Sony WH-1000XM4 Review
The WH-1000XM4 is Sony’s third (technically fourth) iteration of their top-of-the-line wireless over-ear noise-canceling headphones. I have been daily driving these for the last month and I would like to share my experience with them. I will also be comparing these to Apple’s AirPods Max for those who are deciding between the two.
Sound
Sound Signature
The XM4 is bass boosted right out of the box. This can be great if you enjoy a lot of bass in your music, but to me, it’s a little too strong. This isn’t much of a problem though as you can quite easily adjust this using the EQ provided in the app (more on the app later). Compared to the AirPods Max, the Sony’s default sound almost muddy with the bass overpowering everything. In Bluetooth mode, the sound stage of both isn’t great (to be expected given they are both closed-back), but the AirPods Max seems to have a slight edge here.
If you’re wondering, this is the EQ I find best from the XM4.
Audio Upsampling (DSEE Extreme)
I would like to take a moment to also mention DSEE Extreme which is Sony’s next iteration of DSEE HX found on the XM3s. DSEE Extreme is supposed to use machine learning to upscale badly compressed music either from your music streaming service or the Bluetooth codec. From my experience using both Spotify Premium and Deezer HiFi, there’s only a marginal difference between having it on and off.
Analogue Audio
The XM4 can be driven through its 3.5mm port which allows you to use the unit with devices that do not support Bluetooth. Noise Cancelling and Speak-to-Chat will still work in wired mode, but the touch controls will not. For some reason, the unit will also automatically turn off when you unplug it. Driving the unit with my Fiio BTR-5 (will do a review on it soon), instrument separation increased significantly and it sounds clearer too, despite using the same AAC codec from the same phone. This is one of the reasons I consider the Sony over the AirPods Max, as someone who owns a portable DAC like the Fiio, having an option to passively drive the headphone is definitely a plus.
Conclusion
The XM4 is not a pair of audiophile headphones, especially when you consider that Sennheiser’s HD 600 costs around the same as one of these. However if you properly compare them with other Bluetooth over-ear in its price range, it’s great sounding especially if you set your EQ right.
Comfort
The headphone is a big improvement over the MDR-1000X, with its extra padding on the headband and the ear cup. The opening in the ear cup foam is much larger which means that most likely your ears won’t get any pressure from the foam and the ear cups instead rests nicely on the area around your ears. However, the headband is still has the same width (despite being thicker) which means that it is much less comfortable than the wide headband of the AirPods Max. The leather of the ear cups also means that it traps a lot more heat compared to the AirPods Max’s foam, so your ear may sweat more with these.
In terms of comfort, I really have to give it to the AirPods Max, but the Sony isn’t that far behind.
Apps and Software
The WH-1000XM4 works with the Sony Headphones Connect app which enables a lot of its smart features. This works really well as long as you’re only connecting to a single device (see the MultiPoint section below)
Noise-Canceling
The XM4’s noise-canceling is one of the best I’ve seen from over-ear headphones. It cuts out potentially all sound that would interfere with music listening. It definitely won’t cut out all the noise, if you wear it in a car or a train without music on you will still be able to hear higher frequency noise such as the wind and the rails. However, once you start playing music the noise seems to just fade away. When compared to the AirPods Max, the Sony seems to deal with lower frequencies better while AirPods Max cuts out a little more voice.
You can slightly improve the noise-cancelling by using personal optimisation. This can be activated by holding down the custom button (in default setting) or through the app in the sound section. This plays a series of noise as well as using the built-in barometer to measure ambient air pressure. This helps the headphone decide how the feed-forward microphone should be used for noise-cancelling. You should use personal optimisation every time you change how you wear the headphones or when you significantly change altitude (e.g. on the plane)
Ambient Sound Mode
By pressing the [CUSTOM] button you can turn noise-cancelling off or turn on ambient sound mode which allows outside sound to come in. The Ambient Sound Mode works great, but I find that sometimes the Ambient Sound will default to 1/20 which means that barely any sound it let in. This seems to only be a bug tho. As mentioned, in the app you can set the ambient sound level from 1 to 20, with 20 letting the most amount of noise in. I don’t really see a point for anyone using a value that’s not 20 as even at maximum I feel like it is letting in as much noise as I wanted and hearing people through it is still a little difficult. You also have the option to tick “Focus on Voice” which would cut out more low-frequency noise, but it makes voice (which wasn’t clear in the first place) even quieter. This is one of my biggest disappointment with the XM4, in my opinion, it is even slightly worse than the MDR-1000X, and it’s not even close to the Transparency Mode of the AirPods Max which sounds perfectly loud and clear. I hope Sony releases an update allowing for slightly louder ambient sound mode.
When switching using the Custom button the unit will play voice guidance to tell you which mode you’re switching to. You can turn that off in the systems menu.
Quick Attention
Quick Attention allows you to put your hands over the right ear cup to hear things around you. The moment your hands come in contact with the touch-sensitive area, the music volume decrease, and outside noise is let in. This works very quickly and is perfect for if you want to hear announcements on the train etc. Quick Attention has been around since the MDR-1000X, but I feel like the XM4 activates much quicker. Personally, I find this the most useful feature allowing me to quickly hear things around me or to check if someone is talking to me.
Speak-to-Chat
Speak-to-Chat is a new feature introduced with the XM4. The microphone actively listens for your voice, and automatically pauses the music, and lets outside noise in when you speak. This works very reliably as long as you wear the headphones the right way around. I have not seen it get triggered by others’ voices either which I thought was going to be a problem in busy subways etc. You can set when the music continues playing (15s, 30s, 60s, never) as well as set if Focus on Voice should be activated.
However, Speak-to-Chat has one annoying problem, and it’s the fact that it still works when you’re in wired mode. When in wired mode, the headphones do not know if you’re listening to music or in a video call which means that if you don’t turn it off beforehand, it will mute your video call for 30 seconds every time you speak. This is a problem as the unit’s Bluetooth is completely off when wired meaning that you can’t use the app to turn the feature off, and you cannot use the gesture to disable the feature either as the touch control pad is also disabled in wired mode. The solution is either to use the headphones wired with it turned off (this means that you can’t use ambient sound mode to help you hear your own voice) or to unplug the unit, turn it back on, disable Speak-to-Chat then plug it back in.
Adaptive Sound Control
Adaptive Sound Control uses the accelerometer and gyroscope in your phone to detect your actions and set the Ambient Sound mode accordingly. The app supports four activity types: Staying (Standing or Sitting), Walking, Running, and Transport. You can go into each of these and customise it to your likings. This works pretty well on iOS (I have not tried this on an Android device), and the mode switches almost instantly. It does give you a short notification sound when your action changes which can be turned off in the app (you need to update your XM4 to the latest version first though). You also set a location on the map.
One thing I hope Sony implement is to separate standing from sitting (the app can already detect the difference as it shows different icons for sitting and standing) as it would be very helpful if I can set it to use ambient sound when standing and turn on noise-cancelling when sitting.
Multipoint
One new addition to the XM4 is the availability of Multipoint. This allows you to connect the headphones to up to two devices at once (and it can “remember” even more). To set it up, pair the headphones with a phone running the Sony Headphones app, go to the third page of the app then turn on “Connect to 2 devices simultaneously”. The headphones would restart and once it has reconnected, you will see “Devices Currently Being Connected” show up on the status page of the app. You can tap into that and choose which device to connect and/or pair a new device.
However, this feature is far from perfect. The headphones would sometimes randomly disconnects (which happened to me a few times which was pretty frustrating). You also can’t set which device it will connect to first. As the unit can only connect to two devices at once, with my XM4 paired to my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook, it would sometimes connect to my iPhone and iPad while some other times it would connect to my iPad and MacBook. To make it worse, the unit won’t automatically disconnect one of the devices when a new connection is made, so the only way to switch the connected device is to turn off Bluetooth on one of the connected devices then initiate a connection from other.
There also seems to be a bug where the Sony Headphones app would only automatically initiate if the device it’s running on is the first device to connect. If it were to not be the first device to connect then you will have to launch the app and tap connect manually which takes a while.
However, of course, nothing beats Apple’s implementation of Multipoint. This just makes using the Sony a little less of a pain for someone who uses more than a single device for content consumption.
The Custom Button
Out of the box, the Custom button is configured to switch between Noise Cancelling, Ambient Sound, and OFF. However, you are able to customise it to do other things. As of now the only thing you can make it do is activates Google Assistant or Alexa app on your phone. To me, this isn’t particularly helpful as I might as well just hold down on the touchpad to activate Siri.
This button has some really good potential though. In fact, the literal help section built into the app mentions the possibility to customise the action from double and triple-clicking the button, yet it doesn’t seem to have been implemented in the app yet. I wish we could somehow use these button clicks to switch between normal Ambient Sound and one with Voice Focus like we could with the MDR-1000X.
Touch Controls
The touch controls work rather well and there is quite a large selection of gestures that you could use. Here are the gestures as mentioned in the user manual:
- Double Tap: Play/Pause, Accept Call, Hang-Up, Continue Playing (Speak-to-Chat)
- Tap Hold: Activate voice assistant
- Cover with Palm: Quick Attention
- Two Finger Hold: Activate/Deactivate Speak-to-Chat
- Swipe Up/Down: Increase/Decrease Volume
- Swipe Front/Back: Next/Previous Song
- Swipe Front/Back Hold: Seek Forwards/Backwards
Though these are great, it’s a lot of work especially when adjusting volume. This is why I prefer the AirPods Max with its dials and button which is much quicker and accurate.
Touch Controls are disabled when you’re using to unit wired and when the infrared sensor does not detect your ear.
Infrared Sensor
The last addition to the XM4 from the XM3 is the infrared sensor in the left ear cup. It is used to detect when you have taken the unit off and would pause the music. I find this quite reliable and useful for when you need to quickly talk to someone as you don’t need to spend time pausing the music before taking it off.
However, if you wear these outside in the sun and your ear sweats, there might be a bit of sweat condensed on the sensor which would prevent it from working properly. I’m sure it won’t break it, but it means that auto-pause will no longer work until the sweat has dried out. This doesn’t seem to be an issue with the AirPods Max.
The unit will also turn itself off if it’s off your head for over 15 minutes which I think is much better than the AirPods Max where you have to leave it stationary for it to enter low power mode.
Conclusion
The XM4 is tightly packed with features, some of which you’ll love and some of which you probably will disable the moment you take them out of the box. I personally use pretty much all of these features on a daily basis and I find them rather useful. However, though these have more features than the AirPods Max and the Bose NC700, the features seem to lack the polish that you would get from Apple or even Bose. I hope Sony continues to release firmware updates for these to fix some of the issues and improve the user experience.
Microphone
The XM4 uses an array of microphones to pick up your voice during calls. From my experience, I would say that the microphone quality is quite disappointing, but is useable. There’s clearly very strong noise-cancelling done on the voice (even when there isn’t any background noise) which means that the voice sounds robotic and unnatural. When there is noise, however, it seems to do pretty well cutting out a majority of the noise. (I’ve heard it’s not as good as the Bose NC700 though)
Compared to the AirPods Max, these two seem to take different approaches. The AirPods Max focuses on natural voice and barely cancels any background noise, perfect for using in your house for video calls etc. While the Sony applies strong noise-canceling to the voice making it more suitable for use outside the house like on the train or on the streets.
Final Conclusion
The Sony WH-1000XM4 is a great pair of headphones for its price. Though the AirPods Max sounds better and is more comfortable and intuitive to use, I don’t really find that to really justify the huge price difference as well as the lack of portability. As a student who carries these to school on a daily basis, I definitely found the Sony, with its foldable design and large feature-set, to be a much more compelling choice. I just hope Sony spends a little more time fine-tuning some of its features.
If you’re out looking for a pair of over-ear noise-canceling headphones, you won’t go wrong with either of these (nor the Bose NC700 which I’ve yet to have my hands on). Just make sure you consider them carefully with your use cases.
