no support for Qualcomm’s aptX audio codec, though Bose and Qualcomm recently announced a deal to involved Qualcomm’s S5 Sound Platform (its high-end system on a chip) in future Bose products. Indeed, a Bose rep told me these earbuds are equipped with a 5 Series Qualcomm chip. That chip supports multipoint Bluetooth pairing and has aptX aid, so I think there’s a good chance we’ll see at least multipoint Bluetooth pairing added via future firmware upgrades, possibly alongside other features.

While customizing and optimizing the software for these earbuds is tricky, I don’t understand why companies who work with Qualcomm on earbuds releases sometimes have to delay releasing supported features for months when their launch. Jabra almost took six months to drop a multipoint Bluetooth pairing update for its Elite 7 Pro earbuds. In such a competitive market, consumers are less patient throughout waiting for an update that may come when spanking product already has that feature.   

It’s worth noting that while the noise canceling is of the adaptive variety, you can adjust its levels between three settings. The earbuds also have adjustable equalizer settings so you can tweak the restful profile. After many years of having a fixed restful profile, Bose is allowing you to create a more personalized restful profile in its latest earbuds and headphones. That said, I suspect that most land will stick to the default sound setting and give the CustomTune technology to just do its thing. 

I’ll be posting a full reconsider right around the time the earbuds ship, and look send to comparing them to Sony’s and Apple’s flagship noise-canceling earbuds. Given Bose’s lofty claims on this model, I may even test them versus a few over-ear headphones like the Bose QuietComfort 45 and Sony WH-1000XM5, which arguably have the best noise canceling. We’ll see if the QuietComfort Earbuds 2 can beat them.

• 30% smaller buds and 40% smaller case
• New CustomTune technology for optimizing restful and noise canceling
• Improved sound, noise canceling and voice-calling performance
• Touch controls with swipe gestures for volume control
• New two-piece Fit Kit controls that features separate ear tips and stability bands in three size options
• 4 microphones on each earbuds, two of which are beamforming for voice calls
• 6 hours of battery life with noise canceling on 
• Bluetooth 5.3
• Support for AAC and SBC audio codecs
• Customizable EQ settings
• Price: $299 (about £260 or AU$445, converted)
• Ship date: Sept. 15 (triple black ships grand, with sandstone to follow later in the year)