Customer Ratings & Reviews

I’ve never had noise cancelling headphones before, so I don’t have anything to compare these to, but they’re awesome. I can’t believe how much I needed the quiet while listening to music or even just doing tasks like studying!

Best headphones i've ever had. I have not regretted getting these at all they are high quality headphones way better than apple airpods

Great pair of headphone, sound quality is more that I expected, color and style is better looking when you have them in your hands, sony is a brand that there is not wrong way to

It is definitely worth the price. When you start to put it on, it feels like you turn off the surrounding sound and enter the different world.

I have a Bose QuietComfort 45 and the features and sound quality in the Sony headphones are amazing. I really recommend this haedphones

These are fantastic headphones. The active noise cancellation is top notch and the sound quality is amazing. The only downside to these headphones are that there are only 3 colors to choose from but other then that I would recommend them to anyone in a heartbeat!

Have Been in the lookout for 2 years to have a good over the ear headphones for professional and Personal use. Sony gave it all, right budget, Awesome Sound quality, Design, and No doubt the Noise cancellation is great. The icing comes with the color Blue.

Great noise cancelation and ajustable. Great for working out in a noisey gym. Better than any earbuds.

They’re good, but could use a bit more volume range, overall they’re great!

The noise cancelling at these XM4 is still one of the best in the market. The call quality continues to be average as the update on the microphone appears to be very small compared with XM3 version. Having the ability to pair two devices simultaneously is the main and probably only justification if you want to upgrade from XM3.

Best pair of headphones I've ever bought for myself. Sound quality is incredibly crisp and noise-cancelling is amazing. If you're still over the fence whether to buy this or not, at a $200+ price point (when on sale), it's a must-buy.

amazing noise cancelling system. however, because the color is light it can get dirty very quickly. i dyed my hair red and the ear sponges got the red discoloration.

Love these. After years of being a Bose customer I struggled with a change to Sony. The Sony set sounded like it offered more noise reduction and felt lighter to wear during long days of virtual conference calls. I am not sorry I bought Sony - love them.

Coming from the previous iteration. These are marginally improved. If you have the 3s keep those, if your 3s finally started to break down get these. If your 3s are still good, keep them and get these when/if they ever falter.

These are the best headphones I've ever owned. White noise works perfect! I can run a microwave, a blender and blast the furnace, and still hear nothing. Sound quality also perfect. Love them!

Noise cancellation works perfectly. And the headphones are reslly comfortable aswell as good battery life

I bought these for noise canceling to block excessive dbs from amplified music near by. They work great! Cut about 80% and a good % of the base.

Simply the best noise cancelling headphones out there. I like the bronze touches on the black ones a little more, but the blue is a nice change from the seas of black, not so light that it’ll show wear and not a garish color.

Top of the line piece of electronics. I had the WH-1000XM2 and these are way better than those. I like the feel of them. As always they isolate sound perfectly. I would buy again in a min if I had to. I got these for the sale price of $279. Can't beat that!!!

*The Good* Range: Excellent. My apartment's longest length is 31 feet with 3 walls between them measuring at about 6 inches thickness. I played a 24 bit, 96KHz FLAC file using the LDAC codec to try to really test the connection because those are the highest settings I can get out of my audio. I didn't get a single stutter. NFC: Allows you to pair and connect a phone with the headphones by just tapping the phone on the left ear cup. No need to go through the menus for bluetooth and scan, or select device. Just tap and it will connect. Your phone does need to be unlocked though but that's it. The rest is just a simple tap. Noise-cancelling: Great noise cancelling. Successfully blocks out air conditioner sounds. I couldn't even tell if I had the AC on or not while I was wearing them. S-sounds or hissing sounds get cancelled out entirely. It does its best job with noise cancelling on the low frequency end. My PC's fans (6 of them) are brought down to white noise. I won't be on a plane until next month so I tried playing a YouTube video of plane engine sounds. It cancels out the harshness of the low frequency noise from it but you can still hear the plane sound. However, when I play music I'm able to successfully drown it out. It's not noise cancelling, but with the aid of the noise cancelling I'm able to tune it out for the most part. The same goes wearing it on the subway. I live in NYC and our subway is one of the loudest in the world thanks to tiles the MTA uses in most of their station's walls, which amplify sound. You're not going to block all the noise, but it does a great job at dampening it so you can hear your own audio better. You'll still hear cars on the streets but it will sound like they're hovering instead of rolling past you. If you own a WH-1000XM3, I couldn't tell much of a difference in noise cancelling performance from it. You can use the noise-cancelling even without any audio playing. It won't time out as long as you have Automatic Power Off set to "Do not turn off" in the app. Cupping your hand over the right earcup allows you to temporarily disable ANC and hear outside noise. Sound: I'm not an audiophile by any means, but they're my best sounding headphones. Voices sound clear. Instrument separation is clear. I can hear subtle hihat sounds clearly. Bass is evident out of the box and it doesn't sound muddy (I've read from others that it does but it doesn't sound muddy to me). I tend to think the sound sounds slightly warm (bassy) but mostly neutral. But best of all is the hardware EQ from that you can use from Sony's Headphones app (app available only on Android and iOS). Unlike the XM3, on the XM4 you'll be able to use the hardware EQ even if you're using the LDAC codec. You can wipe out that bass by setting the "Clear Bass" setting to -10. Or boost it up. You can customize the EQ through 5 frequency bands (400, 1k, 2.5k 6.3k, 16k). There are 8 preset EQ settings along with 2 Custom EQ settings you can set and save for whatever purpose and one manual EQ setting, which really is just a third custom setting preset. Since it's hardware EQ, the changes you make hear on the app effectively change the headphone's sound signature. If you use it on any other device like your PC, or TV, the EQ settings you set will stick. So I feel all the criticism about the out of the box sound feels unwarranted. Spend some time with the EQ and find the sound you like and that's the sound you'll have on all your devices because you've changed the way the headphones sound on the headphones themselves. The physical buttons: The Custom button allows me to either assign it to toggle ANC or Assistant commands (can't have both at the same time for that button). I have it set to Google Assistant but it also supports Amazon Alexa too. I find the Google Assistant support so invaluable. Thanks to it, whenever I get notifications on my phone I can press the button and it will read me my notifications. Whether you have notifications or not, it will also give you the time. So useful. The voice that reads you the notifications sounds natural too, not robotic, and is easy to understand. The power button is clearly spaced away from the custom button that I never mistakenly press it for anything else. One press of the power button and the headphones will tell me how much battery life I have left. **The OK** Comfort: The XM4s has slightly more cushion on the earpads and headband than the XM3. Unfortunately the opening inside the ear cups haven't changed much. They're not that wide, so they'll still sit on some of your ears even if you might not feel like it does. I can prove it does though. When I insert my finger underneath the cup and reach for my ear, I can feel that it's still being clamped under the earpad. You may not feel it because the cushioning is so soft but the pressure gets felt after extended use. The earcup is also not that deep. Your ears will touch the inner soft lining although you will not feel it. The evidence will be when you sweat. You'll find sweat marks on the lining where your ear touches it. Speaking of sweat, the XM4 made me noticeably sweat more than the XM3 or XM2 did. Conversely though, I imagine these would make great winter earmuffs. Careful though, they're not waterproof, so throw a hood on when it's raining or snowing. Clamping force will vary on your head size. I have a large round head so they do clamp with some force but I never really found them uncomfortable even after hours of use. Wired passive mode: You can use the headphones without power as regular headphones. When you power the headphones, you can also get ANC. You just can't use the touch controls. Touch controls: Touch controls are intuitive. Swipe up for volume up, down for volume down. Swipe left for previous track, right for next track. Double tap to play/pause. Unfortunately, the touch controls can be as finicky as they were on the XM3. If you're familiar withe XM3's touch controls and never had a problem with them, the XM4 will suit you fine. I put the XM4 in the freezer for 30 minutes while playing music to see if the cold issues on the XM3 exist on the XM4. Surprisingly they don't! I even used a fan to simulate wind along with the cold and I didn't get any erratic behavior that I had with the XM3. Touch controls still worked also. There's still about 3 months until winter here in NYC to know for sure, but I think they fixed it. Multipoint: You can now connect the XM4 to more than one bluetooth device at the same time. As long as you don't actively use them at the same time, you won't run into many or any problems. If you do actively use them at the same time, occasionally you'll run into issues. If audio is playing on one device, and you play audio on another, the audio from the first device will continue to play and you won't hear the second device until you pause or stop the first device. This appears to be the current nature of multipoint because I get this same behavior on my Jabra Active Elite 75t's multipoint. Multipoint does NOT work with LDAC. The Shure Aonic 50 supports multipoint on LDAC so bad job with Sony here, especially when LDAC is their own proprietary codec. How does another company one-up you with your own technology? So only AAC and SBC work with multipoint on the XM4s. Proximity sensor: There's now a proximity sensor inside the left ear cup. This allows the headphones to pause audio when you take your headphones off. You can also turn this feature on or off using the Sony Headphones app. My issue with it is that it doesn't work with all media. It works fine with audio players and YouTube. It doesn't work with the MLB app when I'm listening to radio broadcasts of games on it. It doesn't work with the ESPN app either. This is probably because they're live streaming sources. But my main reason to even pause audio when I take my headphones off is so the audio isn't leaking out and being distracting and this won't help with that. They could have just stopped the live streaming sources and have them restart it live. Battery life: 30 hours is what Sony claims. I got 23.5 hours with AAC, ANC on, no multipoint. 23 hours and 10 minutes with ACC, ANC on, multipoint on (Note 10+, Tab S6) I screwed up my tests with LDAC time and time again, and it's super annoying to start over from scratch so I apologize for the poor test but I got 60% after 14 hours and 40 minutes with LDAC and ANC on. So perhaps on LDAC, I can get the claimed battery life of 30 hours. Battery is reported in intervals of 10% so you'll never see any reports of battery life in between them like 97% or 55%. Sony claims 10 minutes of charge gives you 5 hours of battery life. My tests never got anything close to that. Using a 3.0A charger for 10 minutes I got: With LDAC, ANC on: 1 hour 55 minutes With AAC, ANC on: 1 hour 22 minutes Charging from 0%-100% does take about 3 hours (sometimes less, sometimes slightly longer) **Neutral** XM4 has Speak-to-chat which allows the headphones to pause your audio and allow you to hear outside noise. It just won't work they way most want it to in real life though. It does an excellent job at not triggering with anyone else's voice but yours. But any sound you make activates it. So no singing along. I find myself turning this feature off. **The Bad** Loss of AptX support. I hoped for AptX low latency but instead they got rid of it altogether. Bad news for older Android devices that can't upgrade to Oreo. No USB-C audio. **Concerns** Build: Plastic construction is like how it was on XM3; feels cheap. May creak after a while. Remains to be seen. **Conclusion** Great option for Apple users since LDAC and AptX is no concern, and for new buyers that don't own XM3. Poor value to upgrade from XM3 if you don't care for LDAC or multipoint.