Bose A30

One unique feature that is sometimes misunderstood by users is Tap Control for talk-through communication. “If you’re flying a really loud single-engine piston plane, you probably never use that feature,” said Brisbois, “but if you’re in a quiet flight deck and you want to speak off-coms shoulder to shoulder to somebody, you can do a double tap on the ear cup and it will drop the noise cancellation and activate an acoustic transparency. So, it’s not muffled, it’ll let that sound come through. You could have your chat, double tap it again, and the noise cancellation kicks back on.”

This feature is switched off at the factory and needs to be activated by moving a small switch in the A30’s control module battery compartment. However, Brisbois warns that because the double tap feature is acoustically powered—not touch sensitive—it can be falsely triggered in a loud environment and should not be used in most piston-engine aircraft.

The A30 has a few hidden Bluetooth tricks, as well. Not only can you pair the A30 with two Bluetooth devices simultaneously, but you can also answer or hang up a phone call by pressing the Bluetooth button. “If there is no call coming in,” says Brisbois, “and you press that Bluetooth button, it’ll activate the voice assistant on your phone.”

If the LED lights on the control module are too bright at night, a double press of the power button reduces the LED light intensity by 50-percent; a triple press shuts the LED lights off completely. A single press of the power button, or turning off the headset, resets the LED lights to full intensity.

While these features—and more—are all explained in the 68-page instruction manual, Brisbois says, “These nice-to-know little nuggets are easily forgotten. A couple of them are worth reminding.”

Brisbois said he’s read a concern on forums that using rechargeable batteries can damage the A30, but he said they will not and can be used. However, they may not provide the 45 hours of product usage alkaline batteries will.

Brisbois was also eager to discuss the elephant in the room: The A30’s biggest competitor may well have been the Bose A20. Some purchased the A30 only to return it because they believed the A20’s noise cancellation was superior. Brisbois said Bose heard the complaint early on and quietly made a change to the A30 more than a year ago.

“The thing that we really went after with A30 was comfort,” said Brisbois. “But when you do that, you throw off the entire acoustics platform because noise cancellation is a function of passive and active noise reduction. On A30, we went after [increased] comfort primarily by attacking the clamping force element.” Bose reduced clamping force by 20 percent but traded off some of the passive noise cancellation in the process, requiring ANR to compensate.

The reduced clamping force changed the headset fit for some users based on their head size, introducing little air leaks around the ear seals. “What had happened was we realized we didn’t allow for enough tolerance from head-to-head fit,” said Brisbois. “And when we did that, that buffeting or warbling sound [some were hearing] was the acoustic noise cancelling system getting overtaxed. And that gives you that sensation like you have one rear window open in the car when you’re driving down the highway. We were hearing that from relatively few [customers] pretty early on. We spoke to our acoustics engineers, and they did a bunch of testing. They said, ‘We think this is a goodness of fit issue and we can make some corrections.’ So, over a year ago now we solved that by adjusting the acoustics [the ANR signal processing] in the ear cups so that it wouldn’t do that.”

Brisbois said every A30 headset is covered by a five-year warranty, and pilots who have an earlier A30 headset who have experienced this issue should contact Bose who can address the issue with a factory service that may include replacing the ear cups.

“When we have something that is in our wheelhouse like acoustic performance that’s not hitting the mark, even though it wasn’t affecting the vast majority of our customers, that’s something that we just couldn’t let sit,” said Brisbois.

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