© Provided by TechRadar Sony WH-1000XM4 review

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Connection issue with WF-1000XM3 headphones and Apple devices using iOS13.1 Notice of Limited Warranty Updates for Sony Electronics Inc. And Sony of Canada Ltd. The wireless headset cannot be charged or does not turn on (WF-1000XM3) How to check the remaining battery level of the charging case. Unable to charge the wireless headset (WF-1000X / WF-SP700N). To pair the Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones with your phone, PC or Mac, you need to press the power button for a few seconds (Sony says seven seconds). The blue lights will start flashing, at which point you can search for them using the Bluetooth settings on your phone or computer in the normal way.

One-minute review

By every possible metric, the Sony WH-1000XM4 are a wonderful pair of wireless noise-cancelling headphones – and they're our pick for the best headphones of 2020. They deliver exactly what they promise and then some thanks to their exceptional noise cancellation and cutting-edge codec support.

While they haven’t seen a massive overhaul aesthetically from the Sony WH-1000XM3 that was released back in 2018, the WH-1000XM4 pack in a number of new improvements like DSEE Extreme audio upscaling and multipoint pairing that should be real crowd pleasers.

On top of the adjustments listed above, the Sony WH-1000XM4 support Sony’s 360 Reality Audio format that enables spatial audio on stereo headphones plus the LDAC codec that can send a bitrate of up to 990 kbps. The unfortunate bit there, though, is that it no longer supports aptX or aptX HD, so your Hi-Res Audio support mileage may vary.

Thanks to their comfy feel and great noise cancellation, we completely recommend them for travelers, however they’re not great for workout enthusiasts who need a secure fit and water-resistance – or business people who need the best-in-class microphone. For nearly everyone else, however, these are the best headphones you can buy (so far) this year.

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What about Black Friday?

The Sony WH-1000XM4 may be relatively new, but they were discounted over Amazon Prime Day, and that means we could see deals on the headphones over Black Friday on November 27, too. The older WH-1000XM3 could also see some huge discounts – just make sure you bookmark our guide to the best Black Friday headphones deals so you don't miss out.

Sony WH-1000XM4 price and release date

• Price: AED 1,499 in the UAE
• Price: SAR 1,599 in Saudi Arabia
• Released in August 2020

The Sony WH-1000XM4 were announced on August 6 2020 and are Sony’s flagship headphones for the time being, sitting above the mid-range Sony WH-CH710N and true wireless Sony WF-1000XM3.

In terms of price, you’re looking at AED 1,499 / SAR 1,599 which puts the Sony WH-1000XM4 in the same price range as the Bose Noise-Cancelling 700 Headphones, and slightly less than the more upscale Bowers and Wilkins PX7.

Design

• Imperceptible design changes to the 1000XM3
• Sturdy build and comfortable padding
• New SoC for improved noise cancellation
• Lacks any sort of water-resistance

Though the Sony WH-100XM4 have added a slew of new components inside the headphones themselves, there’s not a major difference between them and their predecessors in terms of aesthetics. In fact, put them next to each other and you’d have a hard time telling the 1000XM3 from the 1000XM4.

That’s not the end of the world, though, as the design of the 1000XM3 is refined and subtle, allowing it to blend in on subway stations, planes and offices without drawing any attention.

In terms of materials, you’re mostly looking at a high-quality plastic build with supple pleather padding. The result is a product that feels mostly durable while remaining extremely comfortable to wear for an extended period of time.

Around the outside of the earcups you’ll find two physical control buttons for power/pairing and a button that cycles through noise-cancelling modes, as well as a 3.5mm aux. jack and a USB-C port for charging. The outer part of the earcups act as a touch-capacitive control panel that can be used to play, pause or skip music, and raise or lower the volume.

Inside the headphones is where the magic happens, though. Sony has swapped out the old system-on-a-chip (SoC) for a new one that promises better noise cancellation. Key to that, of course, is the Sony QNe1 Processor that constantly samples ambient audio to reactively adjust the level of noise cancellation. It’s an ingenious setup and design that separates it from the one-size-fits-all noise cancelling algorithm from other manufacturers.

The bad news here, however, is that the Sony WH-1000XM4 aren’t water-friendly - they’re not splash-proof, water-proof or even very water-resistant. Sony recommends keeping them dry and far away from any source of water that might damage them. That sounds like common sense - and fairly easy to achieve - but that does limit the places you can bring them: if you’re looking for a pair of workout or outdoor headphones, these aren’t them.

Features

• Class-leading noise cancellation
• Situational and conversational awareness
• Multi-point pairing to connect to two devices
• May pause the music if it hears you singing along

The Sony WH-1000XM3 were feature-rich upon release, full of inventive control schemes and intelligent applications of their noise cancellation technology. All that was great about the WH-1000XM3 headphones has carried over to the new WH-1000XM4 successors, and with some all-new tricks, too. These aren’t just gimmicks either – they’re useful additions that actually work as advertised.

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So let’s kick off with the brand-new stuff. First, and perhaps most importantly, Sony has refined its wireless noise cancelling approach. Like all good design, it’s subtle to the point where you may not notice it at first (such was the strength of the previous system, anyway). But with the WH-1000XM4 newcomers, you’re getting a much greater sense of noise cancellation in the mid-ranges – those sorts of areas where you get a low-level humming kind of sound that you could attribute to a fan, or air conditioning unit, or engine noise. It’s never fully silenced, but it’s remarkably quiet, and as soon as you have actual audio playing through the cans, you can’t hear the outside world at all. Though high wind can still cause a bit of extraneous noise to come through, it’s otherwise among the best (if not, the best) noise cancelling system we’ve heard from a pair of wireless headphones.

These noise-cancelling modes are intelligent, too – with your permission, the WH-1000XM4 headphones can learn where you are using geo-location access, and apply your preferred level of noise-cancellation or ambient sound passthrough depending on where you are. So, at home you may prefer a fully cancelled noise mode, while in the office you may want voices to come through. With the feature activated, the Sony headphones play a small chiming tone when it’s reached one of your set locations, and dials the noise-cancellation up or back appropriately. Though GPS requirements mean it won’t be able to work during a subterranean commute, you can preset your station or travel hub in the accompanying Headphones Connect app, and have it activate your preferred noise cancelling settings whilst above ground before descending.

The best of the new WH-1000XM4 features though are those that pander to convenience. They’re simple and effective additions. A sensor in the earcups will recognise when you take the headphones off, and pause music accordingly, resuming playback automatically when you replace them. If they’re paused for a few minutes (at a delay of your choosing), they’ll automatically switch off to save battery life. A new multipoint connection lets the headphones connect to two devices at once, intelligently switching between both as the requirement of each device dictates – say, to deliver a notification or answering a call.

Most impressive is a new Speak-to-Chat feature. With this option switched on, the headphones’ microphone will intelligently recognise when you’ve started talking, and pause your music while ramping up ambient noise being funnelled into the cans. It’ll let you have a chat naturally without taking your headphones off, with a short pause occurring after you stop chatting before resuming music playback. However, it’s a double edged sword, as it’s almost too effective – if you decide to break into song and sing along with your tunes with the feature activated, it’ll pause your track, ending your karaoke session. Convenient then – so long as you’re restrained with your vocal gymnastics.

Audio quality

• Uses circumaural 40mm drivers
• Warm and balanced, clear and powerful bass
• Supports 360 Reality Audio for spatial audio
• LDAC and AAC but not aptX or aptX HD

Sony’s using the same 40mm drivers in the WH-1000XM4 as it had in the WH-1000XM3, so tonally and in terms of mix, there’s not much to separate the WH-1000XM4 from the WH-1000XM3 headphones that preceded them. It’s a warm and balanced sound that does well to offer a wide soundstage when required and detail that can pierce through a powerful bass performance.

On the noise-cancelling front, Sony’s using its Dual Noise Sensor tech, making use of two mics in each earcup to suck in sound and analyse it with the QN1 noise cancelling processor. This allows the headphones to adjust its noise cancellation response imperceptibly quickly, at more than 700 times a second. It’s fantastically powerful, and never gets in the way of your tunes.

While aptX HD support would have been welcome, the Sony’s LDAC codec, present here, does a good job with devices that support it, pushing lots of detail through wirelessly. The introduction of DSEE Extreme, an AI-driven process that looks to restore detail from lossy compressed formats, does well to bring clarity to even the lower quality formats and files you may throw at the WH-1000XM4. Sony’s still pushing its 360 Reality Audio offering too, which is its homegrown immersive audio format, putting you in the middle of a surround-sound mix, and it’s still impressive – even if actually accessing its library is limited to just a few streaming services, and the catalogue’s growth has been slow.

As ever, we put the headphones through their paces with a mixture of streaming services, file formats and spoken word clips, and the Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones impressed across the board.

Jeff Buckley’s elegiac Last Goodbye shimmers into action, its slide guitar giving way to a warm bass groove and layers of acoustic guitars, jangling electrics and orchestral strings. It’s a complicated mix, but the WH-1000XM4 headphones do it justice, soaring with Buckley’s falsetto comfortably sitting at the fore.

Putting the bass to the test by jumping over to Bjork’s Army of Me, you can hear the can’s masterful management of bass frequencies, with the arpeggiated bass line walking through the song as the machine-like snare snaps through.

For something a little softer, Bright Eyes’ First Day of My Life has a great warmth - great vocal clarity is paired with sparkly finger picked guitars and a comforting, guiding double bass that never sounds flabby.

At the other end of the spectrum, Janelle Monae’s absolute-banger Make Me Feel sounds supremely powerful on the WH-1000XM4 headphones. From the bop of the percussion to the wall of sound that accompanies the pre-chorus, it sees the Sony WH-1000XM4s firing on all cylinders, with expressive dynamics and clear and distinct separation between each instrument. It’s a pleasure at the best of times, and Sony’s cans bring out the best of the track.

From the perspective of a work-at-home, share-the-kitchen-table-with-a-flatmate user scenario, those around us did notice a substantial amount of noise leakage from the Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones – enough to distract at even half their maximum volume level. You may not be able to hear the outside world, but it can hear what you’re listening to, so keep that in mind if you’re planning on taking these to a quiet office or library.

Battery life

• No improvement on battery life this year
• 30 hours with noise cancelling on / 38 hours with it off
• Quick charging (five hours of charge after just 10 minutes)
• Lasts just as long or longer than the competition

While the Sony WH-1000XM4 didn’t get a boost in battery life compared to their predecessors, you're getting a substantial 30 hours with noise cancelling turned on and around 38 hours with noise cancelling turned off.

At first, that number somewhat disappointed us - how could a product not improve battery life year-on-year? But then it dawned on us that now the headphones have speech detection, a new SoC and algorithm, plus new sensors, too. The fact that it remained the same in spite of adding a host of new features is actually kind of impressive.

And though it doesn’t have better battery life this year, the 1000XM4 does stretch things as far as possible thanks to the new auto-on/off and play/pause sensor inside the earcup that can tell when you’ve taken the headphones off. It’s a huge boon to folks who might forget to turn off their headphones at the end of the day only to find that they’re dead 24 hours later.

The 30 hours should be enough to get you through multiple international flights or a few days to the office, but it’s also good to know that the headphones can be charged in a matter of minutes thanks to fast-charging. According to Sony, you can get about five hours of charge from 10 minutes of power and a full charge after about three hours.

So how does the Sony WH-1000XM4 comapre to the competition? Quite favorably. The Bose Noise-Cancelling 700 only clocked in at around 20 hours of battery life with noise cancelling turned on, while the Bowers and Wilkins PX7 matches the Sony at 30.

Should I buy the Sony WH-1000XM4 Wireless Headphones?

Buy them if..

You want the best noise cancelling headphones

There’s no doubt in our minds that, when it comes to reducing background noise, you can’t do any better than the Sony WH-1000XM4. They’re the perfect carryon for your flight thanks to their long battery life and exceptional ANC, and are well-worth it for travelers.

You want versatile headphones that sound good

Usually you’re forced to pick between a pair of noise-cancelling headphones that do a good job of blocking outside noise, or ones that excel at audio playback. The Sony WH-1000XM4 is great at both, meaning you don’t have to pick.

You're working from home and need some peace and quiet

With the volume turned up and the noise cancelling up and running, there’s little doubt in our mind that these headphones can finally bring you that much-needed respite at home. If you’ve been homebound due to Covid-19 and need some peace and quiet, the Sony WH-1000XM4 can provide that aural nirvana you’ve been searching for.

Don't buy it if..

You plan on bringing them to the gym or beach

Although they certainly could help you tune out the grunts of the person next to you at the gym, the WH-1000XM4’s looser fit and lack of water-resistance should make you think twice before putting them inside your gym bag.

You take tons of conference calls

While the Sony WH-1000XM4 are the best headphones to use when getting from meeting to meeting, they’re not the best headphones to use in your meetings. Go for a pair of Jabras instead if you’re constantly making phone calls and need top-tier voice quality.

You hate tinkering with apps

Sony has hidden a number of neat features inside the Sony Headphones app. That’s the spot where you can tweak the EQ, turn on Speak-to-Chat and Ambient Sound Control, plus enable DSEE Extreme and set your preferred smart assistant. /serial-key-number-for-maya-2016.html. Even if you hate downloading standalone apps, we recommend you download and use this one regularly.

The WH-1000XM4 is the latest in Sony's popular series of flagship noise-canceling wireless headphones. The 1000XM4 arrive two years after the launch of their predecessor, which received universal acclaim. With the 1000XM4, Sony has chosen to, once again, not reinvent the wheel but just bring minor improvements across the board and further refine what was already a good product.

The improvements on the 1000XM4 focus largely on the software side, with the inclusion of things like a new noise-canceling algorithm, multi-device pairing, a 'speak to chat' feature, DSEE Extreme, improved voice pickup, and Google's Fast Pair feature, with some new hardware features like an optical sensor for wear detection. Things that have remained the same include the design and battery life. But then some things are missing this time around, such as the lack of aptX and aptX HD codecs.

We will be discussing all that and more in this review so make sure to read through till the end before you make your purchase decision.

Design

Visually, the 1000XM4 are identical to their predecessor. They even come in the same two colors, so there's no way to tell them apart when you spot someone wearing them. The only difference is on the inside of the left earcup, which is where the optical sensor for the wear detection sits.

Sony has chosen to retain the basic design of the 1000X series over its many iterations. Version 3 and 4 differ slightly from 1 and 2 but they all have the same unmistakable look.

To me, this is not a bad thing. Aesthetically, it's a very pleasing design with a refined, sophisticated appearance that is discreet enough to be worn outdoors without drawing attention towards them. The ear cups are also quite lean so the headphones don't stick out much from either side. The fit and finish of the materials is also quite good and the 1000XM4 have a lush feel to them.

Aesthetics aside, the functionality of the design also hasn't changed. The headbands are adjustable with a satisfying sliding mechanism. However, one issue with the sliding is that it has to be done when the headphones are off your head. That's because once you wear them, the headbands get bent, which prevents the ear cups from sliding smoothly on the metal rails. I found it extremely difficult to decrease the length of the band while still wearing them as the mechanism just seems to get jammed when worn.

The ear cups swivel to the side, so they can be made to lie flat on your collar bones when you take them off your head and wear around your neck. However, with my preferred size of headband, the 1000XM4 get uncomfortably tight around my neck until I swivel the ear cups sideways, and even then it's not cozy.

The headband also folds inwards from near the extension joint. This allows you to fold one of the speakers in so you can place them inside the supplied carrying case. It's not a particularly compact size even when folded this way and the headphones will still take a fair bit of space. The case, however, is very well designed, with pockets to keep the supplied audio cable and the airplane adapter.

The controls on the 1000XM4 are also identical to the 1000XM3. You have a mixture of touch gestures on the right ear cup and physical buttons on the left ear cup.

The 1000X series have always had these touch gestures and I've never been a fan of them. It's a cool thing to demo to your customers in a store or to show off to your friends but it's not the most practical and user-friendly way to control. First of all, the gestures are only available on the right ear cup, so if you are left-handed or have your right hand occupied, you will find them quite awkward to use with your left hand.

The other issue is that they just aren't reliable. Sometimes, they work as advertised; up/down to increase/decrease the volume one step, swipe and hold to keep adjusting, left/right to skip forward/back a track, and double-tap to play/pause. But I often found myself swiping and not getting any reaction.

Third, up/down/left/right are all relative to the position of your head. If you are looking up, an upward swipe is a side swipe now for the headphone. This could be the reason why the gestures don't work sometimes as you are swiping in the wrong direction relative to the position on the headphones.

Fourth, the gestures don't work if you have gloves on.

And finally, using gestures just looks plain silly in public. The issue is that you have to make fairly dramatic, deliberate swipes otherwise they often don't work and you don't want to be the only dork in the room tickling the side of your headphones.

Having physical buttons takes care of all of these issues. They always work reliably, regardless of the position of your head, whether you are wearing gloves or any other situation. You also don't look silly using them in public. The 1000XM4 has two buttons, one for power/pairing and the other for the noise canceling/voice assistant, and they work perfectly every time. Would be nice if we could have more of those for everything else.

That aside, there is not much else to lament about the design of the 1000XM4. These are still largely well-designed pair of headphones with a premium fit and finish.

Comfort

The WH-1000XM4 are an extremely comfortable pair of headphones. Most of it is down to the ridiculously plush ear pads, which cocoon your ears with their marshmallow softness. You could wear these for hours and not feel any pressure or discomfort in or around your ears. The ear cups are also deep enough to not touch your ears but just in case they do, Sony has lined them with a soft, spongy material.

The headband is also covered with the same soft padding as the ear cups and is also quite comfortable. I have read reports of some people claiming that the padding has improved on the WH-1000XM4 over the WH-1000XM3 but I don't have the older models with me to compare.

The WH-1000XM4 are also fairly light. This, coupled with their compact size, means you can walk around with them or wear them on long-duration flights and just forget they are there. The low mass means every time you turn your neck you don't feel the inertia of the headphones swaying your head and you can also move forward a fair bit and not have the headphones slide off the front.

I should note that I don't wear glasses so I can't comment on how the experience is if you have glasses on underneath the headphones.

My only issue with the comfort of the headphones is the lack of ventilation. Since these are noise-canceling headphones, there's not much air moving in and out of the ear cups. This is not a problem in countries with cold weather or if you are constantly in air-conditioned environments but if you are in hot and especially humid weather then, unfortunately, you will find your ears sweating quite a bit. This has been the case with noise-canceling headphones since forever and there's not much that can be done about it.

Software and Features

The WH-1000XM4 has a range of software features, all of which can be accessed from within the Sony Headphones Connect application, available on iOS and Android. It's not mandatory to have this app installed but it lets you control so many things, not to mention provides software updates, that it just makes sense to have it.

Sony Headphone Connect app

I have covered some of the features in this app in previous Sony headphone reviews. These usually include things like Adaptive Sound Control, which adjusts the level of noise cancellation based on your location, Ambient Sound Control, which lets you adjust the level of ambient noise coming in, 360 Reality Audio, which creates a custom HRTF profile for use in apps that provide content in this format, and DSEE, which upsamples low-resolution music. You can read about all of these in the recent WF-1000XM3 review. Most of these don't add much value to the product and are not worth belaboring on.

Instead, I will focus on the new and actually useful features for the WH-1000XM4 here. The first of these is multi-device pairing. This feature has been requested for a while now and for far too long wireless headphones have shipped without it. The WH-1000XM4 does support it, but there's a caveat.

First, the good bit. Yes, you can pair two devices at the same time. You can go about it pretty much how you'd normally pair with the devices. Once that is done, you have to go into the Sony Headphones Connect app and check the first option in the System tab. Here, you will be asked to select the second device from the history of paired devices. Once chosen, the app will then attempt to connect the headphones to the second device while maintaining connection with the current one.

Multi-device pairing

After that, you're done. The headphones will seamlessly switch over to whichever device is trying to play audio and if a call comes in, that device gets priority. The cool thing is, you could pair your WH-1000XM4 with your phone and, say, your laptop and the app is aware of both. So even if you play something on your laptop, you can control the playback within the Sony app on the phone as if it was playing on the phone itself.

The only bit of bad news here concerns the codecs. The WH-1000XM4 supports SBC, AAC, and LDAC but multi-device pairing does not work with LDAC, so depending upon what both of your paired devices support, you will be brought down to AAC on both or even SBC on both. Right now, this is the price to pay for multi-device pairing, where you will lose out on some of the audio fidelity for the sake of convenience.

The other new feature and my personal favorite is wear detection. There is now an optical sensor placed inside the left ear cup, which lets the headphones know when you are wearing them. It seems there is a bit more going there as well as I wasn't able to fool the headphones into playing by simply manually covering the sensor.

Wear detection settings

The sensor enables two features on the headphones. The first will simply pause the audio when you take the headphones off or even just raise the left speaker off your ear. The other feature will wait 15 minutes after you've removed the headphones and then turn the headphones off, even if the sound is still playing. I learned this the hard way as the headphones kept turning off while I was doing the battery life runs even though the sound was still playing.

You can disable both these features individually. I don't see much point in turning off pausing audio when the headphones are removed but you could disable switch off after a certain amount of time if you don't want your headphones to switch off if you don't use them for a while.

The third new feature is 'speak to chat'. What STC does is automatically pause the music and increase the ambient sound level in your ears when it detects you are speaking. You can choose how sensitive the headphones are to your speaking and also choose how long the headphones will stay paused once you are done talking.

Speak to chat

I was surprised initially when I found out how well the headphones detected me speaking to someone. Usually, it would be someone walking into the room and talking to me, and then me going 'What?' which would automatically kick in STC. The issue is, STC relies on you talking and not just listening. If you don't talk much or often in this conversation, the music will come back on once the timer expires, your conversation be damned.

STC is also sensitive to other sounds. It can pick up some other loud voices near you as you speaking. It can also mistake you making other vocal sounds as speech. One time I cleared my throat and it thought I was talking. Despite these issues, I still decided to leave the feature on and just made the expiry timer long enough that it wouldn't turn off in the middle of a conversation. It's much easier to just manually turn the music back on when you're done instead.

Some of these new software features add a lot of value to the product. They may not be enough to tempt 1000XM3 owners to upgrade but they are certainly nice to have for new buyers.

Performance

Audio

The WH-1000XM4 are closed-back headphones with a single 40mm dynamic driver on either side. The aluminum-coated LCP drivers have a frequency response of 4-40000Hz but it's limited to a maximum of 20-40000Hz when used with Bluetooth. From what I can tell, the drivers are identical to those on the WH-1000XM3.

The WH-1000XM4 support SBC, AAC, and LDAC codecs. There is no support for aptX and aptX HD codecs as Sony has now switched over to using MediaTek processors on its headphones, which lack native support for these codecs. While LDAC is fine and has fairly wide support these days on Android, it's not as consistent as aptX codecs due to its tendency to fall back to lower bitrates when the connection is less than perfect. I will discuss this further in the connectivity section.

For audio testing, the WH-1000XM4 were tested using all three codecs over a wide range of platforms. LDAC testing was done using the highest bitrate codec by forcing it through Android's developer settings. A variety of content was used for testing, including high-resolution 24-bit 96kHz files. Some of the testing was also done using the supplied audio cable in wired mode.

The WH-1000XM4 are a great sounding pair of headphones. Sony has improved the audio quality compared to WH-1000XM3 by adopting a slightly more neutral frequency response, which sounds cleaner and less muddy.

The bass response has seen the most change from the previous model. The WH-1000XM3 had a consistently inflated low-end response, which added additional thump to the sound but also tended to get muddy and bloated. The WH-1000XM4 corrects that by adopting a more neutral bass response with just a touch of warmth to it. The resultant bass line is quite clean, letting you appreciate the instruments and vocals that may fall in this region without unwarranted rumble. It's not perfectly neutral and still has a fair amount of warmth to it but it doesn't sound muddy anymore. The sound is lacking in some of the lowest registers, where it seems to lose some of the energy but it's not going to be a problem for most content.

The mid-range also benefits from cleaning up the bass region. The WH-1000XM3's bloated bassline seeped into the lower mid-range, creating additional warmth in male vocals and providing a boominess to the sound. The WH-1000XM4 mid-range is much more consistent in comparison. It's not forward but it also doesn't go to the back of the mix and generally, there is a good sense of balance throughout.

The treble response has also improved on the WH-1000XM4. You get an improved presence in the higher-end with better detail and definition. There is more treble in the slightly upper reaches of the treble and a bit less in the lower regions, which could affect female vocals and string instruments slightly, but it's not too much of a concern. The resulting sound is more airy and open than its predecessor.

Despite that, the WH-1000XM4 still have a fairly restricted soundstage due to their closed-back nature. You do feel like the sound is trapped within the confines of the headphones and not necessarily around you. It's a limitation of noise-canceling and closed-back headphones in general and although the DSP tries to emulate a wider soundstage than what the drivers are capable of, you don't quite get the same feeling you would with open-back headphones.

Overall, though, I was impressed by the sound quality of the WH-1000XM4. Sony has made the wise decision of going back to the warm but more neutral-leaning sound of the first generation of WH-1000X. It's a more authentic sound that works with more types of content without significant coloration. It's the opposite of what Bose did with the 700, where they made the sound less neutral and a bit more bass-heavy than the QuietComfort 35 II. I have no doubt that Bose' decision was influenced by the success of the bassy-sounding WH-1000XM3 but personally, I think Sony made the right decision in course-correcting back to a more neutral sound.

However, as good as these headphones sound, I would like to remind readers that you can still get a better sound for equal or even less money if you go wired. Quite often people see the high price tag of these headphones and assume the sound quality would be similar to similarly priced wired headphones but that's not the case. Most of the money you spend on wired headphones goes into making them sound good whereas most of the money you spend on wireless headphones goes into making them wireless. If you want something to listen to during a train commute, air travel, or just walking your dog, these will sound good enough while providing the wireless freedom and noise-cancellation you paid for. If all you want to do is sit in front of your desk at home and enjoy your music, you can get phenomenally better sounding headphones for the same money or spend about a third and get similar sounding stuff.

Noise-canceling

The Sony WH-1000XM4 have impressive noise-canceling performance. This was established with previous iterations but Sony claims to have improved it with this model with a new algorithm.

I just want to say up front that I don't know if the WH-1000XM4 are improved over the WH-1000XM3 in this regard. It's been two years since I reviewed the WH-1000XM3 and the degree of noise cancelation is not something one remembers. The best way to compare would be side by side and since I don't have a pair of those now, there is no way I can confirm Sony's claims of improvements.

I can say that the active noise-canceling on the WH-1000XM4 does work quite well most of the time. I didn't travel with them unfortunately due to the ongoing human malware situation so most of the testing was done indoors with some outdoor use. Still, the WH-1000XM4 do a great job of isolating most background noise. They are also surprisingly effective at blocking speech so you do have to use the palm gesture on the right ear cup if you intend to hear what the other person is saying. The headphones also worked great to isolate sounds of heavy rain and even some thunder, although the louder ones would seep through occasionally.

My issue with the noise-cancellation is that occasionally it would pass some of the noise in through one of the speakers. I don't fly much these days but I do have airplanes flying overhead constantly where I live. The WH-1000XM4 do this weird thing where it would play the sound of the aircraft going overhead through the left speaker while the right one worked to cancel it out. This happens consistently, every single time. To the left ear, it almost sounds like I'm watching some content with the sound of airplanes taking off. And just to confirm, this is not sound leaking in, this is the speaker itself reproducing the sound of the aircraft.

Now, the sound isn't loud but it is audible and because it essentially plays through the speakers you can hear it even over the music. This defeats the purpose of noise-canceling headphones if the speakers themselves are playing the noise for you. I'm sure this is either a bug or just something that can be tweaked in the algorithm but it is quite distracting.

Other than that, the noise-canceling performance is excellent. Again, I have no way to prove if it is better on this year's model. Nor do I have any way to verify if it is the best noise-canceling on the market. But it is certainly very good and should be sufficient for most situations.

Microphone

The WH-1000XM4 have average microphone performance. Voices sound reasonably full but still overly compressed. Background noise suppression is adequate but not exceptional. The overall quality is fine for short voice calls but completely unremarkable overall for a premium set of wireless headphones.

Again, if audio quality is important, get a pair of wired headphones. Even the microphone on the wired EarPods will sound better.

Latency

The WH-1000XM4 have fairly manageable latency. There is some minor delay when watching videos, which can increase further if your paired device is not up to the task (I do my latency tests with Windows 10, iOS, or macOS as Android has a fair bit of audio latency itself). However, most people likely wouldn't notice this. But if you do need low latency for things like gaming then the supplied cable should get rid of it entirely.

Connectivity

The WH-1000XM4 had fairly stable and robust connectivity with most of the paired devices. I was able to walk around with the phone in the pocket, some distance away but in the same room, and in the next room and the connection would stay stable throughout.

The issue comes with LDAC 990kbps, which can be quite finicky. This bitrate is only really usable about an arm's length away from the phone or if you are within a clear line of sight and in the same small room. It's also dependent a lot on the transmitting device, as some phones can struggle to maintain a stable connection at 990kbps even if the phone is in front of your face.

Unfortunately, LDAC is only really valuable at 990kbps or at worst, 660kbps. You lose all the high resolution, high bit depth advantages if you drop down to 330kbps, which is no better than SBC or AAC. If you leave your phone on auto, which is how it's configured and will default to every time your headphones are restarted, most Android phones will resort to using 660 or 330kbps to prioritize stability. 990kbps can mostly only be obtained manually and then you have to make sure to be close to the device.

This is why aptX HD is preferable as it's far more stable than LDAC and still has a reasonably high bit-depth, sampling rate, dynamic range, and low noise floor. Unfortunately, Sony decided to drop support for these codecs altogether to not pay royalties to Qualcomm, so here we are.

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Download driver nvidia geforce 7300 se 7200 gs. For those who will be buying these headphones for use with iPhones or other Apple products, the AAC codec (or even SBC for that matter) works just fine. The audio quality is also nearly identical.

Battery Life

The WH-1000XM4 have a rated battery life of 30 hours. This is the same figure that Sony claimed for the 1000XM3 and even the 1000XM2.

Since Sony doesn't claim which codec was used to achieve the rated battery life, I tested the headphones with LDAC locked to 990kbps and AAC. As usual, the volume was maintained throughout the run, the same track was looped over and over again, and features like Adaptive Sound Control, speak to chat, EQ, DSEE, and multi-device pairing were disabled.

When testing with LDAC, the headphones managed 25 hours of continuous playback. This is a fair bit off from Sony's claim so the test was repeated with a different device but similar test conditions and the result was identical.

Later, the headphones were tested with AAC and with this codec they managed 35 hours of continuous playback, which is a fair bit over Sony's claim.

We know LDAC is a fair bit demanding, especially in 990kbps, so the difference compared to AAC isn't surprising. It's possible, though, that when used with 660kbps or 330kbps modes, the battery life is closer to the claimed 30 hours.

I also tested the quick charge claim of 5 hours of use with a 10-minute charge. I tested in the same conditions used for the LDAC testing and I got just over 6 hours.

The battery life, even with 990kbps, isn't too bad. But, after three years, I expected Sony to have made some improvements in this area. Some of Sony's cheaper models achieve better battery life than the WH-1000XM4 so it's disappointing that the flagship model only achieves acceptable and not exceptional battery life. Also note that I had to disable some of the features of the headphones to make the testing reliable and consistent. Enabling them will potentially reduce the battery life further.

Conclusion

The Sony WH-1000XM4 are priced at $350. They will sell alongside the previous generation model, which have the same official pricing for now but can be had for about $100 less on Amazon.

The initial reaction to these headphones was that they are a bit underwhelming as there didn't seem to be any breakthrough for a product that arrived two years after its predecessor. But after spending over three weeks with these headphones, I can say that they are a definite step up over the previous model.

A lot of the improvements come from various little software and hardware features. Things like multi-device pairing, wear detection, and 'speak to chat' add a lot of value to the overall experience of using these headphones and now seem like something every pair of headphones should have. There's a lot more features if you choose to peruse through the Sony app but these are the ones that I found most useful, and all of them are new to the WH-1000XM4.

The other major improvement to me was with the audio quality. The WH-1000XM3 had a bassy, muddy sound that was neither accurate nor to my taste. This was one area where the old Bose QC35 II handily beat the Sony. The WH-1000XM4, however, feature a much more neutral sound that should please the purists while still maintaining some of the warmth of the previous model. It's a great sound overall and one of the best I've heard from a pair of wireless headphones.

Then there's the noise-canceling, which continues to be very good. I did face some minor quirks with it but overall the feature works outstandingly well and is one of, if not the best in the industry.

The WH-1000XM4 are also extremely comfortable headphones. This is something that matters a lot to me, almost as much as sound quality, so I'm always elated when headphones get this right. Sure, they are not ideal for hot weather but everywhere else you should be fine.

As for downsides, the microphone quality was a bit of a miss. For a premium pair of wireless headphones, I expected better audio quality from the mic. The other disappointment is Sony's continued reliance on touch gestures for controlling almost everything on the headphones. The gestures are unreliable, awkward to use, and present no advantages over physical buttons.

The final bit of complaint is regarding battery life. There is a notable difference when used in LDAC vs AAC and the LDAC figure falls short of Sony's claim. 25 hours is still a decent figure but I would have liked to see Sony do better in this regard. However, if you plan on pairing these with an iPhone or a Mac, then you can expect some pretty good battery life.

It's tempting to give the WH-1000XM4 a hard time due to their stature. After all, many do consider these as the best wireless headphones on the market and they also cost a pretty penny. While I would hesitate to call them the best without further comparisons to their rivals, I will say that the WH-1000XM4 are a very, very good pair of headphones and that you should probably buy them if noise-cancellation, wireless audio, and sound quality are your priorities, in that order.

Pros

• Comfortable
• Great active noise-cancellation
• Great sound quality
• Multi-device pairing and wear detection
• Good battery life with AAC

Cons

• Average microphone quality
• Clumsy touch controls
• Underwhelming battery life with LDAC
• No aptX
• Multi-device pairing does not work with LDAC

Reader comments

• g5f

If we expect new NC chip and more competition, it should be better. xm4 got about the same anc as xm3, only slight difference using sw and padding. Though I'm happy with a jack and ldac is still the best for wireless, they could improve somet..

• YHV

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I wonder what improvements Sony will bring this lineup in 2021 and 2022?

• Doc Robby
• mbR

Agreed! 👍🏼