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You generally wouldn't expect a manufacturer of headphones to brag about their ability to quell sound. After all, headphones are supposed to provide you with sound.

With two children in the house I'll admit I do occasionally wish to record an entire CD of silence, put it in the CD player, and crank up the volume hoping that silence played back at full volume might lower the general noise level of our home, but somehow my technical background tells me it might not work as expected.

Then again, that's probably not the way Bose's QuietComfort® 3 Acoustic Noise Cancelling® headphones work. (According to Bose's website, apparently that's what they're called, trademark protection and all, but I'll just refer to them as QuietComfort 3.)

Bose's QuietConfort 3 headphones are designed to put a lid on the noise. In this case, noise is considered the same thing as one of my students suggested at an exam when I asked for some characteristics of electrical noise: my student suggested that this might be the sounds produced at a concert, which the neighbors might very well consider noise. Noise, in this context, is ambient sound that you don't want to hear. Incidentally, the Bose headphones make excellent headphones capable of playing back music with a high audio quality.

In my field of engineering unfortunately office space is planned on the assumption that highly interverted people such as engineers whose stress levels are increased by the presence of other people will thrive in crowded, noisy offices. Well, we don't, but unfortunately office planners seem to prefer saving a few hundred dollars per month instead of earning several times that amount by means of increased productivity by employees working in environments tailored for productivity.

I'm one of those people that is particularly stressed by other people's noise, and I demand virtually complete silence at work. Bose's QuietComfort 3 come at a steep price, and reviewers tend to disagree on several performance parameters, but I decided I'd purchase the headphones. A price tag of $349.00 may cause wallet aches, but keeping my sanity seems more valuable.

The headphones weren't available for online purchase in my country at that time, but after calling Bose and handing over my credit card number, I had them within a week. I could probably have purchased a set online via helpful sellers at eBay or such, but then I probably wouldn't have the proper plugs for the electrical outlets in my country.

Upon opening the box, it is evident that Bose has frequent travelers in mind. A handy bag includes the headphones themselves, of course, a charger with replaceable mains plugs, two batteries capable of delivering 20 hours of silence, and an adapter that fits into those pesky separated left and right channels that most airlines have adapted in order to force passengers to rent the airline's rather poor headphones instead of using the headphones the passengers brought with them for their MP3 players or discman.

The QuietComfort 3 headphones themselves are about the size of any other small set of headphones, but the padding on the ear contact discs is soft, and the headphones are somewhat heavier. They're still reasonably lightweight, though, and won't tire your neck. The battery plugs seamless into the headphones themselves, so you won't have to deal with an extra box lying around.

On with the headphones, and where usual noise cancellation headphones block much of the ambient noice passively by virtue of a cup that covers all of your ear, somehow, the soft material on the QuiteComfort 3 headphones accomplished the same effect by gluing itself to my ears, covering the sound canal entirely. A significant amount of noise was already dampened at this stage, and with a little fiddling with the "on" switch on the side of the headphones, I turned on the active noise cancellation.

The effect of the active noise cancellation was not immediate, but within two seconds the active noise cancellation algorithm adapted to the room characteristics and the ambient noise, and the silence was complete. I have quite a few experiments with active noise cancellation and adaptive algorithms at university (in fact, my specialty is adaptive filtering algorithms), and Bose has made an excellent job.

Okay, the silence isn't quite complete. I'd have expected PC fan noise to be less audible, but some of the most annoying sounds are practically gone. We've suffered at work because of a construction site just outside of the building where what seemed like an infinite number of concrete pillars were driven into the ground. Conversation was rendered impossible because of the heavy banging noises outside, let alone the ability to concentrate. The QuietComfort 3 headphones managed to reduce this ear-rendering noice to the sound of someone driving nails into wood at a distance of about 300 feet. This is truly an impressive noise reduction. Unfortunately the headphones couldn't make the monitor stop bouncing on the table as a result of the massive vibrations caused by the hammers outside.

Virtually all reverberations are canceled by the noise reduction algorithms, so indirect speech coming from a neighbor office may be reduced to faint mumbling. Direct speech is only slightly reduced, however, and because of the eliminated reverberation the speakers sound as if they're speaking from a radio studio.

Some reviewers have complained about a feeling of pressure onto their eardrums by the headphones. I'm quite sure this is purely a psychological effect, as I remember some fellow students making similar complaints back at university when others didn't feel a thing. This is probably an entirely individual feeling that little can be done about. However, if you're not used to having your ears covered, expect pain after prolonged caused by the physical pressure onto your ears. Just don't blame Bose; people that wear a scarf for a long time can tell you about similar pains caused by the pressure from the scarf.

All things considered, I find the headphones comfortable and highly effective, but unfortunately they don't quite eliminate the one source of noise that has bothered me the most, that is, the noise of other people speaking. In my home office the headphones filter most of the ambient noise, causing the one noise I specifically want to avoid to pass through with unprecedented ease: no matter where in the house my children are, if I put on my QuiteComfort 3, I hear that particular noise of the children chattering endlessly loud and clear. As a result, I mostly use them as regular headphones because of the great sound quality.

In short, I probably shelled out a fortune for a set of headphones whose noise reduction I hardly use. But when it comes to traveling for hours in a car or by plane, they're wonderful. They eliminate only some of the car noise or airplane noise, but they reduce it to a level where you're less prone to being fatigued by the end of your journey. I've always been somewhat shell-shocked after a long journey, but after wearing the QuietComfort 3 headphones my mind is still reasonably clear when I reach my destination. Some users have claimed that they no longer experience jet lag, but I've yet to share this experience.

Bose cautions that these headphones actually might deliver lower audio quality than typically expected from Bose products. It may be true that high-grade headphones specifically designed for playback deliver better audio quality, but compared with the low-end consumer range headphones that you purchase at your local electronics store, Bose's QuietComfort 3 deliver an astonishing audio quality. It's good enough for me; maybe I'd be able to hear the difference between QuietComfort 3 and their high-end headphones, but I feel my demands are fully satisfied.