The Sony WF-1000XM4 is the latest model in Sony’s highly successful WF-1000 brand of truly wireless earbuds. Also now it’s smaller, lighter, and greener than ever before. Oh, and it sounds even more clear and more direct than the one it replaces at the top of the line.
Indeed, they don’t genuinely lead the industry in any single category with the potential exception of control-app perfection; nonetheless, you’d have to purchase three pairs of truly wireless earbuds to match its combination of sound quality, noise-cancellation, and battery life.
The new wireless earbuds provide enough quality-of-life enhancements to justify upgrading from their predecessors. The Sony WF-1000XM3, even though they are slightly more costly.
The Sony WF-1000XM4 is much more comfortable and easier to carry around thanks to its smaller size, and the auxiliary app makes it simple to modify the controls and EQ settings. This makes them rival the best headphones.
Meanwhile, features like Speak-To-Chat, DSEE Extreme audio upscaling, and adaptive noise cancellation stolen from the over-ear Sony WH-1000XM4 mean you’ll be difficult to find a more robust pair of wireless earbuds, even when looking for the finest wireless headphones.
While competing for truly wireless earbuds may outperform the Sony WF-1000XM4 in some areas. Such as noise reduction, neither model comes close to matching its overall quality. As a result, the Sony WF-1000XM4 is the best and most accurate wireless earbuds available today.
The Sony WF-1000XM4 is now available for $278.00 / £217.04, which sounds reasonable when you consider that now the outgoing WF-1000XM3 began in 2019 for a mere $230 / £220, with the final few pairs presently selling for roughly $170 / £150.
In terms of competitiveness, the WF-1000XM4 compares nicely to alternatives from Bose, Grado, and Sennheiser, and appears to be a bargain when compared to Bowers & Wilkins’ excellent (and dizzyingly expensive) PI7.
We had lots of reasons to promote the previous WF-1000XM3, but ‘discretion’ was not one of them. The earphones and charging case were both large, and Sony correctly choose to try to decrease some of the heft in this new iteration.
The charging case is 40 percent smaller, and the earphones are 10% smaller. The fact that they’re still among the heaviest examples of this kind just goes to show how enormous the WF-1000XM3 was. But at least the newer charging case could fit into a trouser pocket, and the earphones don’t protrude from the wearer’s head like a prop from a science fiction film.
The WF-1000XM4 includes some of the features that were first seen on the WH-1000XM4 over-ears last year, including active noise-cancellation that can detect what you’re doing and where you’re doing it in order to adapt to your surroundings; fast pairing for Android and Windows devices; and ‘speak to chat,’ which simply requires you to make a noise to pause your music. So users can have a brief chat without removing the earbuds. Newer polyurethane ear tips (small, medium, and large sizes are all available) are meant to provide greater passive noise suppression.
Sony’s fully functional, completely stable Headphones app is your one-stop-shop for operating the Sony WF-1000XM4. Here you may play around with all of the functions that are partially written on each earbud’s capacitive touch surface. You may configure the left and right earphones to control volume, play/pause/skip/forwards/skip/backward/summon voice assistant‘, ‘active noise-canceling on/off/adaptive’, or the less useful ‘nothing assigned’ through the app.
There’s also EQ tuning, custom preset storage, and the ability to toggle auto-pause and DSEE Severe on or off.
You can also upload photos of your ears to help Sony optimize music streaming apps that support 360 Reality Audio or Dolby Atmos. As well as choose whether you want your Bluetooth technology to prioritize sound quality or connection reliability.
The top 3 voice assistants – Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa – may also be woken using their which was before ‘wake’ words. Even in unsettlingly loud situations, the WF-1000XM4 proves pointy and alert to commands, regardless of your helper of choice.
Each earbud has three microphones for active noise cancellation, call quality, and interaction using voice assistants. When under unfavorable circumstances, a mix of feed-forward and feed-back mics collect the wearer’s speech directionally.Albeit the graze mics will automatically mute. A bone conduction sensor is also there, which detects speech vibration but does not record it as ambient sound.
Even within the Sony WF-1000XM4‘s new and smaller physical dimensions, there’s a lot more going on than before. Connectivity is now through Bluetooth 5.2, which allows for data transmissions to the left and right earphones as well as Hi-Res Audio Wireless certification.
In theory, Bluetooth 5.2 should imply longer battery life, but the best-case real-world scenario of 24 hours isn’t very impressive. Still, the WF-1000XM4 is compatible with Qi charging pads, thus five minutes simply plug into an outlet will give you another hour of use.
The WF-1000XM4 supports LDAC as well as SBC and AAC codecs, but there’s no mention of aptX in most of its forms. They also support DSEE Extreme, in case you believe in a method that claims to be able to extract high-resolution sound from such a standard-definition digital audio recording.
Positioning the Sony WF-1000XM4 comfortably ends up taking a little longer than it should – users may find them a little fiddly to insert and think they should fit deeper in the ear than they do. But once you’ve done that, you can customize the touch controls and EQ levels. Also the plethora of other features to your liking. Were all done? Good. It’s time to put some music on.
They don’t over-emphasize any part of the frequency spectrum. They don’t overlook any subtleties, and they don’t allow rhythms or tempos to linger. Their presentation has vim and excitement, yet it is reasonable by unquestionable control.
The earphones’ freight bass sounds have depth, character, and an incredible amount of information at the bottom end. There’s plenty of power and momentum here, but the Sony WF-1000XM4 never loses its cool there’s enough composure to go along with it. The entry and departure of bass notes are both clear, preventing the bottom end from blurring into the middle.
Listening to Kate Bush’s Lake Tahoe, the WF-1000XM4’s capacity to discern and blend the finest nuances of the most transitory drifters into a much bigger image was clear. The phrase ‘communicative’ may sound redundant when discussing a person’s singing voice. But it’s completely apt here: the Sony WF-1000XM4 are communicative if they’re anything.
The transition from middle to high end is seamless and lifelike, and the treble sounds themselves have enough of gleam and bite without being overbearing. The Sony WF-1000XM4 controls the high-frequency information as skillfully as the rest of the frequency spectrum.
There’s not much to critique in terms of dynamics. The Sony WF-1000XM4 wireless earbuds can go from “ear-splitting” to “nearly silent” in a matter of seconds. Also, even the most delicate harmonic dynamics of Bush’s piano playing are captured in clear detail. Their blend of control and assault guarantees that, like James Brown. They’re always on the right foot when it comes to rhythmic assurance and expressiveness.
The active noise cancellation is a little more modest in success. The challenge with every other pair of ANC true wireless earbuds would be that the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds have shown that it is feasible to completely reject extraneous sounds without leaving any counter-signal or affecting the quality of the music you’re listening to.
The Sony WF-1000XM4 earbuds can’t quite match the WF-1000XM3 when it comes to reducing the influence of noise level on your listening experience. They aren’t always the market leader in terms of noise cancellation.. but for the vast majority of people, they are more than enough.
Sony is primarily to blame for the market’s poor performance, ergonomics, and build quality, and with the Sony WF-1000XM4. The corporation has merged performance, ergonomics, and build quality better successfully than ever before. They aren’t flawless, but as a whole, they are difficult to defeat.
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