The Bose Ultra Open Earbuds are a totally new kind of audio wearable device: premium sound built into a cuff-shaped earbud that doesn’t cover your ear. Proprietary Bose OpenAudio technology allows the earbuds to play rich, immersive audio privately even though the speakers on the earbuds sit a short distance from your ear canal, leaving you open to the sounds of your surroundings. The cuffs hook around the outside of your ear so gently that you might forget they’re even there, so you can leave them on all day, always ready for music, calls, or videos.

No. By design, the Open Earbuds don’t block out the world or have noise cancelling, so you can enjoy your music while staying open to the sounds of the world around you. They do have an automatic volume control feature, available in the Bose app, that helps you hear your music evenly as your environment changes from quiet to loud and back.

The Open Earbuds were designed from the ground up to give you a soundtrack for your life: to let you enjoy your music without blocking your ears, in a shape so comfortable you can almost forget you’re wearing any earbuds at all. The engineering of these earbuds was a matter of squeezing Bose OpenAudio technology — which projects deep, rich sound across a short distance of open space to your ear canal — into a shape that could grip your ear extremely gently, leave your ear open to outside sounds, and contain a long-lasting battery. This design process resulted in the Open Earbuds’ unique shape,