Bose announced two open-ear models on 18 September: a new clip-on Sport Open Earbuds at $199 and a second generation of the Ultra Open Earbuds at $299, both shipping in October.
Both are air-conduction designs that leave the ear canal unblocked, which avoids the contact pressure that bone conduction needs. Bose aims the output at the ear with a shaped acoustic structure rather than sealing it, and the new Ultra gets a driver that the company says extends bass and raises available output. Neither model has active noise cancellation, which follows from the concept rather than from cost. Battery figures are honest about the trade-offs: the Sport quotes up to seven hours, falling to 3.9 hours with automatic volume adjustment enabled, and the Ultra nine hours, falling to four with both immersive audio and auto volume running.
Open-ear is the opposite design brief to the sealed earbud. Without a seal there is no cavity to pressurise, so low frequencies need displacement the driver does not have, and whatever you radiate towards the ear also radiates towards the person next to you. The engineering work is in directivity and in dipole cancellation, not in DSP.
The category exists because a sealed canal is genuinely unpleasant for long wear, during exercise, and anywhere situational awareness matters. Expect the figures in the specification to be the ones measured with every feature switched off.
The pricing is the interesting signal. At $199 and $299 these sit above most sealed earbuds with cancellation, which tells you that the acoustic design work in an open device is not cheaper for being simpler on paper. A transducer that has to beam usable bass into an unsealed ear is a harder component than one firing into a closed cavity.
Source: audioXpress