Bose jacks inaccessible at store
At a Bose store, you can't plug a pair of Bose headphones into your audio source, to A/B with a pair of headphones you've brought in. The headphone jack is inaccessible, buried behind the display. This is entirely deliberate.
There's an obvious conclusion one can draw here. Nevertheless, I brought my Audio-Technica phones over to a nearby Apple Store, where the same Bose headphones were for sale, along with iPods on display loaded with music. This confirmed my suspicion, if Bose could win a head-to-head with phones a third their price and independently chosen music, they'd allow it in the Bose store. They don't. Anyone can premix music to compensate for the limitations of a particular set of headphones; this is what they've done.
If you can dismiss this concern, you have the necessary powers of denial to enjoy Bose phones.
To be fair, they have hands down the best noise suppression, and a "you can't tell what you're missing" sanitized pleasant sound.