When they were first released back in 2018, Bose’s noise-masking Sleepbuds were hailed as game-changers for light sleepers and those dealing with sleeping partners who snored. Alas, Bose ran into some issues with the battery on both the original model and the second-gen version, and ended up discontinuing the Sleepbuds, much to the chagrin to a lot of folks who really liked them. Well, three former Bose engineers acquired the rights to the Sleepbuds and have now come out with new Sleepbuds under their new Ozlo brand. They feature the same design as the original Sleepbuds — both the buds and charging case essentially look identical — but have a key new feature: you can now stream other audio to the buds from your phone over Bluetooth (the original Sleepbuds just stored the noise-masking sounds on the buds and didn’t allow for streaming music).
One of the Sleepbuds’ biggest strengths is how tiny they are and how comfortably they fit most people’s ears (they come with four different sized ear tips). I didn’t have any wearability issues with them even though I’m a side sleeper. While they’re not noise-canceling earbuds, they have good passive noise-isolation and do a very good job eliminating ambient sound when you apply one of the masking sounds, whether it’s waves crashing on beach, falling rain, the crackling of a burning fire and more. You can also set a personal alarm to go off in your ears so your sleeping partner isn’t disturbed and the buds can sense when you’ve fallen asleep while listening to music and automatically kick in your chosen noise masking sound. Finally, there are also some sleep-monitoring features.
I can’t say everything worked perfectly all the time and I think Ozlo is still working out the kinks with its companion app for iOS and Android. When streaming music — don’t expect much bass but the sound was better than I thought it would be — you have to keep the buds’ case nearby because the case is used for streaming — and charging, of course (the buds are rated for up to 10 hours of battery life). But all in all I was impressed with this new iteration of Sleepbuds and hope there are no battery issues going forward.