Agreed. My Bose Noise Canceling 700 headphones have possibly been my favorite purchase ever in terms of day to day use and also quality of life increase. Absolutely essential while having a toddler and working on the road.
Along with an 18-month-old who loves to hear how high his voice can be, and a cat that can be heard cleaning itself from half a block away, and a bad case of misophonia.
These headphones give me peace. Sometimes I'll even turn them on with just noise-cancellation and no music, just to concentrate.
Once I got the mic working properly on ubuntu, they improved my meetings considerably as well.
I’d love a recommendation for a compatible USB Bluetooth dongle.
I had dramatically better luck with that, which AFAICT just presents to the OS as a USB-C headset, and has an entirely-internal bluetooth stack.
Or just try using your phone - I connect both phone and computer to zoom meetings for instance. For some reason, desktop OSes / bluetooth chip stacks are absolutely awful compared to the ones in iOS / Android devices. Nearly everything connects to my Pixel 4a just fine, while nearly everything stutters when connected to my MacBook, and often doesn't connect at all to my Dell.
Unfortunately, I don't remember if I've installed or adjusted anything on the OS.
One moderately annoying caveat is that I have to open the Settings / Sound panel every time I turn on the headphones, and while the Output Device is always automatically set to the headset, I have to explicitly set the Input Device to the headset as well. When I do I get an alert sound and a quickly cut-off moment (like the "Ca-" of "Call") in the bose-lady voice, as if something went wrong, but then it works correctly.
I imagine this can all be automated somehow, but I haven't had the time to figure out how and it's not _that_ big of a deal to go through the motions.
I've had maybe twice since where she said she could kinda hear me a little bit versus her being livid at me for keeping her up all night. Really life changing.
Now big caveat: they don’t stream audio and they aren’t noise canceling. They only play looping sounds that you download from the Bose sleep app. That said, I’ve found them to be helpful in staying asleep. Pricey also, but if it helps you sleep, it’s worth trying in my opinion.