Bose Sleepbuds II review: you get eight hours

As I imagine many of us do these days, I often have trouble sleeping. Plus, I’ve always been a light sleeper and can be easily woken up by a variety of noises: a particularly loud siren outside, a crackling thunderstorm, the heat that suddenly comes on in the early morning hours. So I was the perfect person to try out the Bose Sleepbuds II, a set of $ 250 earbuds specifically designed not to play music or podcasts, but to block and replace sounds that can disrupt your sleep.

The Bose Sleepbuds II are a pair of tiny – really tiny – earplugs specially made to help you sleep with a combination of sounds and music. They follow on from the rather disastrous introduction of the first-generation pair, which suffered from inconsistent battery life and sudden outages. This second generation has undergone several improvements.

For starters, they use a completely different battery technology. The previous generation was built around silver zinc batteries which, according to a Bose representative, “have a very high energy density, making them well suited for an application like ours.” In other words, they can pack a lot of battery life into a very small package. But they turned out not to be ideal for consumer products – hence the sudden shutdowns. As a result, the Sleepbuds II are based on more well-known nickel metal hydride batteries, meaning they last around 10 hours instead of the previous 16, but should prove to be more reliable.

Other changes include a better low-end response to improve noise blocking, better connectivity, and an anti-friction coating to keep outside noises (such as rubbing against a pillow) from interfering.

So now that we know what has changed, how do they work?

You connect the Sleepbuds II to your phone via an energy-efficient Bluetooth connection, which is used to transfer the various sounds to the earbuds. (Note that I’m using the term ‘transfer’ and not ‘streaming’ as the sounds actually live on the buttons rather than your phone.)

There are three classifications of sounds you can listen to. Sound masking sounds are designed to cover up any sounds (such as snoring) that can disturb your sleep. Natural landscapes are designed to calm you with natural sounds such as rain or rustling leaves. Finally, Tranquilities are silent musical selections described as ‘relaxing notes’. A few of these are already loaded on the buttons when you get them; then use the Bose Sleep app to view others you may want to use.

To tell you the truth, I couldn’t find much of a difference between many of the Noise Masking and Naturescapes sounds, especially since the former uses different nature sounds, such as a campfire or a breeze. That didn’t bother me; both sets of sounds were pleasant enough. However, I was disappointed with Tranquilities, which, as far as I could tell, consisted mainly of new age genre music, useless to anyone who finds that kind of monotonous tonality irritating. A quiet classic song would have worked a lot better for me, but of course it is a matter of taste.

The earplugs themselves come in a round case about the size of a hockey puck with a sliding top. They fit nicely into two small slots in the case, marked for the left and right ear. The tips themselves are labeled “L” and “R”, but the labels are covered by the tips, so they are not much useful. Still, it’s easy enough to figure out which bud fits which ear.

A series of small LEDs on the edge of the case let you know how much power is left in the case. It can hold two or three power ups before needing to be connected via USB-C connection. (The only way to know if the earbuds are running low is to check the app.) There is also an LED for each earbud that pulses while each earbud turns on.

The Sleepbuds come with three different sized tips. I tried the medium, which was on the buds when I first got them, but they were uncomfortable, almost painful, so I switched to the small ones, which fit just fine.

You use the accompanying Bose Sleep app to choose which sounds you want to listen to at night. The earbuds need to be out of the box to attach them to the app, and connecting takes about 15 to 20 seconds, but they always end up being attached. Since the sounds are downloaded directly to the earbuds, you can only have a limited number of them in your library at a time – usually about 10, although that can vary depending on the sounds you are using. When you reach your maximum, you will be warned that you must delete one sound before you can upload another. Uploading takes about 10 to 20 minutes – because the earbuds use low-energy Bluetooth, their upload speed won’t be as fast as, say, your typical phone app – so it’s best to conduct your sound experiments before going to bed.

In addition to the sounds themselves, you can also set an alarm and be notified of phone calls. Both are useful. But while you can be notified that an incoming call is coming, you cannot answer the phone with the buttons. So while you might not wake your partner early, you certainly could if you run out of the room to answer it.

If you don’t want to keep your earbuds on your phone all night, and you have already downloaded the sound you want to use, you can use the “phone free” mode. However, since you are not connected to the phone, you cannot use the alarm or be notified of phone calls.

But do they work?

So the main question: are they effective?

To tell you the truth, as someone who isn’t used to falling asleep in anything other than relatively quiet (I live in New York, so it has to be ‘relative’), the idea seemed to deliberately go to sounds or music. listen a little strange to me. But I have to say, after trying it out, it’s not a bad idea at all. I like to listen to rain, and there were several sound masking “rainy” sounds that worked quite well. The buttons did not mask everything, but they caused random street noise and the baby next door. And other sounds, if not completely masked, were muffled to such an extent that they were not really disturbing. (I can also see where the Sleepbuds are ideal for sleeping on a plane or train.)

The tops were perfectly comfortable to wear too. During the testing period, I wore them for about six to seven hours a night, with the sound on constantly (you can also set them to turn off after a certain number of minutes or hours) and found that they went from 100 percent to 40 -45 percent power during that time. So using it at night and then charging it during the day works really well.

Judging from my experience and what I’ve read about the first set of Sleepbuds, these are certainly an improvement over their predecessors. (There was at least one report of the new model combustion and discoloration, but the faulty unit was apparently replaced and no further issues were reported.)

There is one more question to ask: are they worth the price? It depends on. If you have real sleep problems due to environmental noise or even voltage, it might be worth paying $ 250 for a pair of earplugs just to help you sleep. (If your insomnia is due to medical problems such as sleep apnea, a doctor’s visit is probably okay.) The effectiveness of Bose’s Sleepbuds II is probably highly individual. They may work well for some people and less so for others. In my case, they improved my sleep somewhat, which I was grateful for – but whether or not they would be worth the investment is something I should consider.