The Bose QuietComfort 20 is the best pair of in-ear noise-cancelling headphones. We based this conclusion on objective testing with headphone measurement equipment, subjective listening tests conducted with multiple listeners, and more than 100,000 miles’ worth of in-flight testing. In all, we considered more than two dozen models and tested the best of those, and the QC20 came out on top because it had better active noise cancelling than any other model we tested by far. The QC20 even offers better active noise cancelling than the much-bigger over-ear QuietComfort 25, which is our pick for the best noise-cancelling headphones (though the QC25 has additional passive isolation the QC20 lacks; more on this later).
Simply put, no other in-ear headphones come close to the QC20’s NC performance.