Fancy a mile-high earjob? We've had five!

Bose QuietComfort 25

If, as the old adage goes, one is never more than six feet from a rat, how far is one from a source of AAA batteries? Bose is betting there's nearly always one to hand by powering the model QC25 with a single AAA cylinder that it claims will be good for up to 35 hours. The headphones' lovely flat oval case also contains a slot for a spare battery.

The battery compartment in the headphones is an ingeniously-concealed little spring-loaded delight. After having gone to all that trouble, and added an airplane adapter, it's an oddity that Bose omitted some kind of cable-storage mechanism. The neatness of the case is diminished by that omission.

Bose goes for his and hers appeal

The single battery handled a nine-hour Sydney-to-Taiwan jump for Computex without incident.

Nicely compact, the headphones still managed to fully cover my ears and the sound was dreamy. I tested all of the products in this roundup at home, in the plane on the ground as well as in the air.

At home, the sounds of TV from the lounge were cancelled, along with a bunch of low-level noise I don't notice. On the tarmac, a fair bit of high-frequency made it through.

Aloft, the QC25s gobbled the low in-flight rumbles to the extent that the plane felt uncomfortably loud when I nipped off for a comfort break. I needed to pump up the volume a little to hear movies properly, but not to the maximum extent possible.

The set was easy to sleep in and not especially uncomfortable after a few hours' wear. At 21cm x 14.6cm x 5.1cm the case won't bulk out your carry-on and coped with a China Air economy seat's meagre storage slot. The headphones have hinged and swivelling earpieces to make that small package possible. I didn't test the QC25s for long enough to find out if the two potential points of failure made for a short working life, but I did feel like perhaps Bose could have kept Occam's Razor handy.

These are pricey units – US$299 or £270 – but Bose has made more effort to tailor the QC25s to in-flight use than the other manufacturers I sampled. If you can wear the price, they'll be hard to knock back.