The noise-cancelling tech is better than it's ever been, too, according to Bose. One of the main attributes the company focused on is the adaptive voice system, which is designed block out noise from your surroundings as you're using the headphone's voice features. There are eight microphones total on the 700s, four on each earcup, and they work together to reject ambient noise around you as you move. The goal is to make your voice sound perfectly clear, especially when you're in a place with a lot of noise.

Bose gave me a demo of this feature by calling someone at a nearby Starbucks in New York City, who took the call first wearing a pair of QC 35IIs and then the Noise Cancelling Headphones 700. As you might imagine, a coffee shop in NYC can get pretty loud. And while I could make most of what the person was saying wearing the QuietComforts, the difference was night and day as soon as he switched to the pair of 700s. Suddenly, you couldn't hear the music playing on the background or the people talking -- it was as if he had muted the microphone on the new headphones. This should be useful for people who use voice dictation on their smartphones or tablets, as well.

In addition to the adaptive voice system, the 700s come with controllable noise-cancelling, which lets you adjust how much outside noise you want to block. You can control this with three different buttons on the headphones (low, medium and high setting) or via the Bose Music app. With the full transparency and conversation modes, for instance, you can hear everything happening around even as you listen to your music. And if you pause your tunes to talk to someone in person, which you can do using the 700s' capacitive touch controls on the right earcup, it doesn't sound as if you're underwater and your voice is muffled.