My Bose QC-35 II headphones burst into flames and left me with chemical burns
recursive-public-rants.blogspot.comThere seem to be two camps here:
- Bose is an evil megacorp who recklessly endangered its customers by selling dangerous and poorly designed products.
- Accidents happen and when a device explodes on your head you should accept it as a fact of life and move on. The chemical burns are nothing and OP is a pussy.
I think the reality may be different. My take on it is that Li batteries possess inherent dangers and it is incumbent upon manufacturers to take reasonable steps to mitigate the dangers while informing their consumers of the risk. Unfortunately, even when presented with the risks, most folks are unable to comprehend the probabilities and consequences and will nearly always choose convenience, features and value over the avoidance of danger. It seems we, as a society(not as individuals, as some will surely object) have chosen Li technology and deemed it safe enough to deploy ubiquitously.
I hope a review of this incident will shed light on the safety practices followed by Bose and will inform future engineers of unforeseen risks, giving us all safer, convenient devices.
Overall I find the discussions in this thread unbecoming of the types of folks I thought frequented HN. I hope we can all strive to elevate the dialogue and treat each other with a moderate amount of respect.
> My take on it is that Li batteries possess inherent dangers
Yes, and most are entirely unaware of the dangers and best practices. I can see what may have happened is that even if the product was new, it may have sat in inventory long enough for the Li-ion cell to have self-discharged below 2.5V and remained below that critical threshold until purchased. Dendrites began forming immediately upon submitting to charge cycles. The dendrites shorted the cell causing thermal runaway. It could have burned the house down.
>Yes, and most are entirely unaware of the dangers and best practices. [It] may have happened even if the product was new [...] It could have burned the house down.
And yet, the calls to add labels that would allow consumers to tell which products contain lithium batteries at a glance have been derided here.
To add to this, my pair of wireless headphones can be also used with a 3.5mm cable, and I often do that, as it allows instant switching between devices. You can't tell they have wireless capability (or lithium batteries in them) just by looking.
According to comments, I'm the sole person on this planet who does read the instruction manual. And yet I am learning about thermal runaway in possibility in otherwise non-defective equipment from the HackerNews (thank you for explaining!).
Don't we want things to change for the better?
There's more than just the safety aspect, which, again, is to never allow your cells to drop below 2.5V, though dendritic formation is a function of how long the cell's voltage was below that threshold. At 3.6V, your cell is depleted, and I would expect at least smart devices will have low voltage detection and will shutdown at some low voltage threshold if low battery indicators are ignored. To be clear, it isn't the cell dropping below 2.5V that will cause the cell to turn into a bomb, it is afterwards attempting to recharge it that is dangerous. Stop using and never charge a Li-ion cell that's voltage dropped too low. Recycle it at a battery drop (most hardware stores have a battery drop).
The best practices are pretty simple. To get the most life out of a cell (and this is true of Li-ion, NiMH, NiCad, whatever), rest the cells for at least an hour after use and before charging, and after charging and before use. Adopting these rest cycles allows the cell to maintain its capacity. Abusing a cell by never resting it between use or charging will decimate its charge capacity and reduce the amount of amps it can provide compared to when it was new and unused.
Do not store Li-ion cells long term at full capacity, but instead at 3.7V. This is actually controversial, but allegedly (though I do not know why) storing at full capacity reduces the life of a cell.
And of course don't drop your cells, as it can and will cause internal damage, reducing the life of the cell.
>To be clear, it isn't the cell dropping below 2.5V that will cause the cell to turn into a bomb, it is afterwards attempting to recharge it that is dangerous.Stop using and never charge a Li-ion cell that's voltage dropped too low.
>Do not store Li-ion cells long term at full capacity, but instead at 3.7V.
These are great suggestions, and also they are absolutely impossible to follow given that we have absolutely no access to the sealed Li-Ion cells in devices that we buy.
How would the OP even know what voltage the cells inside his headphones are at? Even with replaceable cells, we can't expect people to have the tools to measure the voltage - unless the device itself displays it.
And even then, if we know that charging a cell after its voltage drops below 2.5V is dangerous, why do we allow chargers that do that (including devices with internal batteries) to be sold to the public?
With experience one can have an idea of what charge is left on a cell. One easy way to gain experience is with a decent Li-ion flashlight. It doesn't take a whole lot of tools to test resting voltage of a cell, a cheap multimeter will do. Modern chargers should be smart, have some function to automatically test for resistance, and refuse to charge a cell with resistance that is too high or if voltage under load is below 2.5V.
Frankly, I am a bit astounded these devices were developed. I'd recommend against wearing Li-ion cells on your head unless you really know the cells, know their age and history.
Again, as a tinkerer, I'm happily learning from your comments — thank you!
But the general public can't be expected to know all that without it being even in the booklet that comes with the product.
>Frankly, I am a bit astounded these devices were developed.
Well look at the comments here that say "risk of death is a part of life, deal with it". That kind of attitude is why.
Lihtium Ion cells are depleted at 3.0V, not 3.6V. The 2.5 is the lower threshold after which you should no longer use the device without replacing the battery. Most if not all BMSs on the market are well aware of these data points and will respond accordingly: hard shutdown at 3.0V, after that they will use a few uA until you charge them and around 2.6V they go into 'deep sleep' which means even indicators and other interaction stops until the device is recharged.
It is very hard to get a device to go below that 2.5V, unless you aim for it by leaving it for many months (and with slightly larger cells years), self discharge at that voltage is extremely low unless the cells have been damaged.
"Unfortunately, even when presented with the risks, most folks are unable to comprehend the probabilities and consequences and will nearly always choose convenience, features and value over the avoidance of danger".
Similar in regards to informed consent: if you're even told what the potential consequences are, a layperson may not, likely doesn't, have similar frame of reference to understand what say a potential "side" effect of a medication could be.
So how do we determine what's acceptable? What level of actually understanding, and perhaps confirmation of understanding, should be required? Unfortunately it's likely mostly those who were harmed that try to speak out, but as in the vast majority of cases they are the minority and their concerns drowned out - arguably only monetary losses via lawsuits being the impetus for organizations to change, however so long as it's extremely profitable with no jail time for executives who should be accounting and therefore be accountable.
>There seem to be two camps here...
Third camp reporting! Here's my take (as a Bose product user):
1) Bose QC-35 II headphones are a hazardous product that, in at least one instance, has spontaneously burst into flames and caused chemical burns while being operated according to the manual
2) This product does not come with appropriate warnings[0] that this is a possibility, while, according to comments here, hazards of the battery used are common knowledge among engineers
3) The product's manual instructs the user to take the headphones off if they experience a "warming sensation"[0], indicating that the engineers were aware of the risks, but neither the risks nor mitigation were not described in the instruction manual (compare this with the labels on something as common as epoxy resin)
4) The OP should report this incident to CPSC (as they did[1]!), since this is the body responsible for keeping track of such incidents and that will be able to act upon them if there's a pattern of them happening
5) The medical injuries sustained by the OP are unacceptable; and at the very least, Bose should pay for the medical treatment and resulting productivity loss, as they occurred at no fault of the OP, who trusted Bose's device to be safe to use as described by Bose. (Reminder for our friends outside the US: we don't have universal healthcare)
6) There needs to be some incentive for companies to ensure the safety of their products or actions. In the US, this seems to be (punitive) damages, whereas in Europe it's more through stronger regulations.[2]
7) If the OPs report is true, I also hope they sue Bose. It is important for all of us - people who use Bose products, their roommates etc - that they thoroughly check this incident and make sure it never happens again. They will not do it unless it costs them money and bad publicity.[3]
Please let me know what's so radical about it, as many people seem to get angry about it.
And fully with you regarding treating others with respect (particularly, it's sad to see the OP being called "hypochondriac" and their concerns dismissed as "paranoid"). It is, as you said, unbecoming.
____________________
Disclaimer: I love my Bose SoundLink Mini II speaker. I bought it, for myself, with my money, which was fully worth it. IMO, it sounds better than any other speaker of the same size that I tried.
That doesn't excuse this situation happening, nor how Bose handled it so far.
[0] Bose QC-35 II manual: https://assets.bose.com/content/dam/Bose_DAM/Web/consumer_el...
[1] As per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29602614
[2] In the words of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29603800
[3] In the words of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29603321
Your phone, smart watch, smart glasses, extra battery pack, wireless earbuds, laptop, and essentially all other modern wireless consumer products can and do burst into flames on occasion. As a result, they are required to be shipped with hazardous material declarations like the UN3481 stickers you'll find on everything.
Consumers in general are unaware of the hazards and unwilling to learn, mostly because it's very rare for anything particularly bad to happen. You can find thousands of examples of dangerous situations here: https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/
edit: as a tangential story, I once ended up at a battle robot live stream. Turns out lithium battery fires are a normalized part of that, with arenas filling with toxic smoke and volunteers with no PPE collecting actively combusting robots while breathing billowing clouds of thick smoke. It happened to have some affiliated moderators; after pointing out this was stupid and very, very unhealthy, they basically told me to shut up and donate PPE if I didn't like it. I thought it was a fascinating example of the disconnect between OSHA-regulated industry and end consumers.
>As a result, they are required to be shipped with hazardous material declarations like the UN3481 stickers you'll find on everything.
These modern hieroglyphics a)mean little to nothing, and b)stop existing once you remove a product from its packaging. That's not enough.
>Consumers in general are unaware of the hazards and unwilling to learn
Unwilling? Well, perhaps they would be more willing if the instructions that came with the product contained the information that you'd want them to learn.
According to this thread, this includes:
* Awareness of Li-Ion cell chemistry, normal operating voltage ranges, critical low voltage after which the battery should not be charged, and the possibility of formation of dendrites and runaway thermal reaction;
* Awareness that the said runaway reaction, in practical terms, means that charging a device with a "dead" battery can result in spontaneous combustion;
* Awareness that, given lack of access to internal batteries, and any information about its state, we solely rely on regulating circuitry to prevent that from happening, and that this circuitry might be faulty, resulting in the possibility of spontaneous combustion under normal use conditions;
* Awareness how to handle a Li-Ion battery that caught on fire, and how to dispose of a device with a burning battery safely, especially when it's operated in highly flammable environments (e.g. using headphones in a bedroom/in a dry field outdoors/at a gas station);
* Awareness that the battery catching on fire may result not only thermal, but also chemical burns if it is not disposed of in a safe manner while it's on fire - in addition to toxic fumes;
* Awareness of how to deal with thermal and chemical burns should they happen (e.g. for chemical burns, rinse with cold water for half an hour), as well as consequences of inhaling the fumes;
According to commenters here, all of the above is "common knowledge", "high school chemistry", "middle school knowledge", "easy best practices", etc. - which, at the same time, are virtually unknown by the general public (due to unwillingness to learn, no less).
Also, the manufacturers are under no moral or legal obligation to inform their users of these hazards and procedures, and this information isn't (and shouldn't) be included in product manuals.
Holy self-contradictory Jesus this thread has been quite a read.
>2) This product does not come with appropriate warnings[0] that this is a possibility, while, according to comments here, hazards of the battery used are common knowledge among engineers
should it? especially when the risk is so low and warnings like "contents may be hot" on coffee cups or " This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm" are widely derided?
>should it?
Yes, it should, because people expect wireless headphones to be as safe as wired ones, which have exactly 0% (zero, zlich, nada) chance of spontaneously catching on fire.
Wired headphones are still widely used, made, and sold. This would allow the consumers to make an informed choice, and will give the manufactures of safe devices (wired or wireless) the deserved edge in the market.
Also, consider the comments just from this thread about the risks:
>In the end you're carrying a high energy density power source on your head that would love to just catch fire. Don't they teach kids anything in chemistry these days?
>I mean I’m glad it didn’t happen to me, but a billion people are carrying around billions of Lithium-ion batteries. Those batteries sometimes catch fire because Lithium is highly flammable. It’s gonna happen.
>Nothing is perfectly safe, that is how lithium batteries fail. You should know so you can properly deal with problems.
>Well, at lease EVs are spontaneously catching fire.
>Everyone is aware of the risks, there were a bunch of stories about airplane cell phone fires a few years ago.
>lithium battery fires are really nasty, and that's why he got a chemical burn. LiPF6 is a contact irritant, PF5 it decomposes to is a gas, and also a respiratory irritant, and HF PH5 decomposes in the air is a dangerous poisonous acid. This is what everybody visiting a lithium battery factory is told on safety orientation. In case there is fire in the factory, run, preferably until you are few blocks away.
So, paradoxically, the risks are both negligible and inevitable, something that every consumer should be prepared for because "everyone knows" batteries explode, but no manufacturer should warn about, mitigate, or account for in the design because who'd buy their product then?
I hope you agree that the above is self-contradictory.
Now, ultimately, warnings are not a panacea, but they do work. At the very least, having their product labeled as "unsafe to use in bed" would make the manufacturers invest in research that would result in a better product that doesn't merit such a label.
> So, paradoxically, the risks are both negligible and inevitable, something that every consumer should be prepared for because "everyone knows" batteries explode, but no manufacturer should warn about, mitigate, or account for in the design because who'd buy their product then?
I think this can all be true. ER doctors say avocados are one of the most dangerous fruits because of knife accidents.
Yet avocados don’t come with any warnings or mitigations. And for the general public, you probably don’t know any one who was severely injured slicing an avocado.
Surely avocado farmers should be working on cultivars that have a small or no pit so people don’t get injured preparing these fruits? (I mean that only half sarcastically, I would enjoy a seedless avocado if it tasted the same.)
Another example might be bagels, which are manufactured products, hence more putative liability.
> “Americans ate an estimated 3 billion bagels at home in 2011, an average of about 11 per person ... in the course of slicing up all those bagels, almost 2,000 people cut their fingers so badly that they ended up in an emergency room.
> By the finger-cut-to-E.R. metric, that makes bagel-cutting the fifth most dangerous activity in the American kitchen.
https://www.newyorkerbagels.com/blogs/bagels/bagel-safety-do...
Why are we discussing this here?
A bagel sitting on a shelf isn't going to cut you up.
Bose QC-35 II headphones, apparently, may catch on fire and cause chemical burns when touched.
Analogies are great for illustrating a point, but if you say "this thing is just like that other one", you need to argue why that's the case first.
Product, in ordinary usage, might be implicated in injury to user.
I don't have an argument here, except that bagels might be a better example than avocados, because bagels are a manufactured product.
In either case, a knife is required for the injury to occur, so I agree that the comparison to spontaneous headphone combustion is not great.
> Bose QC-35 II headphones, apparently, may catch on fire and cause chemical burns when touched.
Not if never charged (IIUC). Of course they probably come with chargers and are never used without them, but does anyone buy uncut bagels and not cut them?
The charger needs not be present for injury.
If you really want to stick to the bagel analogy, it's as if the bagel stabbed you back with a knife after you cut it and set the knife aside.
I hope you would find such backstabbing bagels problematic.
Bagel is a bad example here if fingers were cut by a knife. Most people thought by parents how to use a knife safely, but probably not all. Thought I doubt that anyone would read a manual for a knife and then follow it.
I wouldn't mind a sign over the avocado bin at the supermarket warning consumers about knife injuries and an infographic showing the correct way to cut them. The avocado lobby has enough money to help fund it.
I kind of like the giant seeds. It reminds me that this bizarre fruit is a leftover from megafauna eating and pooping out the giant seeds over long distances (you need a big seed to survive dinosaur digestion)
Maybe, is there any evidence Prop 65 warnings have reduced people buying carcinogenic foods in California supermarkets?
I don't think you need evidence. People who are concerned about cancer would be looking for the cancer warning and avoid those products, just like people concerned about the rainforest will seek out Rainforest Alliance-certified products. People who don't care, don't care, but for people who do, they make their decisions based on the information provided to them.
And I just think it would be cool if we dropped little hints to people about the best way to do common things, like cutting an avocado. Imagine if the world were filled with little tips and tricks everywhere we went. Tiny changes, but added up, might elevate life as a whole.
I feel like the people we're arguing with are going around at night tearing down street signs:
>We have GPS, nobody reads directions anyway. You should know your way around these parts. Getting lost is a part of life, deal with it. Using a sextant is easy, just follow these 25 steps in clear weather, and you know precisely where you are, no need for "you are here" displays. Kids these days expect everything to be spoon-fed to them. Nobody gets lost anyway, why should tax money be wasted on this? etc.
The Prop 65 warnings apply to basically everything, so it's difficult to avoid them. That doesn't mean that the warning is bad, just that the threshold is too low.
Giving radiation warnings at the level of a banana would be useless. Does that mean we shouldn't use Geiger counters?
You seem to ask the question in bad faith, as clearly this is not the right place to find out these statistics. Google is your friend. There is evidence that warnings, in general, do work.
There is also evidence that wired headphones, which don't have batteries in them, do not self-combust and therefore will not require such a label. A label that differentiates products is certainly useful.
There is also plenty of evidence that most people are unaware of the potential dangers of lithium batteries.
There is no parallel with Prop 65 warnings here.
I believe it was giant ground sloths as the seed dispersal fauna.
>I think this can all be true. ER doctors say avocados are one of the most dangerous fruits because of knife accidents.
This analogy doesn't apply. Avocados don't lunge at unsuspecting people with knives while they're not looking.
I would say a step further: instruction manuals are inundated with worthless warnings, and there is no sense to the user which are real threats. If you believe instruction manuals, no device should ever be used for its intended purpose, all filters should be changed once every 14 hours, and anything with a fan should be placed on the floor in the exact centre of a 20'x20' room.
There is maybe a quarter page of useful text in the average 20 page manual.
Warnings in instruction manuals about novel threats are completely worthless.
>I would say a step further: instruction manuals are inundated with worthless warnings, and there is no sense to the user which are real threats...
This is not the case. Neither in general, nor, in particular, in the case of Bose QC-35 II headphones.
The worst danger the manual explicitly wans about is the potential of "warming sensation"[1], in which case the user is to take the headphones off. Nothing about an imminent fire hazard, or potential chemical burns.
Compare this to the labels on, say, two-part epoxy glue about the potential hazards, and what to do.
Finally, there are only three possible scenarios:
* Including this information in the manual and packaging will scare away people from buying this product because they are uninformed
* Including this information in the manual and packaging is pointless, because people don't care
* Including this information in the manual and packaging will allow people to make informed choices
Arguably, it should be include in either case:
- If people become scared, the manufacturers will be pushed to innovate on safety, which is a great outcome;
- If "nobody" reads these warnings, there is no reason to add one more about an actual danger that does happen, if rarely;
- Correct product labeling is what makes a free market work.
I urge you to peruse the Bose QC-35 II manual[1] before responding, and come back with the scariest warning you find there. It is a counter-example to all of your claims.
[1] https://assets.bose.com/content/dam/Bose_DAM/Web/consumer_el...
They're a direct consequence of the sue happy American consumer. It's all about legally covering your ass, not about actual risk.
There is no such thing as "sue-happy American consumer".
There is, however, an American consumer whose only way to get their medical bills paid in case they are hurt by negligence or harmful actions of a corporate entity, is to sue that corporation.
Europe has regulations. We have lawsuits.
Lack of regulation is justified by the possibility of taking the offending party to court. Stop shaming people who are doing just that.
> " This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm" are widely derided?
The problem with those warnings is not their existence, but the fact they are unspecific. If the ingredients on food containers just said "This contains an allergen", people would ignore them too. The way to make the California warnings useful would be to list which specific chemical is the problem, so that it is actionable.
Similarly, for the headphones case, listing the specific problem allows the user to take into account their specific situation (climate, usage pattern etc.) to decide if it's applicable to them. Obviously if the warning just said "this is hazardous", it's worse than useless.
> according to comments here, hazards of the battery used are common knowledge among engineers
How many people here are "engineers" (Licenced P.E.s with EE degreee)? Most people here string npm modules together and aren't qualified to assess LiON battery risks -- myself included.
Most licensed EEs are completely unqualified to weigh in on product safety and liability too! Licensed EEs sign off on building power, basically.
EEs that work on products fall under the "industrial exemption" - their employers are responsible for having appropriate processes in place for product safety.
>How many people here are "engineers" (Licenced P.E.s with EE degreee)? Most people here string npm modules together and aren't qualified to assess LiON battery risks -- myself included.
The point of the remark you are quoting was that it's unreasonable to think that the engineers that designed that product were unaware of dangers associated with this kind of battery.
I.e. if people here know about these dangers, so does Bose.
The "Bose is evil" camp are probably the same ones who would damn anyone straight to hell for ever giving money to them, simply because a percentage of their products are "overpriced" and "don't sound as good" as similarly-priced alternatives. Except when it comes to ANC, there really isn't a better solution for the price, I would argue maybe a single Sony model could even attempt to compete in the exact same space and price range.
>The "Bose is evil" camp are probably the same ones who would damn anyone straight to hell for ever giving money to them
I think the money I paid for my Bose SoundLink Mini II is very much well-spent, and I don't know of any other speaker of the same size which can beat it in quality of sound and battery life.
At the same time, some commenters here believe that wanting to hold Bose accountable means I have a bone to pick with them.
I feel like the problem here is that people think that the brands they use represent their personality. I love the product from Bose that I own, and that's why I want to see them held accountable for the self-combusting one.
That's to ensure I can enjoy using their products going forward, and recommend them without being worried about whether their newest gadget may set my friend's house on fire.
It would be good to see an autopsy, to find out if it's actually the battery that went into thermal runaway, or something else that shorted and dumped all of its energy.
I have no idea how much heavy metals I've been exposed to by inhaling the toxic smoke. I don't know how much smoke my pregnant wife inhaled. I worry how much chemical residue is on my desk, floor, walls, how much is getting recycled by my HVAC system, how much exposure my pets had.
That sort of paranoia doesn't help. In fact it may cause psychosomatic symptoms (nocebo effect). You've probably inhaled far worse if you've ever been to a barbeque, gas station, or just took a walk in one of the more crowded areas of the city.
> That sort of paranoia doesn't help. In fact it may cause psychosomatic symptoms (nocebo effect).
You're not wrong, but I don't think it's an unreasonable reaction when you've literally been diagnosed with chemical burns, especially when it was not initially obvious. If you read the post in full, this is separate from lipo fire event, he tried to retrieve the serial number and later after handling it noticed a worsening burning sensation on his hands and arms... that kind of separation in time from a silent exposure of something to horrible side effects really fuck with your mind.
No, lithium battery fires are really nasty, and that's why he got a chemical burn.
LiPF6 is a contact irritant, PF5 it decomposes to is a gas, and also a respiratory irritant, and HF PH5 decomposes in the air is a dangerous poisonous acid.
This is what everybody visiting a lithium battery factory is told on safety orientation. In case there is fire in the factory, run, preferably until you are few blocks away.
If enough hot aqueous LF6 in solvent gets on the skin, you will get a chemical burn. In worst case, the same thing as HF poisoning will happen (it pulls electrolytes out of blood, and then death from heart failure.)
A lithium battery factory has many orders of magnitude more chemicals than a single low-capacity cell. "The dose makes the poison."
It's not even clear if the battery caught fire, or if something else shorted out.
What's clear is that Bose QC-35 II headphones caused bodily damage to the consumer who used it in a completely normal way and in accordance to the instruction manual, without any potential of such damage being indicated on the product that is generally assumed to be safe.
We should stop nitpicking of which part of Bose QC-35 II headphones malfunctioned and caused the product to be deadly dangerous. Instead, we should focus on the following problems:
* How do we incentivize the manufactures to take safety of their products seriously?
* How do we make sure the manufacturers don't skirt the responsibility of selling unsafe products as safe ones?
One doesn't get enter the free market without agreeing to some rules first. The rules are what differentiates a market from a scam.
Actually delivering the product for which the money was paid is one such rule.
Clearly warning about lethal dangers of the stuff you try to sell is another.
Violations of either rule come with a cost - because these violations damage not only the customer, but the entire free market.
I think the two things mentioned are not mutually exclusive, moreover, learning which part had a failure leads to making sure the product will be made safe in the future.
Of course, but we don't have the capacity to do an investigation of this sort - Bose does; and we don't have the authority to force Bose to conduct it - CPSC does, as do the courts.
Hence my suggestions to direct our efforts toward having the responsible government agencies work with Bose on researching and addressing the root issue.
> You've probably inhaled far worse if you've ever been to a barbeque, gas station, or just took a walk in one of the more crowded areas of the city.
That's just dismissive attitude that accomplishes nothing and adds nothing to the discussion.
I think it's a good answer. "is this too bad? no, you've been exposed to worse and nothing happened to you"
Yes, if you assume that author knows the extent of OPs exposure to the fumes and what was in them. I assume no such thing.
> Yes, if you assume that author knows the extent of OPs exposure to the fumes and what was in them.
What was in them: we know it was a burning modern electronics, plastic fumes and a battery fire.
Extent of OPs exposure: we know it was one event of fixed duration, close contact with a single burning equipment. Not a chronic exposure, not a pyre of a dozen headphones.
We of course don’t know details on the margins, like which parts did melt on the pcb or how many breaths did the author inhale of this smoke, these are small details.
Even if we assume that these unknown variables fall on the bad side of their respective spectrum, we can still bound our estimation. (Like for example assuming that nearly all the nastines from the single headphone went into the smoke and the author did sit around for an hour in the smooky room.)
This means that we know a lot about both of those questions and can estimate the unknowns with reasonable worst-case thinking. (Which is the conservative thing to do in this situation)
> That's just dismissive attitude that accomplishes nothing and adds nothing to the discussion.
You say that, but it is not true. It is an understandable reaction on OPs part, once the initial shock is over and they see that they are still alive to think about if they have suffered any unknown long term harms. While obviously this kind of exposure is not good, and the OP is unlikely to ask for a repeat it is unlikely to cause lasting harm. In fact worrying about it might actually cause more harm.
Thinking this through calmly and logically is not dismissive, and might actually help the author.
You seemed to have missed the part where the same comment called the OP's concerns "unhelpful paranoia" after the OP's doctor said that the pain they're experiencing is due to chemical burns.
So instead of armchairing the chemical composition of smoke, how about we just not call other people's concerns paranoid, and not excuse others doing so?
This forum's guidelines call for civil discussion, and the OP also commented in this thread. Paranoia is not a word that belongs here.
>You seemed to have missed the part where the same comment called the OP's concerns "unhelpful paranoia" after the OP's doctor said that the pain they're experiencing is due to chemical burns.
Because the burning is in the hands and arms not the nose, larynx or lungs...
>Because the burning is in the hands and arms not the nose, larynx or lungs...
This isn't even a sentence, much less a coherent thought.
The OP inhaled smoke from a burning device that caused chemical burns on his arms. The smoke from burning electronics is hazardous. OP's concerns are justified, and calling him "paranoid", "hypochondriac", etc. is insulting, and against the rules of this forum (on which the OP is commenting as well).
That is assuming it is from the burning materials, but OP said it happened when he was peeling off the earcups that he noticed it being sticky etc.(so it could be the plastic mixing with chemicals?) And we do not know how many ppm of toxic materials were in the fumes he inhaled or his wife inhaled.
Exposure is cumulative though. If someone keeps getting exposed to "innocuous" things like cigarette smoke, they may very well find 20 years later they've got lung cancer and end up dying young.
>It would be good to see an autopsy,
You do realize that there was a quite real chance of someone seeing the OP's autopsy here?
>That sort of paranoia doesn't help
I guess you don't.
I find it fascinating that we get people saying "both of these in this thread:
* The inherent explosive and deadly danger of lithium is well known, the OP should have expected it, and should not complain
* The danger of lithium batteries is overblown, the OP shouldn't complain
It's quite a mindfuck to argue with both simultaneously.
>You do realize that there was a quite real chance of someone seeing the OP's autopsy here?
That's an overstatement. The batteries in this thing are the most dangerous part, and yet they are too small to explode with a force that could cause an immediate fatality, i.e neither the explosion itself nor the shrapnel it could generate from the casing or the other components in the headphone are powerful enough. The risk here is burns, and maybe toxic exposure. And while burns can be rather bad (especially since it's Lithium), of course, also depending on how much flammable "stuff" you have on your head (hair, hat, headscarf, etc), burns are not the same thing as death.
The risk of a fatality is extremely low. The risk of lasting scars and disfigurement, deafness (on the battery side at least) and even blindness has a somewhat higher chance.
Then again, just look at the picture in the article. You can see how little damage is there to the actual "fragile" head phones plastic casing. Mostly intact. It wasn't a major explosion, it wasn't a major fire, and there probably wasn't any shrapnel whatsoever.
>>That sort of paranoia doesn't help
>I guess you don't.
This was clearly referring to the "toxic fumes" bit. And it is a fair thing to say, in my humble opinion. The fumes from the battery and plastic certainly aren't great, but unless you deliberately stay there and huff them without opening a window, your exposure will be rather minute, especially considering how small this event had to be. Indeed, what you inhale at a barbeque or just from burning food, or staying at the outside of a gas station for too long will be worse.
The "chemical burns" claim in the article is just confusing to me. I'd get it if the claim was that only the hands had a burning sensation like that, but the arms too but nothing besides that? Such a thing is either caused by direct contact (so hands only) or from fumes/spraying (which would mean exposed areas like the face should be affected as well). The way the story represents it makes me think it might be a psychosomatic effect only, but not necessarily of course. There is a "sweet spot" where these things might have sprayed particles only in a very limited area where hands and arms were affected but other exposed skin was too far away, but that sounds unlikely to me at least...
Regardless, nobody should expect these things to blow up, and it's fair to complain when they do. If it was a singular/very rare incident, fine, really bad luck. If there are a number of reports like this, this could indicate a systemic engineering or manufacturing problem.
>That's an overstatement.
Calling things that spontaneously catch on fire while being worn on one's head a lethal danger is not an overstatement.
For the same reason that smoking in bed is not something you should do: and that's because having something burning in places where fire isn't expected leads to people dying in fires.
>This was clearly referring to the "toxic fumes" bit. And it is a fair thing to say, in my humble opinion.
There is nothing humble about confidently calling the OP's concerns "unhelpful paranoia", and discounting what his doctor said were chemical burns as "psychosomatic effects" based on an armchair analysis of the spray pattern which you haven't even seen.
>Regardless, nobody should expect these things to blow up, and it's fair to complain when they do
Thank you. I don't understand why half the comments here are arguing the opposite.
>If it was a singular/very rare incident, fine, really bad luck. If there are a number of reports like this, this could indicate a systemic engineering or manufacturing problem.
Which is exactly why I urged the OP to immediately report it to CPSC (as Bose is also obligated to do, by law, regardless of whether they can establish the veracity of the claim).
And since CPSC is not very reliable, only legal action might uncover such systemic engineering/manufacturing problem and force Bose to do something about it.
I am not going to argue everything you wrote here, but...
>There is nothing humble about confidently calling the OP's concerns "unhelpful paranoia"
Not even close to what I wrote.
Given that the battery was breached, that there are chemicals in batteries that can cause chemical burns and that the user apparently didn't know this and suffered diagnosed chemical burns, it seems unlikely that those burns are psychosomatic.
It’s not the only risk. What if OP had fallen asleep while listening to music? Then there would have been a real risk of the house burning down.
Personally I wouldn't stake my life on your armchair expertise.
Then don't.
> That's an overstatement.
Sometimes I wear my headphones in bed (not this brand/model, but another wireless over-the-ear sort.) I'm reconsidering that now...
> * The danger of lithium batteries is overblown, the OP shouldn't complain
Nitpick: lithium and li-ion are two different battery types.
The former contains metallic lithium, the latter lithium salts.
What went aflame in this accident wasn't the metal, but the liquid electrolyte, which is flammable.
What went aflame in this accident was Bose QC-35 II headphones.
Not sure what your nitpick is about; address it to the people who argue either.
My point is that OP should file a CPSC report (which they did), and contact a lawyer (which, I hope, they would).
> and contact a lawyer
It might be my "European" upbringing, but why? Is there any indicating it was the manufacturers fault?
>It might be my "European" upbringing, but why? Is there any indicating it was the manufacturers fault?
Because we are not in Europe, and we rely on lawsuits to keep the manufacturers in check instead of having them regulated like they do in Europe.
Also, because we are not in Europe, we don't have universal healthcare, so the OP's visit to the doctor (and any possible medical care they could need for their injuries) is coming out of their own pocket unless they sue.
Also, because the rules of the "free market" we have here require dangerous products to be clearly labeled as such, but the enforcement of this rule is "the consumers should sue if there's a problem".
In short, every time you hear about Americans being lawsuit-happy, it's because we need to sue to get the stuff that you're taking for granted where you're living.
>Is there any indicating it was the manufacturers fault?
Yes, there is. The OP used the product in accordance to the manufacturer's guidelines[1], and adhered to all safety warnings (which, by the way, didn't even mention risk of fire or chemical burns under normal operating conditions).
Given that, the manufacturer's fault appears to be clearly established.
[1]https://assets.bose.com/content/dam/Bose_DAM/Web/consumer_el...
This actually sounds plausible, in some weird way, especially the bit about manufacturers being kept in check by lawsuits.
>Yes, there is. The OP used the product in accordance to the manufacturer's guidelines[1], and adhered to all safety warnings (which, by the way, didn't even mention risk of fire or chemical burns under normal operating conditions).
No, the OP claims he did that ;)
But even then...
>Given that, the manufacturer's fault appears to be clearly established.
No, honestly, it isn't. There is such a thing as pure accident. Things break, and you have no expectation things won't ever break. This time it broke in a somewhat dangerous way. To me, in order for the manufacturer to be liable, the manufacturer must have committed an "avoidable" act and not acted negligent, such as a deign flaw or manufacturing flaw that could have been avoided by following current knowledge and best practices, or was negligent testing the product properly before release or didn't do proper, constant product quality assurance especially of the dangerous parts.
There are plenty of other reasonable explanations, such as customer misuse, vendor not storing the product properly in some warehouse, improper shipping, or just "shit happens" were nobody really is at fault and all parties involved didn't do anything that was avoidable wrong.
A product that is worn on one’s head potentially exploding or spontaneously causing a chemical fire due to to suboptimal environmental factors counts as a design flaw, at least in my book. Something that is used on people’s heads should not fail that way if it is going fail.
That depends on how it was treated right up to that point. For instance: unauthorized repair, wrong substitution parts, messing with the charging circuitry and so on are things that can and do happen.
It need not be a design flaw right away, but it well may be. Of course you could be of the opinion that it should be impossible for something like this to happen, and that is definitely a valid position. But even wired headphones have on occasion killed people (a Swiss HAM, for instance).
There are two schools of thought on tort liability.
1. Fault should be assigned, and those at fault should be paying for the damages to those not at fault.
2. People should be insured against these events, and we should assign responsibility to whoever it makes the most sense to have responsible for obtaining insurance.
If you take the second approach, that party is often the manufacturer. The consumer isn't really in a good position to buy flaming headphone insurance because that is such a rare event that any individual consumer has no idea how much coverage they need.
They could get it covered under their general medical or house insurance, but their insurance companies probably don't have much data on how often that specific issue happens to actually figure out the right price, so it just will get lumped into some general category of unclassified accidents.
The manufacturer, on the other hand, will have data in how often this happens, so a proper price for insurance can be determined. The manufacturer can likely get a breakdown of how often these incidents are due to manufacturing defects, how often they could have been prevented by minor design changes, how often they are due to the consumer doing something stupid, and so on. That can lead the manufacturer to make changes to reduce future such incidents. That would be much less likely if the incidents were handled by health or house insurance.
In my experience, if something spontaneously catches fire, it's always the manufacturer's fault.
I have set some things on fire spontaneously i.e. by accident which was entirely my fault, and it didn't always involve "obvious" things like open flames or heat sources either... I am not buying this argument.
That's not what spontaneously means :)
>I have set some things on fire spontaneously
That's you setting things on fire.
Here, the user did not set the headphones on fire.
If normal operation can cause the headphones to catch fire, Bose should market these headphones as such, e.g. "Do not charge these headphones, doing this may cause them to catch fire. Discard after first use."
The issue here is not your European upbringing but rather the American justice system. Suing Americans can be awarded punitive damage while European countries cap what you will be awarded at compensatory damages. That makes Americans trigger happy.
>The issue here is not your European upbringing but rather the American justice system
That's right, and let me fix the rest of the comment:
> Suing Americans can be awarded enough money to pay for their medical bills in some cases, and that's their only recourse when the injuries are severe
> Suing Americans can be awarded enough money to pay for their medical bills in some cases
That's compensatory damages you will be awarded that in both systems.
The main difference there is that in most European countries medical bills are cheaper, public health care will cover most of the costs and most people are insured for the rest. If the costs are important, your insurance and the insurance of the party at fault will negotiate. They will only involve the justice system if they can't agree.
In Europe it usually is, until proven otherwise. At least in the first year (and for some classes of problems, longer).
Because you should always contact a lawyer. Until you do, you really have no idea how serious something is.
Don’t try to figure these things out yourself.
> Not sure what your nitpick is about;
You're conflating two different battery types. The lithium in lithium-ion batteries is bound to either the cathode or anode, so it's not readily flammable as metallic lithium would be.
>You're conflating...
I am conflating nothing as I was summarizing the comments of other people in that sentence. The other comments do conflate different battery types; you can educate the people who make them. Ctrl+F "lithium" in this thread will get you plenty.
I think GP meant an autopsy of the device not the person.
Yes, and I was highlighting that either could have been an outcome of this incident.
Luckily, it wasn't the latter.
What other thing in the headphones could possibly cause such a fire and burns? Whether or not the battery started it or something else did, it is clearly the battery that provided the serious problem, so if it's there, the danger is there.
While I agree with you, if you may, I will augment what you said slightly:
>Whether or not the battery started it or something else did, it is clearly the defective Bose QC-35 headphones that provided the serious problem, so if you have them, the danger is there.
Which is something that they should put on the label.
> Which is something that they should put on the label.
It might already be there? Just that the warning is so standard and ubiquitous that it is universally ignored (lots of things contain lithium and have the potential to explode).
I prefer the version that takes an AAA battery. A bit safer, especially if you avoid using rechargeables.
>It might already be there? Just that the warning is so standard and ubiquitous that it is universally ignored (lots of things contain lithium and have the potential to explode).
No, the warning is not there.[1]
The manual instructs the user to take headphones off if you experience a "warming sensation", that's all.
The generic warnings aren't for normal operation; as in "improper use, like <...>, may lead to <...>". There was no improper use here, which is why it's a concern.
Additionally, there are many ways in which a device can fail. These Bose QC 35 II headphones not only caught fire, but also caused chemical burns.
Clearly, the engineers were aware of the dangers, but the product managers decided they can get away with saying "take them off if there's a warming sensation" without adding "BECAUSE THIS MEANS THEY ARE ABOUT TO CATCH FIRE AND SPRAY YOU WITH HAZARDOUS CHEMICALS, RUN FOR YOUR LFIE".
[1]https://assets.bose.com/content/dam/Bose_DAM/Web/consumer_el...
I use only wired devices. Exceptionally when i need to travel i'll take a lithium battery with me for a laptop/phone, but otherwise everything stays wired at all times.
I own those and opened them a couple of times to replace the battery and the earpads, no need of further investigation, the battery is placed there and for sure there is a short circuit protection in place by mandatory design, it is also unlikely they got pierced by something since they sit in a large space and the battery itself is rounded, so expansion is took into account, to me it seems that the battery was already compromised from the factory which is very very very bad
edit: no idea if the internal thermistor can fail by any means and it could have messed up the charge/discharge logic
Could have been dropped in a bad way. This is the reason why Lithium Ion cells go bad, external damage. There are numerous examples of people falling with their e-bikes, not even visible damage on the outside of the bike or the pack other than maybe a scratched up handlebar and then 12 hours later the whole thing suddenly goes up in flames.
Here is one example caught on video:
Company training reminded us, that a leaking Lithium ion cell produces hydrofluoric acid, which if you touch it you need to see a doctor.
Yes, it is an inherently unsafe battery chemistry. And they're everywhere. I really hope we find a better replacement soon, there are already some promising contenders but none that meet-or-exceed on all specs.
That training was probably designed more to instill paranoia and cover legal arse, because my initial reaction upon reading that was "What the fuck!? No. No. No. Not even close."
Burning fluoropolymers will produce HF. Lion electrolyte is, besides being rather flammable, nowhere near as dangerous. It's a mild solvent. A leaking cell, if it's not burning, will not expose you to HF. In fact I'd say the risk of chemical burns from a leaking alkaline battery is higher.
As i said the battery has a lot of space, is glued, and sealed shut within a “box”, you should be able to throw them out of the window with no problem at all, I’ve dropped mine a lot and they are already 5/6 yo
Yes, I would expect them to be designed for that, especially given the proximity to the body. I've reviewed a design for a LiPo powered wearable once and the list of recommendations was surprisingly long when it was all done. One thing that I find curious about this instance is how it failed, I'm very surprised that what appears to have burned through is the inner shell, rather than say a burst wall in the outer shell.
That said: headphones are subject to all kinds of abuse and that's why I'm particularly interested in what went wrong here, either, as you say, Bose has an inbound quality control issue or there was possibly some thing that this pair of headphones was subjected to that pushed it outside of its design parameters (electrically or physically). It's hard to say for sure without a much more detailed autopsy of the device (fortunately not of the user...).
I have a Sony rough equivalent of this device, and if I would ever drop it on a hard surface I'd stop using it simply because I would never trust a Lithium Ion battery after it has been subjected to a shock load. But I'm a bit paranoid about them, the more you are familiar with some tech the less comfortable you feel while using it.
As for your edit: thermistors can and do fail, but the battery protection circuitry is hip to that and should simply stop charging the battery if the thermistor ever open circuits or short circuits. Theoretically I guess it could fail with a resistance that indicates a safe operating temperature but I have never seen that happen (and I've worked on tons of Li-Ion packs, enough to see a couple of failed thermistors, all of them open circuits).
Speaking of shock-loads to Li-Ion batteries...
I was once responsible for figuring out how to track the flight path of an object being towed through the air on a rope. This ended up being a GPS transponder with a ISM band packet radio and a Li-ion pouch cell. Packaging this was difficult, as the device would occasionally be slammed into the ground at at least terminal velocity.
One of my first prototypes was essentially all of the above stuffed into a bit of ABS pipe, with some foam inside for cushioning. We flew the prototype once, slammed it into the ground, and it promptly stopped working. Upon cracking the enclosure open, I found that the battery lead wires had broken free from the PCB under the shock load. As I extracted the pouch itself, I found it had formed itself into an arc segment, with r=1.5", same as the ID of the ABS pipe.
That sounds like a pretty lucky escape. A little bit less lucky and you'd have had nothing left but some black and unidentifiable bits.
All valid points, about the thermistor i was more worried about it operating out of spec, it should have a specific thermal/resistance curve and maybe it is not following it anymore
Such a soft failure would be concerning. One BMS that I am intimately familiar with has two thermistors, one stuck to the batteries using a plug and a short cable, another surface mounted on the BMS board, if the delta between the two gets too large it shuts down any charge cycle in progress and bricks itself. Pretty harsh but given the alternatives it is the only safe thing to do.
Oh that’s a nice redundancy, glad to know, I’ll probably check for those when i open battery powered stuff from now on
Actually, it's not a small thing. There are often reporting requirements for even small spills of dangerous chemicals, like those contained in batteries, and even small amounts of some chemicals can be dangerous for humans and local soil and groundwater. Were I the OP, I'd be contacting the local public-service hazardous waste team to ask questions about what needs reporting to whom and what cleanup and medical checks may be required.
Which component of a pair of headphones contains as much energy as the battery?
The plastic case almost certainly contains more energy than the battery.
Excellent, now figure out how that plastic suddenly bursts into flames. Many of the plastics used in consumer electronics are referred to as "self extinguishing," or are otherwise quite hard to ignite.
I partially melted an electric kettle on the stovetop and my girlfriend at the time went to her moms house for three days
Yeah, I agree. I actually have these headphones and love them, so for a second I was a bit worried. However, this is clearly an isolated case, so I'm sure there's more to the story, and certainly swearing off all wireless/rechargeable gear is an overreaction.
I didn't hunt for very long, but a cursory search didn't turn up anything like this with these headphones or Bose for that matter. And while I don't trust corporations implicitly, I do draw distinctions between companies like Ford or Samsung that might wait until absolutely necessary to do a recall and a company like Bose that has always seemed to have a lot riding on their reputation with their target customers.
And given my interactions with other companies after product failures, I would be stoked to be offered the brand new flagship line (QC45) assuming I had no real injuries.
Then again, if I were of a litigious nature (and thought there was a potential payday) I might focus on how the trace amount of "heavy metal" smoke from LIon batteries that lingered after I threw the headphones outside might affect my pets, wife, unborn child and HVAC system instead of being reasonable.
If you're up for it, I suggest:
1) Find a lawyer. I'd guess that personal injury lawyer is the right kind, and that you can easily find one who works on contingency.
2) File a complaint with the consumer product safety commission, and any other applicable government agencies. The lawyer may be able to help with this.
You deserve compensation for this, and I wish you all the best with extracting it. I hope you recover soon.
Also: Take photos and document everything. A massive number of photos, of the damage to your house and your body and anything else you can think of. This will help with the lawyer.
Yep, ^this, it happens. You 100% deserve compensation. But this is what their insurance is for. The remaining 99000 thousand pairs they sold will surely pay the deductable.
>The remaining 99000 thousand pairs they sold will surely pay the deductable.
Not if there's a recall.
Which, by all means, should happen, and not just for that particular model.
You're all over this thread with one huge assumption: you have zero knowledge about how that particular set of headphones was treated so far. The charger setup is described but not in a way that I can make sense of it, apparently charging while connected to a computer but using the stock charger, if it was opened up, repaired, had a battery replaced, dropped, otherwise damaged and continued to use. Before you jump to the 'sue', 'recall' and 'Bose sucks' conclusion I would wait for a little bit more data, especially because the other not 99000 but millions of pairs that they have sold have so far not exhibited this tendency.
The flip-side, that Lithium batteries should probably not be present in body worn gear is something that I would subscribe to but at the same time I'm aware of people wearing stuff like that by the 10's of millions in their ears and so far it seems to work well enough that the number of incidents is low and in most cases can be traced back to gross abuse of the devices.
Finally: charging Lithium Ion batteries of any kind is where the risk is, it's always a good idea to charge them in a spot where you can keep an eye on them, and to watch them closely just after you have charged them (especially to full capacity, which I would recommend against) for a little while after because that is when if things go wrong they will go wrong.
There is a reason I can't use my Sony MDR-1000X when I'm charging them. Good point on the charging danger of batteries.
Yes, Sony has this set up the right way, the headphones simply stop working when charging. They also have some pretty good undervoltage protection in there that keeps the batteries at a safe voltage until they are charged again.
That said: it is still body worn lithium ion tech and you should definitely be careful with them, especially if you ever suspect they may have become damaged (from dropping or impact). Be nice to your headphones. And never ever leave them hooked up to the charger once they are charged and if you can only charge to 90% or so.
>You're all over this thread with one huge assumption: you have zero knowledge about how that particular set of headphones was treated so far.
What's the assumption? Based on information given, the headphones exploded during normal operation, and have been previously treated well[2].
The OP is commenting in this thread. If you think they are misleading us, go ask them[2].
Further, nothing in the official documentation for the product[1] indicates the possibility of fire and chemical burns during normal operation, regardless of how they have been treated so far.
> Before you jump to the 'sue', 'recall' and 'Bose sucks' conclusion
It seems to me that you are jumping to these conclusions.
My conclusions are:
1) Bose QC-35 II headphones are a hazardous product that can spontaneously burst into flames and cause chemical burns while being operated according to the manual
2) This product does not come with any warnings that this is a possibility, while, according to comments here, hazards of the battery used are common knowledge among engineers
3) The product's manual instructs the user to take the headphones off if they experience a "warming sensation", indicating that the engineers were aware of the risks, but neither the risks nor mitigation were not described in the instruction manual (compare this with the labels on something as common as epoxy resin)
4) The OP should report this incident to CPSC, since this is the body responsible for keeping track of such incidents and that will be able to act upon them if there's a pattern of them happening
5) The medical injuries sustained by the OP are unacceptable; and at the very least, Bose should pay for the medical treatment and resulting productivity loss.
As you said, this shouldn't be a big deal for Bose if this is a one-off freak accident. And if it's a systemic issue, it better become a big deal.
Finally: I have a Bose speaker. I have no idea what kind of battery is inside it, but all I know is that the manual didn't instruct me to take the precautions that you just listed:
> charging Lithium Ion batteries of any kind is where the risk is, it's always a good idea to charge them in a spot where you can keep an eye on them, and to watch them closely just after you have charged them (especially to full capacity, which I would recommend against) for a little while after because that is when if things go wrong they will go wrong.
Bose Soundlink speakers are designed to sit at a dock, where they are continuously charged. The later models don't even have an off switch.
So I'm all over the thread with one huge assumption: that any reasonable person would agree with my points 1-5 above.
Sadly, this assumption has been repeatedly proven wrong.
[1]https://assets.bose.com/content/dam/Bose_DAM/Web/consumer_el...
> this shouldn't be a big deal for Bose if this is a one-off freak accident. And if it's a systemic issue, it better become a big deal.
You're spamming the thread with dramatic comments that are premised on this not being a one-off freak accident. Nice of you to finally acknowledge the possibility.
> You're spamming the thread with dramatic comments that are premised on this not being a one-off freak accident
My bad. I've been led to believe that the batteries in these headphones are inherently dangerous and that the OP should have known better by the commenters that defend Bose elsewhere in the thread:
>In the end you're carrying a high energy density power source on your head that would love to just catch fire. Don't they teach kids anything in chemistry these days?
>I mean I’m glad it didn’t happen to me, but a billion people are carrying around billions of Lithium-ion batteries. Those batteries sometimes catch fire because Lithium is highly flammable. It’s gonna happen.
>Nothing is perfectly safe, that is how lithium batteries fail. You should know so you can properly deal with problems.
>Well, at lease EVs are spontaneously catching fire.
>Everyone is aware of the risks, there were a bunch of stories about airplane cell phone fires a few years ago.
>lithium battery fires are really nasty, and that's why he got a chemical burn. LiPF6 is a contact irritant, PF5 it decomposes to is a gas, and also a respiratory irritant, and HF PH5 decomposes in the air is a dangerous poisonous acid. This is what everybody visiting a lithium battery factory is told on safety orientation. In case there is fire in the factory, run, preferably until you are few blocks away.
Combining this, we have on our hands an inevitable freak accident that every consumer should be prepared for, but no manufacturer can expect to happen or do anything to mitigate the damage.
Got it.
I'm talking about your rhetorical strategy. You've got a reasonable view, and you're being ineffective in advancing it.
My rhetorical strategy resulted in the OP filing the report with the CPSC.
As far as strategy goes, mission accomplished. The purpose of further discussion is that I enjoy it; these are not the views I thought needed to be advanced on the account of being self-evident.
I am very disappointed that this is not the case.
You've continued well after you prompted a CPSC report. I'd hope that one purpose of further discussion is benefit to the rest of the community, rather than being solely for your enjoyment. I'm sorry that's disappointing to you.
Ok, good luck with that. After 55 or so comments out of a total of 330 in this thread I think your endless repetitions of the same bits don't contribute but just detract, there is some good that can come of this but not by this ridiculous stream of unsupported assertions.
Once more: you do not know what that set of headphones have gone through and you do not know the finer details of the charging setup. Both of these matter enormously and until that data is available anything you add to it in terms of conclusions is speculative.
For some reason you seem to be either in a panic or overreacting but this whole thread isn't even about you. So why the over the top responses, including suggesting that something exploded, that this is a systemic issue, that somebody died and so on, it makes no sense to me. Count to ten and relax, the world will continue to turn even if one Bose set of headphones came to a bad end (which is all the evidence we seem to have) and let's learn what we can from this instance to ensure that if (which we do not know for sure) there is a quality control or a design issue that it gets found.
And that's not just because of Bose but also because of the 10's of millions of other devices using similar setups.
As for the warning: that warning applies to any device that contains rechargeable lithium ion batteries. Shape change or warming up when they shouldn't be is a very strong indicator you have a problem that is about to get a lot worse. Not having that warning in their manual would have been irresponsible, of course Bose - and every other LiIon powered device manufacturer) is aware of that and instructs their customers accordingly.
Not that anybody ever reads the instructions. And if they did I'll bet that people would not be so happy with Lithium Ion any more. But after having used a couple of hundred cells in various shapes and sizes and advising on the way a certain piece of consumer electronics was put together (wearable, LiIon powered) I think I have a reasonably good idea of what it takes to get one of these cells to misbehave and my list of suspects would be, in order:
- charging circuitry
- impact or drop damage
- cell piercing
- repair gone bad (either of the headphones or of the charging circuitry)
- temperature damage / operating / charging outside of allowed temperature envelope (charging circuitry should protect against this)
and finally
- manufacturing defect (either at Bose, or their supplier) implying at least a quality control issue at Bose
- design error
You seem to jump to 'structural manufacturing defect' as your conclusion without having the required data to establish that that is indeed what happened here.
>Ok, good luck with that. After 30 or so comments I think your endless repetitions of the same bits don't contribute but just detract
Repetition, my friend, is the mother of learning.
My comments resulted in the OP reporting the incident to the CPSC[1]. That's my contribution.
The rest is pure fun.
>Not having that warning in their manual would have been irresponsible, of course Bose - and every other LiIon powered device manufacturer) is aware of that and instructs their customers accordingly.
OK, let's just focus on that one word: irresponsible.
Count to ten, and quote me the warning from the manual that would indicate that OP's experience is a possibility.
(It's not there. Bose was, as you said, irresponsible, and there is only one way to force companies to be responsible in the US).
You're not the OP, you are monopolizing this thread with more bits than you'd normally have a right to, I suggest - mildly - that you reconsider whether or not you think this is a proportional response to something that does not concern you directly or that it is possible that you are over-reacting. And finally, whether the point that you are ineffectively trying to make is served by this behavior.
Presumably if it happens enough times their insurance premiums will go up.
That’s their own problem to worry about.
The American response, to a non-American, is fascinating.
You believe that you “deserve” compensation, but at the same time you guys are all crazy on independence and don’t-tell-me-how-to-behave and whatever else. But as soon as a thing goes wrong you want money for it.
It’s like you don’t believe in the concept of an accident.
Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar, regardless of which country you have a problem with. It leads to predictable, shallow, nasty threads and just makes everything worse.
Well, as a non-American, you live in a country with likely stronger consumer protection laws that punish the companies that break the rules of the free market (selling hazardous products as safe in particular), to ensure that the free market exists.
We, in the US, have to rely on lawsuits to impose a cost on companies for violating the rules of the market.
That's not to mention that we don't have public healthcare which will pay for medical expenses, like seeing a doctor from the chemical burns that you got while wearing Bose QC-35 II headphones as they exploded during normal operation.
It's just one of these weird quirks of The Land of The Free™, where if you want to get medical care for the bodily injury caused to you by a negligent corporation, you have to sue them.
I know it's difficult to understand to an Australian, but the lawsuit is what pays the medical bill.
But when I talk to Americans about their lack of socialised healthcare, a common response is that “I’ve earned my money, if you want your own healthcare, you get your own healthcare”.
That might be a fine attitude. Until you get terribly injured and now you seek tens of thousands of dollars from someone else.
Who do you think that this someone else is? Don’t you realise that it’s just all of the other Americans?
>But when I talk to Americans about their lack of socialised healthcare, a common response is that “I’ve earned my money, if you want your own healthcare, you get your own healthcare”.
You don't seem to understand. It's those Americans who assume they would be able to get money for health in case they are injured through no fault of their own by filing a lawsuit.
They are also in the minority; 63% of Americans want universal healthcare[1]. Including the one you are talking to right now.
Perhaps your sample isn't representative?
[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/29/increasing-...
63% of the Americans deserve a better democracy. One where this number means they'll actually get universal healthcare... Because as it stands it doesn't work that way due to all kinds of complexities in the electoral system that seem baffling to a foreigner.
You are, sadly, absolutely correct here.
We are pushing for ranked choice voting[1], which is slowly gaining acceptance in the public consciousness.
I don't think most people here were even aware of the complexities of the electoral system until the 2016 election (when, for example, millions of people in NY could not vote for Bernie Sanders because they were required to register a year in advance as Democrats to participate in that election - so first-time voters were effectively excluded -- and it was a NY-specific rule; primaries are effectively unregulated on a federal level).
With ranked-choice voting, the hope is that people will be able to vote for candidates that represent them without fear of "the other side" prevailing. Unsurprisingly, the two-party system is quite reluctant to introduce changes that threaten it.
It works this way wherever you are too. There are no democracies. Democracy is like freedom, like God, like equality - political slogans that people who don't know any better take seriously.
Read this comment for a polite and concise explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29112349
Sure there are limitations everywhere, but in my country for example there are no voting districts or other constructs. No restrictions on who can vote, even with an expired passport or other ID you're still allowed to vote. And no queues at the polling stations, there are enough and they're equally spread (let's not even start about the ridiculous "water" rule in Georgia).
At the end of voting day they do something you would expect everywhere: count all votes the same. And then whoever got the most votes has won. I think the US would really benefit from a system that's more like "everyone can vote, most votes wins".
Pardon me, but when you say "it works this way", what exactly do you mean?
The specific way the justice system operates in the US isn't the way things are done in Europe or China. In particular, lack of regulations is justified here by the logic of "we don't need regulations; if there's any harm done, one should take the offending party to court".
If you're talking about how no system is truly democratic, or that majority rule is bad, that's a whole another can of worms, and outside the scope of this discussion.
> Until you get terribly injured and now you seek tens of thousands of dollars from someone else. Who do you think that this someone else is? Don’t you realise that it’s just all of the other Americans?
Well, in the case of a lawsuit, it's just that specific, negligent American (or company) that caused damages and owes that compensation. There needs to be some kind of system for compensating victims when an accident happens. With socialized medicine, everyone compensates a little, in the American system, the entity judged to be at fault compensates a lot. Not saying which one I believe is better, but they both make sense.
It's interesting. One the one hand, I understand that there needs to be some incentive for companies to ensure the safety of their products or actions. In the US, this seems to be (punitive) damages, whereas in Europe it's more through stronger regulations. The nice thing about damages is that it's in terms of moeny, and since companies optimize for money, this does sorta make sense.
However, this also legitimizes dealing with the potential of human tragedy or injury as a mere financial risk. Companies are already terribly dehumanized, and I don't think this legitimization helps for this. At least with regulation there is a direct effort to prevent tragedy, and the framing is also closer to this objective. Of course, the goal for companies will still be "we have to adhere to the regulation", but at least the question "why does the regulation exist?" remains nearby. I think it's also the more democratic approach: rather than putting the incentive mechanism in the hands of a judge, democratically elected governments take direct measures to protect their citizens.
In a nutshell, you just described why the American Libertarian fantasy of hands-off approach that replaces regulation with reliance on the justice system and lawsuits is undemocratic.
Also, note the stigma and shaming of "lawsuit-happy Americans" who are "entitled" and "sheltered", etc. - even in this forum, where people should know better!
So not only people don't understand that the lawsuits are a compliance enforcement mechanism, but they are actively preventing it from working by saying things like "nothing is perfectly safe, hurr durr".
Anyway. Thank you for putting it this succinctly; I wish your comment was at the top:
>There needs to be some incentive for companies to ensure the safety of their products or actions. In the US, this seems to be (punitive) damages, whereas in Europe it's more through stronger regulations. The nice thing about damages is that it's in terms of moeny, and since companies optimize for money, this does sorta make sense.
Unfortunately, the tort-based method of enforcement leads to companies doing that notorious calculation: C = cost of safety feature, P = probability of lawsuit, J = expected total damages, if C > P x J, we don't make the product safe.
Yes, which makes it even more absurd that people here are complaining about calls to increase J by having the OP sue Bose (given that increasing J is the only way we can actually make them care).
Everything about it is quite unfortunate.
> The American response … You believe that you “deserve” compensation, but at the same time you guys are all crazy on independence and don’t-tell-me-how-to-behave and whatever else. But as soon as a thing goes wrong you want money for it.
Do you believe that all Americans share these exact traits?
Getting injured in America is expensive
Have a look at insurance premiums that doctors have to pay, especially the high-risk specializations (like neurosurgery). I guess I don't have to explain why they're so high.
Why are you bringing this up? This derails the discussion.
The parent's point was that, unlike in Europe, when someone is injured by no fault of their own, the expected way for them to pay for the (very high) medical costs is to sue the offending party.
That's the excuse for not offering universal healthcare. Incidentally, it also explains why the doctors need insurance (because malpractice does happen sometimes, and if your health is damaged by it, you won't get a nickel of support unless you sue the offending party - i.e. the doctor).
That wouldn't be such an issue if we had universal healthcare and a support net for people who can't work.
Because medical malpractice is the 3rd most common cause of death in the US (and probably the west)?
The must be something missing from that statement, I don't see how that could possibly be true - that a third of all people in the US die due to medical malpractice? Accidental death perhaps?
Firstly, "3rd most common cause of death" != "a third of all people".
But putting that aside, I too found the claim implausible and went looking for data. Here is what the CDC has to say:
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htmLeading Causes of Death Data are for the U.S. Number of deaths for leading causes of death: * Heart disease: 659,041 * Cancer: 599,601 * Accidents (unintentional injuries): 173,040 * Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 156,979 * Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 150,005 * Alzheimer’s disease: 121,499 * Diabetes: 87,647 * Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 51,565 * Influenza and pneumonia: 49,783 * Intentional self-harm (suicide): 47,511> Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S. Their figure, published May 3 in The BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) third leading cause of death — respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year.
> The Johns Hopkins team says the CDC’s way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate. The researchers are advocating for updated criteria for classifying deaths on death certificates.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...
I don't know if this is credible or not, but it's coming from the John Hopkins School of Medicine which I think is broadly credible.
Thanks for sharing. Here is another paper on the subject (cited in the Johns Hopkins study you linked to):
https://journals.lww.com/journalpatientsafety/Fulltext/2013/...
> Using a weighted average of the 4 studies, a lower limit of 210,000 deaths per year was associated with preventable harm in hospitals. Given limitations in the search capability of the Global Trigger Tool and the incompleteness of medical records on which the Tool depends, the true number of premature deaths associated with preventable harm to patients was estimated at more than 400,000 per year. Serious harm seems to be 10- to 20-fold more common than lethal harm.
Not sure whether that is correct data.
Assuming for a moment it is, what would be the impact to life expectancy if nobody went and saw a doctor?
The doctor who delivered one of our kids (and turned out also delivered my wife!) had to deliver three babies a week to cover malpractice insurance even though he had never had a case against him.
this is a very sad point of view.
if you buy a product that comes with a pamphlet telling you how safe it is, you have to trust the manufacturer. you are also trusting that the product has passed all the necessary safety requirements. if that product is food or for children, that trust is even higher.
if an accident happens to you, you need to contact the right people so: 1. it does not happen to others 2. your damages, if possible, are covered.
that's how we make it safer for everybody.
If you are in a life-changing accident, in Europe at best you'll receive a few hundred euros a month in disability pay. In US you could sue for millions. I believe this is the rare occasion where the American way of thinking makes more sense.
It's not you'll receive. It's can receive if you are wealthy and lucky enough to find a lawyer that wins against the corporation. I have no data, but I bet the lawyers of a corporation win a lot of lawsuits even if the consumer has high medical bills because of a faulty product. I doubt those cases make headlines.
I prefer that a decently regulated or public health insurance system covers costs instead of letting the risk to the consumer. The insurance can claim damages from the corporation if there is neglect.
Most injury lawyers operate on commissions only. I know a dude who is a personal injury lawyer, he doesn't take any money from the victim, but gets paid a % of the settlement.
Yes, but that doesn't help too much if you have to pay medical bills and lose the lawsuit. Of course better than having to pay the legal fees of the lost lawsuit, too. But still not as reliable as having a publicly regulated health care or health insurance paying your medical bills in the first place.
>in Europe at best you'll receive a few hundred euros a month in disability pay.
Uhmm, no, at least not here in Germany. The amount on compensation is related to the severity of the injury. For things that heal you will get Schmerzensgeld ("pain" money), as well as compensation for things that broke (e.g. your car or bike in a traffic accident). If the injury takes a while to heal, in which time you're unable to work, you get compensated for that as well. If it's lasting damage, you will get disability money. If you need care/help (from grocery shopping and cooking, to full blown 24/7 nurse care) that is compensated as well, and may amount to tens of thousands of euros per month. If you're permanently unable to work you will get compensated for that in a "reasonable" way (you won't be poor), and the liable party will also have to pay your retirement insurance dues[0]. If you requires changes to your living situation[1], you will get "reasonably" compensated as well. And so on. Basically, every damage that can be monetarily valued or at least estimated will be "reasonably" compensated.
>In US you could sue for millions.
Where you're right is that you won't get rich from such a lawsuit. Regardless, the total amount in compensation you will receive over a life time could as well amount to millions as well. The amounts awarded in the US may seem large sometimes, until you realize that it's a one time thing, and the health and care costs over a lifetime you will incur may still not be covered by that lump sum.
The only thing here in Germany that isn't really direct compensation but "extra" money is the Schmerzensgeld, and that's usually a one time pay of a couple hundred bucks for light injuries up to low six figures for major injuries.
And it might be harder to "fully" win such a lawsuit too, as in Germany you don't have jury trials[2].
[0] Retirement insurance dues may have to be paid even if the injured party was not working yet, e.g. when the person was still in school.
[1] E.g. you need a wheel chair ramp, or move to a wheel chair accessible place, or need to make changes to your bathroom to get in and out of the shower/bathtub. In some cases, defendants were ordered to pay the difference for getting a larger house so family providing some care could move in.
[2] Tho, there are Schöffengerichte, with "regular" people sitting on a panel with a judge, usually 2 regular people and 1 judge in the lower courts. While the judge can be outvoted in theory by the 2 other, the judge is part of the deliberations and therefore has great input into the decision finding.
Oh, yes. In the commie socialist states you would get effective healthcare regardless of means and without any cost to you, but in The Land of The Free* you receive bill after bill, each adding another 6 figure sum, requiring you to try to talk to the hospital (who, amongst other heinous lines, charged you $2500 for two 200mg paracetamol pills), pleading for mercy to forgive some of the debt, and at the same time talk to a $200/hr lawyer into pressing charges against anyone who was within earshot of the whole incident and aftermath, on the off chance you get less than half the amount awarded. Your lawyer gets the majority of the awarded sum, and then fees on top of that. You get low 5 figures and a permanent diminishing of mental ability. What an advantage.
Trust me. I have recent first-hand experience in the healthcare of Australia, and my sister has recent first-hand experience with the (lack of) healthcare in USA. I'm nearly 100% recovered, only because of the recency of injury, while she nearly died for the incredibly rare condition of giving birth, through a surgeon causing internal bleeding during a c-section. And no-one noticing she was dying for hours.
Unfortunately, the US has a culture of doctor worship. Most people know next to nothing about medicine, so doctors can get away with all kinds of incompetence. As someone else in this thread mentioned, medical mistakes are the 2nd leading cause of death in the US.
I am glad to hear your sister survived that ordeal.
In the US, doctors that have maimed and killed patients can switch specialties and become a lucrative medical marijuana prescriber:
https://www2.mbc.ca.gov/BreezePDL/document.aspx?path=%5cDIDO...
https://www.laweekly.com/after-almost-30-years-as-a-surgeon-...
Libertarian types are actually not opposed to lawsuits. They are seen as a possible substitute for many government regulations, e.g. maybe you don’t need a bunch of regulations on the safety of things like lithium ion batteries when the threat of lawsuit is enough. Obviously that doesn’t work 100% of the time, though.
> Obviously that doesn’t work 100% of the time, though.
What a great way to describe libertarianism in a single sentence. The vast majority of their talking points and ideas fall apart quite easily under any sort of scrutiny or contact with the real world.
Well, regulations don’t work 100% of the time either.
They do. Not always to a 100% ( e.g. US prohibition of alcohol), sometimes with unintended consequences, sometimes even counterproductive consequences. Nevertheless, it works better, in theory and practice.
I had the same happen to a mid-tier brand portable bluetooth speaker that was charging from the wall outlet on my night stand. Burst into a massive chemical flame right next to me, splattered the wall with molten plastic. It took me a few seconds to understand what was happening, at first I assumed it was my SO playing a really dumb fireworks prank on me. Took a few good inhalations of whatever black smoke came out of it while trying to put the fire out with a pillow. I was very, very lucky that this happened while I was in the same room, and not out at work with nobody at home to put out the fire. It would have easily caused a building-wide fire.
The company behind it offered to replace the product with whatever I wanted from their store as long as I signed a "I won't sue you" form and sent them the unit back for investigation. They said it was a manufacturing defect. I wasn't feeling like spending months or years in litigation, so I took the offer (no batteries this time) and moved on with my life. No regrets since.
The reality is that we're all surrounded by these ticking battery timebombs, and we're all at the mercy of manufacturing quality control and luck. Ever since that incident I never charge any new device unless I'm sitting next to it for a few hours, just to make sure nothing of the sort happens without my supervision. I realize it doesn't accomplish much, since these issues often happen hundreds of hours into the device's regular operation, but it gives me a false sense of safety.
I mean I’m glad it didn’t happen to me, but a billion people are carrying around billions of Lithium-ion batteries. Those batteries sometimes catch fire because Lithium is highly flammable. It’s gonna happen.
>It’s gonna happen.
Yeah, and when it does, the manufacturer of that lithium bomb should pay for it.
And not just to compensate the victim, but to make the cost of negligent manufacture higher than the savings it brings to the company in engineering, QA, and production.
Numbers are not an excuse. There is over a billion cars in the world, most filled with highly flammable gasoline that actually burns inside them. Yet none are spontaneously exploding.
Self-immolating headphones - small speakers that you put on your head, mind you - are an egregious abuse of safety, public trust, and all reason. By an ostensibly "luxury" brand, no less.
There is no "but" about it. If they can't make safe headphones, they should not make headphones period.
OP, please report them to CPSC here: https://www.saferproducts.gov/IncidentReporting
There is over a billion cars in the world, most filled with highly flammable gasoline that actually burns inside them. Yet none are spontaneously exploding.
They absolutely are. 170,000 a year in the US alone. Some are even due to known design faults. A few years ago Ford recalled almost a million pickups due to a fire risk, and then recalled half of them again because the first fix caused another fire risk.
The probability of injury or death from a vehicle fire is probably much higher than the risk of injury from wireless headphones.
https://www.consumernotice.org/personal-injury/vehicle-safet...
Yeah, and GM just recalled effectively all EVs they ever made.
What's your point? Mine was that Bose should do the same thing with their headphones, and they won't do it out of their own accord.
Also consider that there are billions of porcelain dishes made in the world, and somehow, they don't self-explode. If headphones are different in that regard, they should be, at the very least, clearly labeled as such - which is not the case.
The point is that no matter how hard you try, electrical, mechanical or chemical failure will always be a risk. It's an inherent property of physical objects. It's impossibly to make them perfectly safe. Although, to be fair, given the number of objects compared to the number of failures, we're pretty close. Obviously manufacturers should attempt to minimize the risk but they'll never reduce it to zero.
If you're concerned about exploding lithium ion or lithium polymer devices in your home the only recourse available to you is not to buy any.
If you do that you should also be aware that corded devices also catch fire sometimes though. You should avoid those too.
Maybe just avoid electrical systems entirely.
>Although, to be fair, given the number of objects compared to the number of failures, we're pretty close.
Did you ever pause to think why that's the case? That wasn't the case 100 years ago, when Radium was a fun new chemical to paint your teeth with.
We are pretty close because of government regulation, warnings, and yes, lawsuits that punish the companies for being negligent on safety.
>Obviously manufacturers should attempt to minimize the risk but they'll never reduce it to zero.
And obviously, the manufacturers need incentives to do so. Safety warnings aren't just for the consumer - they also make safer products more marketable. And penalties for not doing due diligence won't happen by themselves unless the consumers take an active position, report safety violations to CPSC, and sue to recover the damages.
Someone has to enforce the rules. In the US, the enforcement is shifted to the consumer and the legal system. We have CPSC, NHTSA, FAA - and their reach is still limited, the justification being that it should be up to the courts.
> Maybe just avoid electrical systems entirely.
The risks from burning wood in your living room are higher. My wife got burned badly when she was a small kid. We have freezing temperatures 7-8 months a year in this country. So heating requires a lot of energy and with a lot of energy there is always higher risk, whether electric or not.
> GM just recalled effectively all EVs they ever made.
What has this got to do with exploding ICE cars?
> What's your point?
I think GPs point was pretty clear. You made a completely unfounded claim, ICE cars don’t spontaneously explode, despite the fact that evidence shows they clearly do, and do so at a rate higher than headphones or EVs.
I think their point was that you were pretty sloppy with your facts.
I had a family member have a car light on fire on the road and burn to a charred shell within a matter of minutes, it happens.
Nothing is perfectly safe, that is how lithium batteries fail. You should know so you can properly deal with problems.
There is an annoying trend among people that expect everything to be perfectly safe. It seems to be a symptom of an overly sheltered existence.
>There is an annoying trend among people that expect everything to be perfectly safe. It seems to be a symptom of an overly sheltered existence.
Yeah, how overly sheltered to not expect your headphones to not catch on fire and kill you. It's a symptom of not believing when someone pisses in our eyes and tells us it's raining. Especially when it's happening on our own dime.
>Nothing is perfectly safe, that is how lithium batteries fail.
Then lithium batteries should be banned from headphones.
>You should know so you can properly deal with problems.
Good point! And where would the customer learn about this? From HackerNews?
Last time I checked, Bose devices didn't come with a self-combustion warning.
And until they do, my point applies.
A consumer would learn this by having interest in the world around them and how it works beyond being slapped in the face with every warning possible (I’m looking at you, literally everything in the world which is known in the state of California to cause cancer). We don’t need cushioned guard rails on literally everything.
When was the last time you actually read a product manual? Many of them actually are full of warnings about how things fail. I have no idea about Bose headphones, I definitely threw away everything but the headphones immediately.
No we should not ban everything that doesn’t have a zero percent fault rate. This weird angry response is a symptom of this sheltered fear which comes from not understanding that the world isn’t ever going to be perfect. You make really bad decisions when you’re in denial about the impossibility of safety perfection.
>A consumer would learn this by having interest in the world around them
And where would they go to fulfil that interest? HackerNews? Or maybe, just consider it, the instruction manual that comes with the device?
>We don’t need cushioned guard rails on literally everything.
Sure. Just labels on self-exploding products saying that they may self-explode.
>When was the last time you actually read a product manual?
Yesterday. I got an Ikea ENEBY speaker. Your ignorance and lack of having interest in the world around you, which includes product manuals, is on you.
From the Bose QC-35 manual
"Remove headphones immediately if you experience a warming sensation or loss of audio." [1]
Probably could use a few more words for good measure.
Also, they do not explode. Explode has a specific meaning. Lithium batteries experiencing thermal runaway get rather hot and then burn quite vigorously, but they do not explode.
1. https://assets.bose.com/content/dam/Bose_DAM/Web/consumer_el...
>"Remove headphones immediately if you experience a warming sensation or loss of audio."
A "warming sensation" is not what the OP has experienced.
When Bose augments this to the following, you may have a point:
>Remove headphones immediately if they spontaneously ignite and start emanating smoke and hazardous chemicals that cause chemical burns to your skin. Failure to do so may result in death. Rinse all exposed skin with running cold water immediately, and see a medical professional ASAP in such case.
You seem to have no problem with this scenario actually happening to someone, so there should be absolutely no reason not to have it in the same manual in these exact words.
> A "warming sensation" is not what the OP has experienced.
A warming sensation is the first thing OP noticed: "I took them off of my charger, put them on my head, and noticed they were suddenly getting very warm".
Taking them off at that point does remove _some_ of the risks.
The guy went digging for the serial number after the event.
Interesting it also says it shouldn't be connected to a Airplane Seat Adapter yet I'm sure my QC 35'S came with a airplane adapter. Wonder what happened there.
"We know our product is unsafe and shouldn't be used in this way, but this is a huuuuge use case for our product, so we will make it appear as if it's designed for it, while warning the user to not use it in a manner that they bought the product for. Genius!"
>Yeah, how overly sheltered to not expect your headphones to not catch on fire and kill you
Very. In the end you're carrying a high energy density power source on your head that would love to just catch fire. Don't they teach kids anything in chemistry these days?
>Very. In the end you're carrying a high energy density power source on your head that would love to just catch fire. Don't they teach kids anything in chemistry these days?
I just love how this comment appears in the same thread as this one:
>That sort of paranoia doesn't help. In fact it may cause psychosomatic symptoms (nocebo effect).
Anyway, if it's common knowledge, there's no harm to put a big label warning about it on the instruction manual, right?
Last time I checked, passing chemistry isn't a requirement for purchasing Bose QuietComfort 35 II headphones, which spontaneously catch fire and cause chemical burns.
> I just love how this comment appears in the same thread as this one
Yes. One says “yes lipo batteries can have thermal runaway” and the other comment says “don’t twist yourself into knots by worrying over this one time bad exposure”.
They talk about two different things in two different way. Your comment makes it sound as if they are somehow contradicting each other? They don’t.
> Yeah, how overly sheltered to not expect your headphones to not catch on fire and kill you. It's a symptom of not believing when someone pisses in our eyes and tells us it's raining. Especially when it's happening on our own dime.
I agree with the feeling, but flammable batteries are one of the less risky and stupid thing humans are doing.
I mean, we are literally littering the sky with swarms of useless satellites for the rich hikers in the global north (one example among many of totally idiotic behavior) - I can live with batteries.
(btw. I don't even have a smartphone or a cellphone in general, i know i'm a bit of a radical - and i use only wired stuff, because i find it more practical, durable and ecological - point is, people accept very stupid stuff for their convenience, that's why we are slowly killing our planet and ourselves - your points are valid, but it won't deter people from using dangerous chemicals in their lives, and the throwing them away and poison nature and themsleves)
I'm genuinely curious. Which satellites are you referring to?
Starlink, Project Kuiper, etc. where they plan to send more than 12,000 satellites into space, for having wi-fi on earth (for those who can afford it, it's very expensive, 500 usd setup + 100 usd per month - not affordable for 90% of the world)
but they are ruining the sky for 100% of us, for the benefit of some rich techbro that want to check emails in some remote place.
I see. I don't live in a remote place at all (central USA), but Starlink is far better internet than anything else we can get. Currently our connection speed is 0.6 Mbps. It's supposed to be 10, but they have problems pretty often...
Nobody got killed, there did you get that from?
Being dramatic is not helping their case.
Some of the safety issues could be alleviated through different product design. For instance -- the charge system is a USB cable direct to the headphones. A fireproof cradle might be one option to handle to at least mitigate for unattended thermal runaway. In fact, a fireproof box in which to charge portable devices might not be a bad product idea.
Fireproof bags and boxes already exist and are widely used for LiPo batteries commonly used in RC products.
Big difference between LiPo in particular and Lithium Ion in general, most Lithium Ion batteries are not Lithium Polymer.
Most "LiPo" batteries are typically the same chemistry as your "Lithium-ion" but without the puncture and pressure resistant casing. The plastic pouch is the "polymer" part. LiPo batteries are lighter and can produce more current than basically the same thing in a safer standard container.
So yeah, big difference in safety, not really a difference in the chemistry.
The above was explained to me by someone I believe knows what they're talking about. But I may have misunderstood; if I have, please let me know!
LiPo is a subclass of Lithium-Ion (which is confusing), but is a different chemistry. LiPo batteries are typically labelled as such, have either a solid or gel electrolyte, and are packaged in pouches while the rest of the Lithium-Ion cells are labelled LiIon or Lithium Ion, can be packaged in pouches but can also be packaged in cylindrical beakers, these have a liquid electrolyte with the negative electrode being the beaker and the plus being the center typically brought out at a concentric tip.
Manufacturers sometimes use deceptive labeling and given that the form factors are somewhat interchangeable it really is a confusing mess. Unfortunately both chemistries have 4.20V as their 'charged' voltage and 3.0V as their discharged voltages because of the underlying chemical similarities so looking at the voltages won't give you a good idea either.
In the end, the electrode is what matters, but getting to that requires destruction of the cell. One non-destructive way of figuring out if a cell has a liquid electrolyte is to see if you can shift the center of gravity by tilting the cell slowly. If you can then it is most likely a Lithium Ion battery, if you can't then it is a most likely a Lithium Polymer one.
> By an ostensibly "luxury" brand, no less.
Bose aren't luxury: they're premium mediocre. They're expensive - overpriced in fact - but have a supremely competent marketing team who are probably responsible for mopping up a good portion of that premium.
That doesn't make this incident any better or more excusable but it does go some way to explaining why it happened: the product is poor quality and cheaply engineered.
You get what you pay for, and with Bose you are paying to be hoodwinked by flashy marketing and "brand equity".
I wouldn't consider Bose for anything else, but the noise cancelling on this particular headset is very good.
I'll probably swap to Sony next, but when I bought them there wasn't really a viable competitor.
From what little I know, Bose has patents on a number of noise-cancelling techniques, hence making it tricky for other manufacturers to match them in noise-cancelling. However, in the past five years, several other manufacturers have done pretty well (though I believe some cross-licence patents with Bose), and Sony and Apple do lead in some comparative reviews.
It is a shame that Bose's lead in noise-cancelling isn't matched in the quality of their sound.
The Sony WX-1000s, I guess?
I'm quite impressed with them. Both the noise-cancelling and sound quality are better than the QC35s I used to use.
Yes. I've tried them side-by-side (and a whole bunch of others) and the Sony came out as way better than the rest, which given my one-man boycott of Sony products after the rootkit debacle is a bit of a letdown. So I hope the boycott gods won't notice my lack of fortitude.
That's why I put "luxury" in scare quotes.
Thanks, "premium" (also in scare quotes) is the word I was looking for.
Don't manufacturers do that already?
Take into account the probability of a costly failure, and increase the price to account for it. And compensate victims to a certain extent, but quietly. I suppose they would fight any publicity of such incidents, since that would have a huge impact on sales, I have read a few such stories, and usually they disappear from the news pretty soon, likely because the victim agreed to be quietly compensated. I could be wrong.
>Don't manufacturers do that already?
Yes they do, and this is why we have CPSC and lawsuits: to increase the cost of failure to the point where it's not a wise business decision to allow one to happen.
Nothing is 100% fool-proof, but the difference between 99.9% safe and 99.99% safe is 10x decrease in incidents.
You cannot be certain that this was entirely "spontaneous".
Yes, the OP prefaced with a number of common reasons this might happen that do not apply in his case, but that does not mean the root cause is faulty manufacture.
Hell, it's possible that a high-energy particle from space hit the battery in his headphones in just the right spot and that's why it exploded. Would you hold Bose responsible in that case?
>You cannot be certain that this was entirely "spontaneous".
Yes, and it's not my business to find out. It's the job of CPSC and investigators to find the reasons. Which is why I insisted the OP should file a report.
And as for establishing certainty, I'm not a judge or a jury, whose job it is to do so. Which is why I suggested the OP should take it to court.
>Hell, it's possible that a high-energy particle from space hit the battery in his headphones in just the right spot and that's why it exploded. Would you hold Bose responsible in that case?
I can't hold Bose responsible, the courts and CPSC can. Since it's also possible that OP was, you know, correct in his assessment, this case should get their attention.
Because they didn't design it around that possibility. If the battery blows up, regardless of cause, it should do so in a controlled manner which minimizes the harm caused to the wearer.
Okay cool and now the headphones weigh a kilo because of shielding and nobody buys them.
>Okay cool and now the headphones weigh a kilo because of shielding and nobody buys them.
The problem here being.. that Bose loses money?
Or maybe, just maybe, they figure out a way to make headphones that are both safe and marketable?
The idea of free market includes the notion of failing in the free market. Which is exactly what Bose did here.
Literally nothing is perfectly safe.
1/1,000,000 chance of getting chemical burns is fine by me.
>1/1,000,000 chance of getting chemical burns is fine by me.
That's fine by me too, and Bose should market the headphones with the description "1/10^6 chance of getting chemical burns".
Then the people who don't find it fine by them can make a rational choice about buying or not buying that product.
See, the public has this unreasonable expectation about wireless headphones being as safe as wired ones. Silly public. Can't fathom why they would think that way, with all the warnings of potential chemical burns in the product manuals.
Oh wait.
Maybe? Your alternative seems to be to let a few people die every now and then, so that some companies can get better margins.
Nobody did die though, nor is it very likely they would. And this is one pair out of however many million they've sold. I'm not arguing there shouldn't be compensation in this instance, nor an investigation into why it happened. But hypothetically if it was some one in a million space particle (which is obviously unlikely), I think it's pretty ludicrous to expect Bose to design for that eventuality.
> I think it's pretty ludicrous to expect Bose to design for that eventuality.
That decision is, indeed, up to Bose.
But should they choose to continue making a headphones that have a 1-in-N-million chance of exploding, this should be clearly indicated on every pair they sell.
So that their competitors who choose to invest in safety would be able to reap the fruit if their labor in the free market.
How many times are you going to say "exploding" to describe something that didn't explode? You're clearly cognizant of the fact you are lying, so why keep doing it? Why not just describe what happened accurately? Is it a concern that you can't make your point if you relate to the facts in a more accurate fashion, without the repeated hyperbole?
It's less that I care about the their "margins" and more that I care about having headphones that aren't $600 and give me long-term neck problems from their weight.
Also nobody has died so...
>It's less that I care about the their "margins" and more that I care about having headphones that aren't $600 and give me long-term neck problems from their weight.
You are aware that wired headphones exist, right?
Also, quite a leap from "Bose shouldn't make headphones that explode while being used, like QC-35 II" to "if we ask for that, this will make all headphones heavy enough to cause neck problems and cost North of $600".
Self-exploding headphones were not a problem we had for most of the time headphones existed. There's no reason to introduce it, nor accept it.
>Also nobody has died so...
Oh, so someone has to die instead of merely being injured for you to care? That's hardly compassionate, but understandable.
How about we settle for the middle ground of the following being included with each pair:
"BOSE Quite Comfort QC 35 II. You might experience bodily injury during normal operation of this product. Also nobody has died, so..."
"Exploding" is a feature of the battery, not the headphone.
Lithium-ion are the best we have right now, and they "explode" (catch fire I think is more accurate) when damaged.
Do I want better battery chemistries that are more robust? Of course.
Am I going to hold this against Bose or any other battery-powered device manufacturer until we do? No.
Replying to this and jen729's comment, which I can't reply to for some reason.
I'm not entirely sure why this got downvoted (bit of a personal gripe with YC (anonymous down voting/spamming without a direct comment).. buuuut
This idea is only 'silly' if you think of it as a large amount of lead lining.
In this day-in-age, I'm sure the idea of a material/substance around it that stops combustion when something like this happens is surely not out of reach.. I'm as far away from a chemical engineer as you can get, but, if it requires oxygen to burn, maybe some incredibly strong substance around it to contain the chemicals if the battery expands. Or some to absorb oxygen around it.
I dunno, maybe I'm incredibly naive, but it feels like something that, if a portion of the companies that manufacturer/use the batteries put effort into something, it's something that could be made _more_ safe in some way?
Big Asbestos enters the chat
and I got down voted :( Honestly like little daggers and makes me really never want to comment on HN.
Surely the idea of the world putting some effort into producing a material that can help stop this happening isn't completely stupid...?
>Surely the idea of the world putting some effort into producing a material that can help stop this happening isn't completely stupid...?
HN, the forum of innovators who are vehemently against innovation if it's for the sake of consumer safety.
I mean, come one people, it's a business opportunity. Figure out how to make non-self-exploding headphones, with a guarantee, and crush Bose in the free market on that selling point.
Sigh.
You're kinda arguing for wired headphones in a different part of this thread.
Bit of a stretch to say you're "pro-innovation" in this context.
>I'm not entirely sure why this got downvoted
Because we are on HackerNews, where the consequences of their own actions only exist for individuals and not the corporations they hope to be CEOs of one day.
I didn't realize that I'd need to argue, in 2021, that selling people dangerous products as safe is, in principle, wrong, but here we are.
To people asking "What did the OP expect", the answer is: whatever the instruction manual said on Page 1. And it surely didn't say: "WARNING: MAY KILL YOU DURING NORMAL OPERATION".
Once it does, we can have a discussion about everything else.
> whatever the instruction manual said on Page 1. And it surely didn't say: "WARNING: MAY KILL YOU DURING NORMAL OPERATION".
Tbh it probably wouldn't take much to get that added to the boilerplate warnings of every battery product sold, just in case.
The point is, the manufacturers of safe products will have a selling point by being able to differentiated themselves.
Heck, wired headphone makers will get a boost from that.
I mean probably. In 1,000,000 such cases of devices causing injury in general, how many are caused by space particles and how many are caused by human fallibility? Whether it's a design issue, qa failure, supply chain issue with unexpected material in the device, or deliberate malice, the company is responsible for the product it sells, and the customer has a reasonable expectation that it won't explode.
The cosmic particle idea isn't completely outlandish, but it's impossible to prove, and it's statistically far more likely that it was a human failure. Given the rarity of spontaneously exploding batteries, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the particles are responsible for less than 1 in a million incidents, so yeah, the company should be liable. That's the cost of business, and on a humanistic note, making things better for the guy would just be the good thing to do.
Responsibility should always rest with the responsible party, I. e. the one in the best position to have avoided this. It’s isn’t about guilt, but simply the redistribution of a harm that has already happened.
Unless the device was mishandled in some unusual way, the manufacturer should bear this burden because they are/were in the best position to implement mechanisms to avoid the harm, from improved QA to a better design and, ultimately, to rhe informed decision not to sell the device.
yes? products should be designed so that they do not kill anyone?
You will not be able to produce a hammer (can by mistake crush a skull), or a ball pen (can pierce the chest and reach the heart in a fall), or a bottle of water (one can choke on the water).
Nothing is perfectly safe. People should deal with it, and remember that they don't live in a fairy tale.
This is absurd. There's a world of difference between an object that you can kill yourself with or an object that just randomly kills you.
This particular Bose model is pretty popular, and has been produced for many years.
I hope statistics exist on how many of them burst into flames. I'd like to compare it to the number of people who choked on a cereal breakfast, or fell from a stairway at home, or other such random accidents with normally benign things. I suspect that the headphones will be no worse than many other common household items, including the low-tech ones.
>Nothing is perfectly safe. People should deal with it, and remember that they don't live in a fairy tale.
Including the business of selling self-exploding headphones.
Corporations should deal with it, and remember that they don't live in a fairy tale where they can pull off shit like that off without consequence.
Can't make safe headphones? Leave it to someone who can. Free market or something.
(In case you're not getting it, it's not about living in fairy tales, it's about increasing the cost of failure to corporations to a high enough point that they will put some money into safety instead of pocketing it.)
How exactly would you develop headphones that are hardened against high energy particles from space?
NASA has a hard time doing this for their vehicles that are intended to be in deep space.
A better design could be such that remains safe (even if functionally degraded) when hit with a burst of cosmic rays.
Whether it can be done within the constraints of mass, volume, and expense that keep the headphones competitive is another (hard) question.
> the manufacturer of that lithium bomb
Thing is, small lithium bombs do less damage than large ones. Now Bose makes a point of advertising the long battery-life of these devices; 20 hours, they say.
Doesn't that mean that Bose is profiting from the long battery life, while failing to mention that their competitors sell cans with smaller ear-bombs in them?
> Yet none are spontaneously exploding.
Not anymore.
>Yet none are spontaneously exploding.
Well, at lease EVs are spontaneously catching fire.
> make the cost of negligent manufacture
What negligence?
It's almost by definition negligent to create a product that burns the user under normal use. These sorts of incidents in the past have led to recalls, to bans on taking devices on airplanes and similar. It's no small thing.
I never thought it would happen to me either. I knew the risks. I took care of my devices. I treated my devices with lithium ion as a loaded gun. But it happened. It happened suddenly, and if I wasn't present, it would have taken out my home and killed my pets and possibly my wife.
I wrote this not to shame Bose. But to highlight the risk of personal wearables and lithium ion technologies.
So you are the OP?
Please, don't cut Bose any slack. They deserve to be shamed.
If someone were to make a self-exploding car, they'd be out of carmaking very fast. If Bose can't make headphones that don't self-ignite, they should not be making headphones.
Consider that Bose is breaking the law if they don't report this incident to CPSC[1].
And if you have a spare minute (which you seem to, given that you wrote the post and comment), please file a consumer safety report[2] and report the Bose QC-35 II headphones as unsafe product.
It is a simple form, and it is the way to make sure that this doesn't happen again to someone else. Aside from that, consider filing a lawsuit to get compensated for the damage to your physical health. Talk to a lawyer that can take your case pro-bono.
Thank you for the time you took to report this here, and I am very sorry that Bose screwed you over like that. Please let me know if I can help with the CPSC report to prevent them doing this to others.
[1]https://www.cpsc.gov/Business--Manufacturing/Recall-Guidance...
> If someone were to make a self-exploding car, they'd be out of carmaking very fast.
I fully agree with the rest of what you're saying, but that's simply not true.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/04/tesla-f...
https://www.inquirer.com/business/cars-battery-fires-fear-la...
Alas. Nevertheless, from the article:
>“We don’t think every vehicle has this rare manufacturing defect,” General Motors spokesman Dan Flores said. “But we can’t take a chance, so we’re recalling all the vehicles.”
I mean, that comes pretty close to be out of electric car making.
The same should happen to Bose. A total recall of all wireless headphones they ever made would be a good start.
-------
PS: I'm spending more time in headphones than I do in my car; it's fair to hold them to the same standard.
Thank you, filed.
Thank you for helping the public out!
Now, if you have energy to simply talk to a lawyer, I suspect it's going to be a slam-dunk case (I'm not a lawyer). They shouldn't get away with offering you a new pair of headphones to replace the one that almost killed you, and caused bodily damage.
If someone threw acid on you in the street, it would be considered assault, and they'd spend years in jail if found and charged. We really don't need to let corporations get away with the same.
> If someone threw acid on you in the street
Intentionally?
It doesn't have to be intentional. It does generally has to be foreseeable. If I throw acid out my front door onto the sidewalk without looking and some passerby happens to pass through the stream, I should be held responsible for my recklessness even if I didn't intend it.
Bose engineers surely understand the risks inherent in their batteries.
Sure but do you see any signs of recklessness in this case? Your comment kind of assumes that (or worse), whereas it's far from obvious to me.
Well that would be up to the courts to decide.
Depends on whether Bose engineers were unaware of risks of lithium batteries to the extent that they didn't put any warnings on the product, safe from a recommendation to "remove" the headphones if the user experiences a "warming sensation".
Could it be the case that Bose thought that "warming sensation" is the worst that could happen? Let's see what the comments here say!
>In the end you're carrying a high energy density power source on your head that would love to just catch fire. Don't they teach kids anything in chemistry these days?
>I mean I’m glad it didn’t happen to me, but a billion people are carrying around billions of Lithium-ion batteries. Those batteries sometimes catch fire because Lithium is highly flammable. It’s gonna happen.
>Nothing is perfectly safe, that is how lithium batteries fail. You should know so you can properly deal with problems.
>Well, at lease EVs are spontaneously catching fire.
>Everyone is aware of the risks, there were a bunch of stories about airplane cell phone fires a few years ago.
>lithium battery fires are really nasty, and that's why he got a chemical burn. LiPF6 is a contact irritant, PF5 it decomposes to is a gas, and also a respiratory irritant, and HF PH5 decomposes in the air is a dangerous poisonous acid. This is what everybody visiting a lithium battery factory is told on safety orientation. In case there is fire in the factory, run, preferably until you are few blocks away.
I don't even know what to think. I guess they just didn't know.
Either way.
It happened suddenly, and if I wasn't present, it would have taken out my home and killed my pets and possibly my wife.
I highly doubt that, but don't let the paranoia get to you and start thinking of all the bad things that could've happened, because they didn't. In fact, I'd say the fire retardants in the plastic did exactly what they were supposed to do, given that you only mentioned smoke and not actual flames.
The plastic will burn. In addition to HF and other very nasty things the battery fire emits, the burning plastic is also very nasty: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5577247/
Judging by the photo the OP posted it self extinguished. So it doesn't readily sustain a flame even when exposed to fire, and that makes it fire retardant.
It probably does emit some very nasty gases while it does that, plastics are, as a rule, not nice to be near when they are burning or exposed to flames, all kinds of nasty stuff can come out of them, including dioxins.
No, there is no fire retardant in the thermoplastic. He is not paranoic, he is just explaining the fact.
Why do you call it thermoplastic instead of just plastic
I wouldn't say 'not the blame' Bose directly, I take your blog post as two points:
- What happened: exactly what you said, you can replace this as 'item X with a lithium-ion battery'. This is an event that could happen to any lithium-ion device, is scary and is something that we should be aware of and is scary
- Bose's customer support is abysmal at handling it (I wonder how first-line support for other companies would be)
Thanks for sharing the post, I'm sorry it happened to you and I hope you burns recover very soon!!
>It is scary and is something that we should be aware of and is scary
Great point!
So what I'm hearing is that Bose should recall all wireless headphones they ever made, and continue selling their new products with appropriate warnings.
In fact, I think it will be a great improvement of their slogan:
BOSE. Better sound through research. Scary, and something you should be aware of is scary.
Until then, It's safe to assume that people think their products are safe, not scary, because that's how they market them as.
But what would you expect support to do? When you call a random callcenter agent the best they’re going to be able to do is comp you a new set of headphones.
>But what would you expect support to do?
Here's a response I expect. Take this as a model customer service response if you are in the business of selling (potentially) self-exploding devices:
-------
Dear <Customer Name>. Thank you for reporting the incident to us. I have escalated your report to the engineering team.
A representative of our company will be reaching out to you to inquire for further details to find out the exact cause of the malfunction to prevent it from happening in the future.
As our product have caused you harm, I may not assist you further, as all I can do is offer a replacement product. I have therefore forwarded your request to our Consumer Relations team senior specialist <Firstname Lastname> who will reach out to you by <timeframe> with regards to settling this in a manner satisfactory to you. They can be reached directly by <phone x extension> or by email at <email address>.
We take safety seriously, and we are immediately reporting this incident to CPSC, as we are obligated by law. You can do your part at the following web address: https://www.saferproducts.gov/IncidentReporting
Thank you so much for reporting this incident in detail, and helping us make our products safer for everyone!
It was more like a $20 discount. It took a bit of prodding for them realize this was a safety issue and get connected to the right team, but I had no complaints on that. No comment regarding the rest of the process, it's still too early. The intent of the article was to highlight a potential issue with a pretty common pair of headphones that's used in the tech world, and one that I used to personally recommend to people.
Even a "We're very sorry this happened and we will immediately raise to the next level to investigate" is a better reply rather than fobbing off with a replacement.
This was terrifying to read, but thanks for sharing. I've been paranoid about Li-Ion battery proliferation for a while, and always worried something like this might happen to me. I never expected headphones to do this though, more like cell phones or laptops.
Do you know how any chemicals got on your arm? Was the smoke itself the likely chemical that your arm was exposed to? (Did it not affect your lungs and eyes?) Or did something drop/drip from the headphones on your body? Or is it that when you grabbed it while it was burning, some part of it that had burned also rubbed your arms? Did your ears feel chemically burnt the same way?
Things happened very quickly. I managed to get the headphones out of the house in under 10s. I may have been screaming obscenities at the time. I just recall a sticky residue somehow ended up on my hands and that's what burned. There was also some burning from thermals. I obviously tried to hold my breath to some extent, but the smoke persisted in the house for a while.
Possibly when you were looking for the serial number?
When I first read this, having been a p-chem nerd long ago, and having had some burns, I had questions about how one could get a chemical burn on one's arms from a relatively small battery in headphones. It turns out that lithium battery fires produce HF, which you do not want to be exposed to at all. Very plausible that HF and other chemicals in the fire could cause a burn on skin without splashing any liquid around. In fact if there was any concentration of HF large enough to be splashed, it would have been a potentially fatal risk. If I ever encounter a burning Li battery, getting it out of an enclosed space would be a high priority.
Is it lithium ion? or lithium polymer? Apparently there’s a difference and lithium polymer is supposed to be a lot safer.
Actually lithium polymer is a bit of a misnomer. Almost all "lipo" batteries are actually liion but the name now means more "li ion in a pouch" instead of pointing to any specific chemistry. So in most cases, the battery that powers your cellphone has more or less the same chemistry than a regular 18650. True Lithium-polymer is a real battery chemistry but it is very rarely used.
Also, "lipo" batteries are actually the least safe configurations for liion. LiFePo and LiTi are inherently safer, but liion pouch cells are probably the worst even amongst other batteries of the same chemistry. A regular 18650 is very hard to puncture or deform, does not swell and has built in vent ports on the top- a li-po usually doesn't. So they have very little structural integrity, can be easy to puncture (which sometimes lead to internal shorting), have a hard time venting gases when they overheat, and need to be kept compressed to avoid swelling.
The reason they are still used is because of the huge weight savings that comes with not having a heavy steel casing and because they are a lot more modular. That also means they can be made larger and push a much higher amperage. At the very high end you can go up to 200-300 amps per cell vs 30-35 for high current 18650s.
This is all spot on as far as I can see.
Devices of that size almost universally use prismatic lithium-polymer cells.
Everyone is aware of the risks, there were a bunch of stories about airplane cell phone fires a few years ago.
What are suggesting people do? Headphones only function while on your head.
I never thought that my wireless headphones had enough juice to fill my house with smoke, to burn for 15 minutes, or result in chemical burns to the user.
They're made of thermoplastic, practically everything plastic burns except for the few things around which are regulated to be impregnated with fire retardants (children's clothes, furniture, etc). Unless what you're holding is made entirely of metal or ceramic, you can be pretty sure that it is some degree of fire risk, if it contains a battery or not.
Last time I checked, the energy densities of modern batteries were approaching that of TNT. Which is insanely worrying to me.
The energy densities of modern batteries are a couple factors lower than that of gasoline, and much lower than TNT. Gasoline is incredibly energy-dense, but its energy density is comparable to butter. Do you worry about sticks of butter exploding on you? No, you don't. Gasoline is dangerous because it really likes to evaporate and the mixture of gasoline fumes and air ignites at the slightest provocation. Batteries are dangerous because they can go into thermal runaway from an internal short if the barrier between the electrodes fails. The energy density is not what matters here.
Try googling both: "1999 butter fire" "1991 butter fire"
Wisconsin and France have had notable butter fires. So I guess even butter fires can be bad news.
If you're into foodstuff-related destruction, the other things to search for are "flour explosion" and "molasses disaster"
A lithium ion battery has about 2-3% as much energy per gram as a chocolate bar. The energy density is not what causes safety issues.
> Everyone is aware of the risks
Everyone here, maybe. Almost everyone I know of is certainly not aware of any dangers (or goes with the classic "it will certainly not happen to me, what are the chances of that?").
I still have to remind my relatives not to just throw a charging phone wherever it lands (like under the pillow). The risk of it going off may be small, but the cost would be very high.
I was not aware of these risks. I knew that li-ion batteries were flammable but didn't realize they would malfunction in consumer devices. Now I know!
There was a period of months where cell phone fires on planes was all over the news. There's also a massive recall of the Chevy Bolt recently.
You weren't around for the Galaxy Note debacle?
I mean, it being not the standard is exactly why it's a debacle, right?
>Everyone is aware of the risks, there were a bunch of stories about airplane cell phone fires a few years ago.
No harm warning about these risks on the label, then?
Everyone is aware, so it surely won't hurt the bottom line.
Lithium-ion batteries don't contain metallic lithium. The lithium is always in the +1 oxidation state and cannot burn. What they contain is a flammable organic electrolyte (like ethylene carbonate). These electrolytes are used instead of water because the cell voltages are so high water would be decomposed to hydrogen and oxygen.
As far as I know there's nothing abnormally noxious about the electrolyte in LiPo cells, the parts of it which you wouldn't come into contact with are in small quantities especially in the sizes of cell that you'd find in a consumer product.
Not noxious, just flammable (especially if lithium perchlorate is dissolved in them.)
To be correct, ethylene carbonate is not an electrolyte by itself, but a solvent
It's unclear whether this is a one-in-a-million freak li-ion battery malfunction, or something systemically wrong with that model of headphones.
It could be the former. But it could also be the latter, in which case the OP taking legal action might save a few other Bose users some pain and suffering. Which is partly why he should escalate this.
It's pretty clear to me which this is since as far as I know this hasn't happened to anyone else. Are you aware of other similar cases?
I want to believe the same thing, but you can't really judge whether there's a defect when the number of incidents is so small. That only works if you're talking about the defect of a known single point of failure.
Imagine there are N = 3 safeguards in the product design (note: I have no idea how many there are in reality), and imagine 1 of them is defective across the whole line. That means the other 2 remaining ones would still prevent almost every incident, and you'd indeed need to be unlucky for all 3 to fail. When you observe the first failure, the only thing you can conclude is that, in your particular case, all the safeguards failed. You cannot conclude (with any useful degree of confidence) that there was no common defect across the entire product line, given there are 2 other safeguards to prevent disasters. To figure that out the only practical way (without risking more incidents) is to actually examine the product and the failure mode.
(Now, admittedly I'm oversimplifying a bit here, but the point stands. e.g. if there are 2 safeguards, each with an independent 1/10k chance of failure, and you get 2 failures within the first 20k items manufactured, then you know that's incredibly unlikely without a defect. But even this reasoning only works after the 2nd incident (not 1st), and it still requires you to know the characteristics of all the safeguards... which is not information consumers have immediately available, and neither of which is the case here AFAIK.)
No. There is very little lithium in the lithium battery.
The amount of chemical energy released by burning of the electrolyte, and graphite is many times higher than battery's stored electric energy.
Most of what burns in a lithium cell is electrolyte, and later graphite.
> very little lithium in the lithium battery
Do you know what the percentage is? Some Googling suggests around 4% by weight or so?
Around few percents, yes, and already oxidised.
Lithium metal is probably what you're thinking of as being very reactive, however there is no lithium metal whatsoever in a LiPo battery.
I purchased Bose QC-35 II as well. I don't have chemical burns, but after a while of wearing my ears become really sensitive. I feel strange pain while wearing them. This applies only when the noise cancelation is ON. When it is off the pain immediately disappears. My explanation is that these phones actually generate inverse signal to the noise, but due to various factors such as delay, the cancellation is not perfect and what I am actually getting into the ear is the residual high frequency noise, which may in fact be quite dangerous. Anybody else experienced this? There might be some study about it ...
> but due to various factors such as delay, the cancellation is not perfect and what I am actually getting into the ear is the residual high frequency noise
If you model the noise canceling as a superposition of the input signal with the generated signal, where the generated signal is specifically designed to account for the processing delay and hence only targets lower-frequency noise, then wouldn't 2 things be true:
1) Any residual from imperfect cancellation would only be at the lower frequencies (because the generated signal itself contains no high frequencies, and we a linear superposition). Of course, the original high frequency content from the input that was never cancelled will still be present but this isn't any worse.
2) Even in the worst case that we completely mispredict, we will only double the sound intensity which is a 3db increase. This seems relatively safe?
That said, while it seems physically safe it's possible that ANC still wreaks havoc with the brain's audio processing. Maybe the brain relies on the existence of the low frequency content as a sort of gain control mechanism or something (there are anecdotal reports by some users of increased tinnitus with long-term ANC use, but it's also possible that it only increased their awareness of it). I've also read that some people are sensitive to this lack of low-frequency noise since the brain interprets it as a pressure differential.
My background is in image processing and I can see quite clearly that the high frequency noise happens when you subtract two images, one of which is shifted by half-pixel for instance. What you are left with is the edges (high frequency) of the image. The same applies to 1D in my opinion. For this reason I am not convinced (1) is actually true. The argument about lack of low frequency is interesting, who knows what is happening there indeed.
Images processing and traditional 1D signal processing are not directly comparable, especially when dealing with analogue signals. You can’t have a true “hard edge” in an analogue 1D signal, because it not physically possible to record or reproduce, so you’re always dealing with sinusoids.
If you take a sinusoids, invert it, slightly offset it, and combine them. You get a smaller signal always, unless you’re delay is larger then 90°.
I would recommend playing with some audio signals in an online simulator and see what you get, you realise that your 2D intuition does not apply well to analogue 1D signals. The strict digital nature of image processing done on a computer creates the possibility of results not easily possible when working on analogue signal. After all you can one pixel on a screen at max brightness, and it’s neighbour completely of, but it’s impossible to recreate a similar hard edge with an audio signal because it would require the speaker to be capable of infinite speed and acceleration.
You're simply wrong, here. Take a single sinusoid and do that, sure. Take a large number of sinusoids of different frequencies, as all music and public noise is, and invert/offset, and you get everything from double amplitude to zero amplitude. None of these simplistic mental models of noise cancellation will help.
Sure, but show me how you get significant frequency shifting, or injection of frequency components greater than found in the two source signals. That’s the topic of discussion, not amplitude changes.
There's no mention of frequency shifting or anything like it in the parent post. For amplification of certain frequencies in a signal via simplistic noise cancellation, just take a combination of a sine wave at 10kHz and a sine wave at 1kHz, offset it by 0.00005s (call it signal processing delay) and subtract it from the original. The 1kHz signal is basically (noise-)cancelled and the 10kHz signal is doubled in strength.
Not that any of this is relevant to the original problem.
From OP:
> the cancellation is not perfect and what I am actually getting into the ear is the residual high frequency noise, which may in fact be quite dangerous.
From GP:
> I can see quite clearly that the high frequency noise happens when you subtract two images, one of which is shifted by half-pixel for instance. What you are left with is the edges (high frequency) of the image.
Show me the part where the word “amplitude” appears in any parent post.
Additionally as mentioned in parent posts, noise cancelling headphone run a low pass filter over the input to the ANC system, specifically because achieving good alignment between your ANC signal and original signal is basically impossible at wave lengths shorter as you can’t know the exactly which direction the original signal came from (direct perpendicular to the head, or at a close tangential angle), and thus can’t compensate for the offset needed to ensure the two signals arrive at eardrum at the right time.
Ah, you're assuming that everyone agrees that ANC always uses an early low-pass filter, and hence there'd be no high frequencies in the noise-cancellation signal. Makes sense.
However, I don't agree that ANC always uses a low-pass filter, and it seems from kalal's followup that they are also talking about the using the full original signal. So the two of us were not talking about introducing high frequencies but about somehow enhancing the high frequencies already present, and that's what the figures I gave above are for. So we've been talking across each other. I apologise for my part in that.
("Amplitude" was a simple technical term to replace woolly terms that were being used, just as you are the first in the parent-chain to say "low pass filter".)
> high frequency noise happens when you subtract two images, one of which is shifted by half-pixel
> What you are left with is the edges (high frequency)
So you subtract a slightly phase shifted high frequency signal, you're left with a high frequency signal that may be amplified at the edges depending on your phase shift. Nothing surprising here?
The question is can you create a high frequency residual by subtracting a lowpass filtered (gaussian blur?) image? I don't think so. You're just left with whatever high frequencies you had but you aren't creating any new ones.
Yes, that would be correct, under the assumption of a lowpass filter. As I've just mentioned elsewhere in the thread, though, I don't think kalal accepted that there was a lowpass filter involved, and even stated such, indirectly, and without that it's easy to have a delayed subtraction that amplifies higher frequencies, as in the image example kalal gave.
Active noise canceling makes some people feel like there's a pressure difference, like when taking off in a plane. It's because the headphones block low-frequency noises better than high-frequency ones, and the brain interprets a proportional lack of low-frequency noise as a sign of pressure difference across the eardrums.
https://www.howtogeek.com/423960/why-do-noise-canceling-head...
It's worth noting that you're applying an overly simplistic model of what noise cancellation (at the Bose/Sony level) actually entails. There's a lot of signal processing involved and it's exceedingly unlikely that the headphones are significantly increasing the amount of high frequency noise reaching your ears. (Some noise cancelling headphones even have a microphone on the inside, to measure what your ears hear.)
There are lots of other sources of pain, fatigue and discomfort, though. Essentially, since the noise cancellation isn't perfect, you can hear some subset of the sound, varying across the frequency spectrum. This can cause a feeling of being underwater, of having blocked ears or simply of having to listen more closely, all of which might cause ongoing muscle tension of different muscles.
On the good news side, a lot of people who find discomfort with one brand of noise-cancelling can find other brands fine, so it might be worth trying some other brands. (For Bose, the main similar-quality competitor is Sony.)
Finally, in the simplistic model, there does not have to be a delay. Sound only travels at 340 metres per second, so for every 10mm distance between the microphone and the emitter, one can have around 34 microseconds of processing time.
Noise cancellation really is one of the most hit-and-miss technologies in my experience.
I've got a sony wh-1000xm2, some inear Jabra and the Bose 700, which came with my Pixel 6 purchase the other day.
It really is something the potential buyer should check out themselves in a store before buying, because they're really variable in quality.
According to mkbhd the Sony one's are the best at it, but they have very strong white noise background at least with my older model.
I actually had the same issue with that pressure on my ears, though it slowly went away and haven't noticed any displeasure in a long time now.
I don't feel pain, but yes, noice cancellation on those Boses can have some weird effects in quiet environments. Therefor I only activate the noise cancellation on louder environments and then it really helps me concentrate.
But the noise cancellation is subtly audible. I'm not a sound engineer, but it feels a little bit like sound compression being too high.
I actually never cared for the noise cancellation on the QC-35 II. I did use it on planes though. I liked the feature a bit better on the earlier wired model. I think Sony has a comparable product where it has a finer grained toggle of the inverse wave.
I am not expert, but if you don't use noise cancellation you would probably do better with standard headphones where you pay for the sound quality instead.
The QC-35 II's were great for concalls. You can connect multiple devices at once via bluetooth and the mic quality was quite good. For music, I agree there's lots of better options. I've now using an external microphone and some wired DT-770's, however it's not a great portable solution.
Bluetooth is great up to the point when you want to have video in sync with audio. For video/audio editing or even gaming it is a problem.
There have been several reports about a similar problem with the Apple AirPods. I guess some people are just very sensitive to this.
I can confirm that I had a similar feeling after wearing the the AirPods Pro for just about an hour. I tested them for a few days and returned them in the end.
However, my Sennheiser over-ear ANC headphones (MB660) have a much better ANC effect compared to the AirPods but the strain on the ears is a lot less intense. I would expect, that the Bose QC-35 II are much closer to the MB660 than to the AirPods Pro.
I bought my kids a hover board for Christmas a few years back. Then it was in the news that some, a different brand, were catching fire on people. I never liked the thought of lithium ion batteries charging unattended after that. I started placing it to charge away from the walls on on ceramic tiles in case it start to burn. Even cell phones I feel better with them charging in a glass dish. Call me paranoid but I’ve seen too many internet videos of these types of batteries spontaneously bursting into flames.
There is no way I would let a device like that into my house. In the (detached) garage, maybe, but even there I'd be very careful about how it is stored and charged.
Most of those hoverboards are actually from the same place in China with a different company importing it. I would keep away from any of them.
They did recall several brands, I checked and mine was not recalled. I bought a name brand one, Airwalk to be exact. Yes I know many are just rebranded but there was some issues in the ones that caught on fire which the air walk brand did not have. It is 3 years old and running strong still, on it's second shell as they bashed the shit out of the first one cracking it. Sounds like the perfect match for an incident bashing walls with a possible explosive battery inside. It could go off any day but some risk I will take because they are a lot of fun. I just charge it on ceramic tiles and keep it away from the walls. I have told my kids if it catches on fire they need to get outside immediately and not breath the smoke.
This is one of the reasons why unnecessary complexity and the general wireless trend is a bad thing. Wired headphones cannot have this problem. They can't have bluetooth syncing issues, they can't rarely catch fire or explode, and their batteries never need to die or be replaced. Reliance on these sorts of technologies is a new kind of sloth.
I'm all for simple technology, and I use wired headphones. However, I can also understand that people like their wireless headphones, they like noise cancellation and so on. I think it's fine to increase complexity when it's necessary to get a better product (depending on your measure of “better”) — I would rather focus on making that additional complexity safe and reliable. A lot of things we rely on today are incredibly complex but work quite well and are quite safe.
> A lot of things we rely on today are incredibly complex but work quite well and are quite safe.
I took the time to run ethernet cable to my home office because while the wifi works well 99% of the time, I don't want to be in a situation where I'm in a work meeting and it cuts off or starts becoming choppy.
Wireless headphones introduce multiple new modes of failure, like connection issues, and running out of battery. If you want reliability, it's good to stick with safe, reliable technologies, and eliminate potential modes of failure.
Sure, you could also use a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse while you're at it, but then, between your wifi, your wireless headset, your wireless keyboard and your wireless mouse, the odds of a connection or battery failure happening when you need your computer to work is quite a bit higher.
One of my colleagues uses a wireless headset and it's happened at least 10 times during meetings that people tell him "sorry, we can't hear you, could you check your audio". Don't be that guy, use wired headphones ;)
>people like their wireless headphones, they like noise cancellation and so on
Just to be clear, "noise cancellation and so on" doesn't in any way require the headphones to be wireless.
I think many people would appreciate it if features, which are typically found in wireless headphones, were available in wired headphones too (which have some other benefits, like lower weight, no charging...). There's a reason many of us prefer wired mice and keyboards, even though the wireless alternatives are pretty decent nowadays.
This obviously should not have happened, and I hope that you will get this resolved to your satisfaction, I also applaud your effort at documenting this.
A couple of questions for you:
- were the headphones recently dropped?
- otherwise damaged?
- what was the environment like at the time of charging (extreme temperature / humidity)?
- what exactly was the charging setup, I don't quite understand your description about the 'the stock USB charger connected to a Macbook Pro', do you mean you used the stock charging cable? Or that you used a Macbook Pro charger? Or something else?
- Was there anything that might have given an earlier warning? Such as: the last charge cycle not working well requiring a recharge much sooner than you expected it, a deep discharge or other anomaly?
- Was there any sound (not headphone sounds, but sounds of something popping or cracking) prior to the combustion?
- Do you know what kind of batteries are in the QC-35, are these Lithium Polymer or something else?
- Approximately how many charge/discharge cycles did your headphones have?
Thank you for answering these, if you can, it may help get a grip on how bad the risk is for other users of these devices and whether or not there are any special circumstances that may have caused this.
I have a long article about Lithium Ion battery safety in the works and this is a pretty heavy thing that happened here, it could have easily been a lot worse though, but to imagine what could have happened had you not been in the house or if you had responded even a little bit slower is horrifying, you were - in spite of the bad stuff - extremely lucky that this ended the way it did.
HF exposure is a possibility from lithium battery fires. It's definitely something to be aware of, although it sounds like the doctor(s) you spoke with might be aware.
There's very little fluorine-containing anything in the size of cell used in wireless headphones. Note that the article you linked used many amp-hours worth of batteries for each test, and they took multiple minutes to get to over 50ppm of HF. Scaling that down to headphone cell size (~600mAh) it would take tens of minutes to produce any significant amount. My theory is outer material containing vinyl decomposing to chlorine which caused the direct reaction. Would also make sense as thermal decomposition of PVC is only dependent on temperature and would be in direct contact with the person holding it.
I know HF is generated when primary lithium cells burn, here's someone who got HF poisoning that way: https://www.candlepowerforums.com/threads/flashlight-explosi...
On the other hand, it doesn't seem that the amount from rechargeable lion is anywhere near as much, or we'd be hearing a lot more about everyone who got lung damage from all the "stupid things people do with lithium batteries" videos on YouTube...
My bose QC-35 II broke twice during the warranty period. Additionally, one of their temporary failures was that suddenly the music stopped and instead they froze while playing a very loud high pitched beep. It was so painful in my ears that I literally punched them off my head. I've been hesitant to use them since.
But this story, together with my own 2 warranty repairs, confirms my suspicion that Bose has serious QC issues.
I see what you did there! Aside, I had QC-35 v1 for more than two years now and I use it daily for work. I only needed to change the cushions once.
Imagine having your pair of expensive headphones exploding, leaving chemical burns only to be offered another pair of potentially explosive headphones.
If I were in this guys shoes, I probably wouldn't even want a Bose aux cord.
Excellent customer relations by the way.
I wonder if all these "shit happens" commenters would be saying the same thing if this happened on a plane to the guy sitting next to you.
I think the core of the disagreement between the "shit happens" camp and the "you're an insensitive clod" camp is differing understandings of the context of the conversation. I'm pretty sure we all, in a personal conversation with someone who just went through this, would be somewhere close to "That sucks. Are you OK?"
In a public discussion about whether it is appropriate to continue using Li-ion powered portable electronics, it seems natural that it's an entirely different discussion.
There is an inherent risk of loss of life whatever you do. We as a society just agreed that there's an acceptable level of it. Lithium-Ion batteries are on the higher level of it but their usefulness outweights it completely. To answer your question, there's a lot of things that have much higher chance of happening on an airplane e.g. a bird flying into the engine or a terrorist attack.
I think there have been more in-flight battery fires than (attempted) terrorist attacks.
What is the rate of escalation from a battery fire to multiple deaths? Especially when you move away from the flashy cases like plane highjacking to smaller scale incidents like school/nightclub shootings it's not at all clear to me that LiIon batteries cause comparable deaths to terrorism.
But also on the subject of risk vs reward, I think its pretty clear that cars cause more deaths than terrorism, if you want a clearer example of society deciding risks are worth the rewards
And of course inactivity has its own risks (blood clots, heart disease, etc)
There's a lot to be said for products which take traditional disposable alkaline batteries, such as my pair of older Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Alkaline cells don't spontaneously combust and may be packed in checked airline baggage. Products themselves are easier to dispose of and recycle without the concern of residual charge in an integrated lithium-ion power cell. If the user desires rechargable or longer-lasting lithium batteries, these can still be obtained in disposable battery form factors.
Alkalines don't spontaneously combust but they do spontaneously leak caustic chemicals.
My favourite is equipment with user-replaceable 18650's.
It solves disposal, storage and transport problems and it decouples device lifetime from battery lifetime.
Alkalines are nice but produce a lot of waste. Lots of things don't work quite right with rechargeable AAs but I agree, the things that do are perfect also.
> There's a lot to be said for products which take traditional disposable alkaline batteries, such as my pair of older Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Alkaline cells don't spontaneously combust
NiMH is rechargeable and seems better than alkaline in almost every way. It also doesn't spontaneously combust. Energy density is not quite as good as lithium ion but for something like headphones it is fine.
I, for one, am happy the author made this post. I never considered this a possibility and while i probably wont change my current headphones ill hopefully be vigilant to excess heat coming from them in the future, and not touch the product afterwards with my bare hands to avoid the described chemical burns.
I use these headphones.. I think I will continue to use them even after reading this. They're expensive and I have nothing to replace them with..
Off topic - Jorg Baller's comment on the blog post is confusing and seems rude.
A few years ago, the charging port in my Samsung Galaxy S7 caught fire while charging in my car. Luckily in this case I was present, and was able to disconnect the phone when I smelled the smoke. The fire just fizzled out as soon as I disconnected the charger. In this case it wasn't the battery burning, but something else in the system. It took a bit of arguing with the technician at the Samsung store, however in the end they just replaced the phone. In this case there was no damage to anything else, so I was happy with them just replacing the phone.
That is commonly caused by bad contacts, which have a high resistance and thus dissipate heat, which then leads to higher resistance, more heat, etc. The tendency of manufacturers to make each generation of connector smaller and with more fragile contacts, for aesthetic reasons, certainly doesn't help.
> "Occasionally you have the teammate without an optimal AV setup for conference calls where everytime they speak there's an echo, and I'd be like, "psst... get a pair of these, the mic quality is great and they're portable." I knew a lot of people who grabbed a pair."
I don't dispute the possibility of the burns, but I stopped reading here. The "echo" effect is caused from somebody using speakers instead of headphones as an output device during a call. Sometimes, having a good microphone or good software noise removal can mitigate this, but to solve the problem at the root, simply stop using the laptop speakers as the sound output device during meetings. You could use a pair of $20 earbuds to solve this. By the way, the echo isn't caused from them speaking, and if it is, the configuration fault lies with someone other than the speaker.
Also interesting that the author uses "portable" as the other selling point, as if the alternative were to use a boom mic.
If the author is thinking about suing, they'd be wiser to not eviscerate their own credibility as an engineer, in comments that could become designated as evidentiary material in such a case. It may not change the fact that they were burned and deserve compensation, but it may make it harder to win in court. The optimal thing to do is to say nothing public at all until clearing it with legal counsel. I'm not a lawyer though.
>I don't dispute the possibility of the burns
If you don't, why bring it up? Nothing in your comment is about burns.
The "I'm not saying <something>, but...." is just a roundabout way to imply <something> without being held accountable for saying it directly. Please avoid this in your communication.
> I stopped reading here. The "echo" effect is caused from somebody using speakers instead of headphones
...which is exactly why the OP suggested they use headphones.
The echo appears when they start speaking while other people speak. It doesn't happen when they're on mute. And echo cancellation does a great job if only one person speaks at a time.
But echo cancellation is complicated when a person's speech is mixed with the speakers output. Hence, if you have a bad setup, there's going to be an echo when you speak.
>You could use a pair of $20 earbuds to solve this.
Yes. And? We can't recommend things we like because there are cheaper things?
>they'd be wiser to not eviscerate their own credibility as an engineer
The author is not writing as an engineer. Also, given the above, I hope you heed your own advice.
You missed the point of my argument, but something tells me that debating with you is pointless and you're one of those people who will semantically and syntactically pick apart someone's entire statement if you don't agree with a single part of it. You've made over 40 comments in this thread, what's your angle?
> Also, given the above, I hope you heed your own advice.
I'm not the one in need of a lawyer.
Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong or provocative other people's comments are, or you feel they are.
When people get to this point in a back-and-forth, it's a clear indication that the thread should have stopped a while ago. Believe me, I realize it's not easy to pull away, but it's necessary.
My angle is that you shouldn't throw stones, especially while living in a glass house.
Saying that the OP has, quote, "eviscerated their own credibility as an engineer" without adding anything of value to the discussion (aside, possibly, from eviscerating your own credibility as an engineer; not that it matters) was uncalled for.
Thank you for the feedback. I've publicly written a number of unpopular opinions during my 20-year career, and the only people it's gotten me in trouble with are those who I wouldn't want to be locked in an office with in the first place. Though I don't do it as much these days due to the rising generation of Internet creeps who will stalk you over a disagreement, I do appreciate your candor.
Call a negligence lawyer. It won't cost you anything.
I’m not sure which is more alarming - that this happened in the first place, or reading some of the hateful negative comments here and on his post. Can we not just acknowledge that a fellow human got hurt and see how we can do better?
Personally I find OP’s experience helpful - it never occurred to me that a failure like this might happen, and it causes me to question if I want to keep using my wireless headphones.
How is it alarming that a battery powered device failed in 2021? Widespread issues would be alarming. This is an anomaly.
I feel bad for OP, but this is just a "luck-of-the-draw" thing. Trying to make it into anything else is disingenuous at best. I don't think these "negative" comments are as negative as you are reading them, I think they're being realistic.
So one small battery on your head is scary. What happens if this happens in an electric car where you are sitting on a huge bank of batteries?
They burn quite vigorously.
You get out of the car.
They don’t tend to explode like in an action movie.
Like any of dozens and dozens of things, they might burn down your house albeit quite rarely.
People really need to start accepting that risk is never zero.
There is a video of a bunch of Chinese battery powered buses that go up in flames faster than that I think those buses could have been evacuated had they been in service at the time. Not an explosion, but scary fast.
> You get out of the car.
Not always.
Electric cars are also quite dangerous for firefighters to put the flames out (you can't use water for instance and it's even more dangerous in rain) and since they are relatively new not all firefighters know how to extinct them properly.
https://californianewstimes.com/sleeping-couple-wake-to-find...
I worry about this too. Cripes!
This battery is not small at all, I was astonished how big it is in my B&O headset. Here is a short video showcasing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeKc4GZwcIo
I wondered how long it was going to be before this happened. As the amount of devices with lithium ion batteries increases the risk of house fire increases.
To the OP I wish you a speedy recovery from your injuries and would encourage you to seek legal recourse so that bose is fully motivated to resolve this issue for you and other Bose customers.
I'd take up on his offer.
I also have this exact model, bought them in 2019 at an airport and right at the time when they were warning about a particular Samsung device bursting into flames before every flight. There must be hundreds of thousands of them in the wild. I won't charge mine when I'm not around anymore.
That should be the norm for any kind of rechargeable system: be there. Charging is the risky time for all those devices, especially where you can't remove the battery from the device and so you don't know what is happening to it thermally and whether or not it has already started expansion.
So you accidentally pierced the lipo battery and it spewed hot lithium juice on you. It sucks but it's not horrendously dangerous and obviously they should replace the product if it doesn't turn out to be due to personal negligence.
Every wireless product you buy is almost guaranteed to have this same "flaw". If the battery gets damaged, it can ruin your product and maybe even hurt you. Why did you switch from the wired version? You never explained.
I got into Remote Control quadcopters this last year and some of the bare unprotected lipo batteries I have bought as part of this hobby could probably burn my whole house down. You just have to be careful and follow the guidelines given when buying these sorts of products.
Nowhere in the article is there an indication that the user pierced the battery. It's more likely that the breach was from inside, via extreme pressure.
In any case, it's reasonable for someone to be bothered at being burned by their headphones and certainly not something to be expected, as you imply.
I think it is safe to conclude the battery housing was breached, but so did the containment chamber but it is not a given that it was the OP that did the piercing.
Agreed that every LiIon powered product carries these risks, but even when you are very careful material defects can and do occasionally crop up. But here there is - for now - not enough information to determine whether this was a a charger issue, a manufacturing defect, a case of abuse or even a combination of some of these.
One more reason I'm never giving up my headphone jack or my Sennheiser HD600.
This is an important reminder to all of us using battery-powered devices: there is just a tiny bit of electronics separating us from a fire. There is a non-zero risk this electronics can malfunction. It does happen en-masse like with Samsung Galaxy Note 7, and it happens in individual cases like with Samsung Galaxy A21. It is important to be always aware of this possibility, because the consequences can be fatal. For that reason, unless it's necessary, I prefer not to keep my phone in my pocket. I know I will probably be fine, but if there is a safe option, I prefer to reduce the risk.
The chemical burns part seems the worst to me. I suppose the thing to do (from a little light googling) is to quickly remove any visible stuff on you and then wash with lots of water ASAP. Anyone correct me on that?
Yes. That's exactly what I did. Doctors think this significantly helped, but we'll know more in a few weeks.
Calcium Gluconate gel would be a good idea for the burns. If you were exposed to any HF from the battery fire, it's the standard low-dose treatment used in laboratories where HF is handled (source: worked in a lab where we handled HF, was hit by a tiny droplet once).
That said, beyond 24 hours not sure how useful it would be.
Lithium Ion batteries don't have heavy metals in them, so there's no risk there.
I once considered buiyng Bose noise-cancelling headphones to use them on the plane or in the train. Turned out I am not as much music fan, and a good book has similar noise-cancelling effect for me (like in I stop paying attention to noise). I wonder what would happen if those earphones got burned midflight. My guess is urgent plane landing.
Scary. Are we, as the consumer, pushing for safer batteries? Is there a shut-down mechanism available for lithium battery faults?
The leakage of a battery isn't something you can stop. It's a big amount of stored energy released in a short while like a bomb.
One Chinese company actually invented a flexible and solid battery that can even be cut without a risk of explosion but it doesn't scale to bigger capacities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJXRyWQgOY4
And there's not going to be a market for it even in devices which don't need large capacities, unless we force manufacturers like Bose to inform the public of the hazards of the products that they sell if they put dangerous batteries in them.
Which is why some of us here are urging the OP to sue: to make sure the safety innovation has demand in the free market.
>Scary. Are we, as the consumer, pushing for safer batteries?
Nope, we aren't.
We, as the consumer, say this on HN:
>There is an inherent risk of loss of life whatever you do. We as a society just agreed that there's an acceptable level of it. Lithium-Ion batteries are on the higher level of it but their usefulness outweights it completely. To answer your question, there's a lot of things that have much higher chance of happening on an airplane e.g. a bird flying into the engine or a terrorist attack.
Why push for innovation when you can just accept the inherent risk of death?
@OP: can you clarify on this? What brand of cable/charger? I wonder if this can play any role
> I used the stock USB charger connected to a Macbook Pro.
The headphones were connected to charger or MBP? (MBP uses USB-C, QC35ii uses micro-USB, are there cables like this?)
I used the stock charging cable which is USB A -> micro-USB. That either connected to a laptop with a USB-A or through the apple dongle.
This is a crucial question that really deserves an answer. If only because it all by itself could shed some light on what exactly happened here.
> are there cables like this
Yes and they’re not super rare
Bose don't manufacture, or design anything themselves.
Last time I heard they were buying from Goertec.
It’s interesting that the author notes taking them off the charger. Those headphones charger really fast. Like in 20 minutes when you first get them. I wonder if they were overcharging them and if that contributed to this.
Li-ion powered electronics anyways contains a battery controller IC. It doesn't leave charging duration to user behaviour. So if so this would be a bug in the product.
I never touch Bose headphones anymore. Once bought an expensive Bose that fell apart within a year. Learned my lesson.
A contrasting anecdote would be that I've got a pair of QC 15s, which are now probably ~6 years old. I quickly dumped the awful bulky case, so they've been thrown unprotected into all manner of rucksacks and other luggage, and have been squeezed into multiple overhead lockers.
A cat chewed one of the cables, and I had to replace the ear cushions (for a few bucks from eBay) but they're otherwise going strong, despite a fairly tough life.
There are a lots of good reasons not to go cordless if you honestly don't need to. This is one of them.
Certain stories, I think, are very clear "bring your lawyer with you" situations!
i'm returning my Bluetooth jbl headphones right now
It's like a one in 10 million event
taking conference calls with those - bad idea. Really shitty microphone.
Why are we trying to figure this out, and not Bose?
I don't think the big picture on lithium ion battery fire risk is well understood yet.
I posted another comment about this recently.
It appears that NYC is having about 1 e-bike fire per year, per 100K persons. (see below)
It also appears the NYC is having about the same rate of e-bike fire injuries: About 1 injury per 100K persons, per year.
I actually bought a nice e-bike and returned it, cause I didn't want to lose sleep over the possibility of an e-bike fire. The estimated probability is very low, granted.
References: https://www.consumerreports.org/electric-bikes/how-to-preven... "E-bike ownership has skyrocketed in New York since the pandemic began, and with it, e-bike fires, according to the New York City Fire Department (FDNY). There have been 75 e-bike fires so far this year, which is on pace to double last year’s total, officials said. The fires have caused 72 injuries and three deaths."
> I don't think the big picture on lithium ion battery fire risk is well understood yet.
It is the most common type of batteries on the planet, which has been used for decades. What is your estimate on when the risk will be well understood, if ever?
Using and understanding something does not necessarily go hand in hand.
Asbestos for example was used for quite a few years and seen as a safe and cheap building material. Then it turned out that it gives people cancer. A similar thing happened with lead, although some people knew how dangerous it is but kept quiet about it for profit.
Are you seriously comparing asbestosis, which develops decades after exposure to invisible fibers, to a literal fire? Billions of people are carrying around lithium ion batteries all day. If they were unsafe, we would have noticed a long time ago.
While true (and this thread is getting me quite paranoid about my devices) the danger from asbestos is quiet but here we are talking about fires and explosions. That’s not something you cover up so easily.