The WH-1000XM4 is a new headset from Sony. It delivers excellent noise-cancellation and surprising sound quality all in a lightweight, comfortable design.
They were announced on August 6 2020 and are Sony’s flagship headphones for the time being. Sony claims the WH-1000XM4s deliver a more comfortable design, better noise-cancelling, better audio, better call quality and more useful features compared with their predecessors.
Design
Though the Sony WH-100XM4 have added a handful 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.
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 downside 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.
The WH-1000XM4 features 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.
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.
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, 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. I.e; to deliver a notification or answering a call.
The Sony WH-1000XM4 features a new impressive 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, Sony now supports Android’s Fast Pair for quick setup. This also lets you find your misplaced headphones by playing a sound through them, and you’ll get low-battery notifications when that 30-hour runtime is nearly exhausted.
Audio Quality
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.
The XM4 lacks aptX HD support, but the Sony’s LDAC codec, present here, however, does a good job with devices that support it, pushing lots of detail through wirelessly.
Sony has added what it calls “Precise Voice Pickup technology” to the 1000XM4s, which optimizes audio processing from the five built-in microphones for clearer voice capture — and the difference is apparent.
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.
Battery Life
There’s no major improvement on battery life this year. Battery is capped at 30 hours with noise cancelling on / 38 hours with it off. Quick charging (five hours of charge after just 10 minutes). The WH-1000XM4 lasts just as long or longer than the competition.
Pricing
The Sony WH-1000XM4 noise-cancelling headphones are priced at $350 and are to be delivered mid 2021.
