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When they were first released in 2018, Bose’s noise-blocking sleep earbuds Hailed as a game changer for light sleepers and snoring sleep partners. Unfortunately, Bose has had some battery issues with both the original model and the Bose. second generation versionand eventually stopped using the Sleepbuds, much to the chagrin of a lot of people who really liked them. Three former Bose engineers acquired the rights to the Sleepbuds and are now launching new ones under the new Ozlo brand. They feature the same design as the original Sleepbuds—the earbuds and charging case look essentially the same—but with one key new feature: You can now stream additional audio from your phone to the earphones via Bluetooth (the original Sleepbuds just stored noise masking on the earbuds sound and does not allow streaming music).
One of the best things about Sleepbuds is that they are very small and fit most people’s ears (they come with four different sizes of ear tips). Even though I’m a side sleeper, I don’t have any wearability issues with them. While they’re not noise-canceling earbuds, they have good passive noise isolation and do a good job of canceling out ambient sounds when you apply one of these masking sounds, whether it’s waves crashing on the beach, rain, or the crackle of a fire. Fire and so on. You can also set a personal alarm that goes off in your ears so your sleeping partner isn’t disturbed, and the headphones can sense when you fall asleep while listening to music and automatically play the noise-masking sounds of your choice. Finally, there are some sleep monitoring features.
I can’t say everything is perfect all the time, I think Ozlo is still ironing out kinks in its iOS and Android companion apps. When playing music – don’t expect a lot of bass, but the sound is better than I expected – you have to keep the case nearby as it’s for playing music – and charging of course (the headset battery life is rated up to 10 Hour). But all in all, I’m very impressed with this new version of Sleepbuds and hope there won’t be any battery issues in the future.