At the time of this review (April 29, 2013) this is my first day I've used them.
In regards to no noise canceling, when you have the music on, yes it cancels a decent amount of outside noise out. When there's no music (in between tracks, paused, etc) it's like there's nothing in your ears.
Bass: very little bass, although I'm used to my Sennheiser HD280 over the ear headphones. However, in my opinion, it's a decent amount of bass for earbuds.
It does, however, seem to muffle the audio, so I have to set my EQ on my iPhone/iPod to R&B and turn up the volume and it suddenly sounds a MILLION times better!!