Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Abrupt failure of RF shielding in my Bose Quiet Comfort 2 headphones

This is kind of disappointing. The Bose QC 2 headphones are a fairly costly luxury item, of a sort I very rarely buy. Until now they seemed almost worth the cost, but yesterday the radiofrequency shielding system failed abruptly. They now pick up RF (radiofrequency) emissions when worn within about 3 feet of a laptop. Tech support says this is a passive system (metal shield), so presumably it worked loose somehow. There's no sign of trauma.

I suspect they're out of their one year warranty [1]. I'll have to see if my AMEX extended warranty will cover this; alas, I struggle with keeping warranty information around [1]. BOSE says they'll replace out of warranty headphones with new ones for $100.

I couldn't find many reports of this problem on the net, so perhaps it's simply bad luck. I'll add this report in case anyone comes looking.

Update 10/17/06: Odd. It's not doing this at home, even though it was a problem throughout the west end of our 4th floor. I've sent a plea to Dan's Data for help. Could my entire office have turned into an RF maelstrom?

Update 10/18/06: The noise is gone. So either this is an intermittent failure of the passive RF shielding (hard to believe) or there's something that can turn every workstation in an office into a massive RF generator. I need a real geek to sort this out. I hope Dan replies ...

Update 10/19/06: The noise is still gone. Clearly the simplest explanation is that there's a 10 million year old alien artifact buried five miles beneath my office. My headphones intercepted the transient transmission to its companion artifact orbiting Jupiter. The invasion will commence shortly ...

[1] One of the key values Amazon delivers is that they track purchase information for me, but I didn't buy these on Amazon. AMEX requires a several pieces of information that are difficult to assemble.

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