When they were first released in 2018, Bose Noise-Canceling Sleepbuds were hailed as game changers for light sleepers and those working with sleeping partners who snore. Alas, Bose ran into some battery issues with both the original model and the second generation versionand I ended up discontinuing the Sleepbuds, much to the chagrin of many people who really liked them. Well, three former Bose engineers have acquired the rights to the Sleepbuds and have now come out with new Sleepbuds under their new Ozlo brand. They feature the same design as the original Sleepbuds – both the headphones and charging case look essentially identical – but they have a key new feature: you can now stream other audio to the headphones from your phone via Bluetooth (the original Sleepbuds just store noise-cancelling sounds on the headphones and do not allow music streaming).
One of the biggest strengths of the Sleepbuds is how small they are and how comfortably they fit most people’s ears (they come with four different sized ear tips). I didn’t have any problems wearing them even though I sleep on my side. While not noise-canceling headphones, they have good passive noise isolation and do a very good job of eliminating ambient sound when you apply one of the masking sounds, whether it’s waves crashing on the beach, rain falling, the crackling of a burning fire, etc. You can also set a personal alarm to go off in your ears so your sleeping partner won’t be disturbed and the buds can sense when you’ve fallen asleep while listening to music and automatically turn on the sound of your choice to mask the noise . Finally, there are also some sleep monitoring features.
I can’t say everything worked perfectly all the time, and I think Ozlo is still working out the kinks with its companion app for iOS and Android. When streaming music — don’t expect much bass, but the sound was better than I thought it would be — you have to keep the headphone case nearby because the case is used for streaming — and for charging, of course (the buds are rated for up to 10 hours of battery life). But overall I was impressed with this new iteration of the Sleepbuds and hope there are no battery issues going forward.
