bogus bose headphones

Back a year or so ago my work offered to buy me a set of noise canceling headphones. I was a little skeptical and thought I'd try them out first before asking the office to cough up $500 for a set (yes, they're bloody dear aren't they)

So I bought a set of Bose QC-2 headphones on ebay, and I was amazed how well they worked! They were fantastic.

Now I'm a bit of a fusspot with this sort of thing, having been trained as an Audio Engineer back in the 80's and being a bit of an amateur recorder. I was impressed how well the Noise Cancellation (NC) worked and I have compared them to Sennheiser and Sony offerings.

The genuine thing works well, you turn them on and the ambient noise just drops away like a coin down a well. I'm guessing they drop the background noise by something like 28dB (but it would be hard to know if it was on the A scale or what) and as its active it will depend a bit. This essentially means you can use much lower listening levels (to preserve your hearing) in a noisy environment and hear the audio well while still not hearing the background noise. You really do need to try them to appreciate how good they are.

Quite simply if you're not stunned then they're probably copies.

I accepted the work ones, and due to tight (personal) budgets at the time sold my others to a workmate. Recently I have decided to acquire another set for outdoor field recording and have been shocked to find that the last 2 in a row I've bought of fleaBay have been fakes.


So just a word of caution out there. There are quite a few assholes out there knowingly selling shit copies to the unwitting.

Here is an auction showing the sort of thing you may find.



Quick give away is low price, and little feedback points.

If you haven't tried the originals you may not know that you're getting crap. The originals are really really good ... these ones you can 'barely notice' something has happened when you turn it on.

I'll update this blog post more with more details what the originals look like, but warning signs are:

• if they can't prove they are genuine
• if the seller only has a few points of feedback
• if the case is not original the original case
• if no case then that's sus ... noone would toss out the original case
  

then its a cheap knock off and you'd be as well off to get a set of cheap Sony's off DSE.

The original case is not only handy but beautifully made. There are cheapies on the market but they are not like the original case.

I'll post more info on my headphones to update this post next week (when I'm back at work)