Bose QuietComfort 2 Headphones

I bought these headphone and was immediately impressed by their light and compact design. However, about a half hour later, I was boxing them back and preparing to return them, and here's why: in order to listen to audio, you have to have the noise canceling turned on. This is like designing a car such that you require the air conditioning to be running in order to be able to drive the car(!) - and ironically, the headphones are so well insulated that you find that the noise cancelling actually sometimes closes out too much noise. The bottom line is this: there is no reason for noise canceling to have be turned on for the audio to be working. This was a very bad design decision by Bose, and possibly a remnant of the legacy design for these headphones, which were military issue headsets for helicopter pilots, and where the everything was likely drawing power from the same source.

I decided to instead purchase the slightly less expensive Bose Triport headphones, which have been outstanding.