On June 20, 2018 Bose introduced a new product to the world. A product that if you read the press releases would revolutionize the way we sleep. I’ve long been a fan of Bose headphones especially the noise cancelling variety. Over the course of my life I have had several iterations of their noise-cancelling devices. They have saved the day on numerous occasions as I travelled a lot and could never seem to find a way of mitigating the drone of the jet engines no matter where my seat was located. So, when Bose suggested they were going to make getting a good night’s sleep easier, I was all ears (pun intended).
The new product was called the Bose Noise-Masking Sleepbuds. That name is a mouthful and quite frankly is a little bit confusing. What this product is, is a set of ear plugs that fit within the user’s ear canal and produce patterns of white noise that masks the outside noises that may otherwise disrupt your sleep.
I was eager to try these and see if they really worked. We used to live in a relatively quiet neighborhood, but the houses have now reached that point where they are starting to need some repair. Since this subdivision was all built around the same timeframe, when one house begins repairs or replacements of some sort it tends to be a domino effect as the houses next door seemingly need the same kind of work done. The positive of this is that there is some level of comfort knowing that your neighbors are as interested as you are in keeping their property looking good and being maintained. The downside of this is that once the dominos start falling it sometimes feels like you are in the midst of a construction zone.
This past year has seen a plethora of houses having roofs replaced, windows and doors replaced with more energy efficient models, and exterior painting. And since Arizona is known for its brutal summer and fall temperatures, these remodeling and construction jobs begin at dawn so that workers can end earlier in the day before the high temperatures reach 115 – 120 degrees. You can’t blame them for starting early but when it’s not your house being worked on, it’s pretty much impossible to escape the construction noises.
So as soon as the Sleepbuds were available I bought a set. The Bose Sleepbuds are not for the feint of wallet. The price at introduction was $249 at Best Buy which is where I bought mine. If they worked, it would be a wise investment. If they didn’t work, well then, I was hoping they would at least drown out the sounds of my wife complaining about me purchasing very expensive ear plugs. I seriously was hoping it would not come to that.
I brought the Sleepbuds home and plugged them in. They come in a space looking round case that not only houses the individual buds but also has a battery built into it so that if you didn’t have a way to plug them in you could still get a night’s worth of charge to get you through the night.
When I say I had to plug them in, I should maybe be a little bit more specific. The charging case has no buttons. It has one micro-USB port on the back and a pin hole that you can use to reset the charging case. The case opens by sliding it from front to back. I know it looks like it opens like a lady’s compact, but it doesn’t. I only say this because that’s what I thought at first and it took me a few seconds of rotating the case like a Rubik’s cube before I figure that out. Yeah, I am slightly embarrassed to admit that but hey, at least I said it so you didn’t have to go through the same thing.
According to the instructions the Sleepbuds should be charged for a minimum of 8 hours before the first use so take that into consideration. You don’t want to plug these in just before bed and expect them to be ready out of the box. In my case, the Sleepbuds were charged in just under 6 hours but your mileage may vary.
The way you can tell if they are fully charged is that each bud fits in the case one way. When they are charging, a white light flashes. When the Sleepbud is completely charged, the light will glow white. In between the two Sleepbuds are five white dot lights. These are to tell you how the charger battery is progressively charged. When all 5 dots are white the battery is at full charge.
Another important note, I thought that the Sleepbuds would charge with the charger closed but in my case that didn’t seem to be how it worked. That may be by design or it might be because of the finicky way the Sleepbuds charge. Each of the buds have two connectors on the back. Those match up with two small posts in the charging case. It looks easy enough, you drop the Sleepbud into the case and it magnetically clicks in place and starts charging. That rarely works through and you end up taking them in and out, wiping off the contacts, reinserting them, wiggling them some more before the lights and charging begin working. I can’t tell you how many times I thought I got the Sleepbuds in correctly only to find when I took them out the next night they had not charged. Definitely not as bulletproof as you would have expected from a company like Bose.
The Sleepbuds have to be paired to a phone or tablet. They use low-energy Bluetooth to communicate with the device. You download the Bose Sleep app from the app store and it will walk you through the pairing. This is another one of those things that seems like it should be simple but doesn’t always work as well. I would say maybe 10-15 percent of the time I will remove the Sleepbuds from the charging case, put them in my ears, open the app and the app will say it cannot find the Sleepbuds and recommends putting them back into the charging case then removing them again to see if they will connect. Now I will say that this has been getting better as new updates have been pushed to the Sleepbuds since their introduction, but it still happens more often than you would expect.
In the Bose Sleep app you choose what sounds you want to hear. It should be noted that the Sleepbuds are capable of storing somewhere around 8-10 different sounds. The sounds themselves are stored in the buds but are activated from the Sleep app. You can remove sounds through the app and add different ones that Bose pushed down through the app. You cannot create your own sounds and you can’t listen to anything other than the sounds. These are not earphones; they cannot play music or other audio files. They can only play the sounds that are built into the app that can be downloaded to the Sleepbuds. That may be a disappointment to many, but I was actually ok with it.
Bose provides a variety of sounds from something like a babbling brook to campfires to rain forests, to waves against a dock. There is even one that sounds like a quieter version of the jet engine noises of a plane. It seemed somewhat ironic they included that since that same sound is what they use to sell you on their noise cancelling headphones. But who knows, somewhere there may be someone who is rocked to sleep with that sound.
The Bose Sleep app also includes an alarm in case these things work so well that you don’t hear your normal alarm clock. The Sleep app will send the alarm to the Sleepbuds and they are responsible for activating the alarm at the appropriate time.
Now to how they work. I found the Sleepbuds to be very comfortable. They come with three different sizes of ear tips to allow for proper fit. You can adjust the volume of the sound the Sleepbuds generate through the Sleep app but I have never had to go above around 25 percent. They do block out a lot of outside noise. Not completely block out but with the ear tips secure in the ear canal plus the sound the external noises seem to disappear.
Battery life on these is really good. Bose claims 16 hours on a charge. I’m not sure how accurate that is, I haven’t found a day where I wanted to devote 16 hours to sleep, you know, for testing. I can say that at the end of an 8-hour night the Sleepbuds still seem to have about 15-20 percent battery remaining, so the estimate is probably pretty close.
They do a pretty good job of eliminating audio distractions at night and after a few short nights I became very comfortable wearing them and they actually helped me to get to sleep sooner. I can also attest that in the morning when I woke up, I was surprised to take them out and hear how loud the neighborhood construction was, so I am definitely getting a better night’s sleep.
When we traveled to a family reunion recently, I was even able to withstand the snoring of that crazy uncle that sounds like he swallowed a bulldozer. It has definitely made a difference in the quality of sleep under adverse conditions.
There are still some nights where I must be tossing and turning because there have been times I have woken up and found one of the Sleepbuds has come out which can be a pain in the middle of the night running your hand up and down the bed and between sheets and blankets looking for the lost Sleepbud. That has happened less the more I use them so perhaps I have finally gotten them to match my ear channels.
The price is rather high but lately I have seen it coming down. Best Buy now has them for $211 which saves you a little. They can be a little frustrating to get into the charger and I really wish Bose would come up with a better way for that to work. There is no way to know what the charging level is except through the Bose Sleep app, so it is kind of a hassle going into and out of the app during the day to make sure they are charged completely. But at the end of the day they do exactly what they were designed to do. They aren’t perfect but if you have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep because of outside noise, these may be the answer you have been looking for.
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