Sony WH-1000XM4 Noise-Cancelling Headphones Full Review & Comparison to WH-1000XM3

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The new XM4 comes in a black or silver color option. Both feature the same shiny copper or gold scheme around the ventilation ports and the Sony logo on top of the earcups. Overall, these accents are small but they retain the headphone’s sophisticated look, so we like that not much has changed here. There’s no change to the placement of the buttons either, but the button that was labeled “NC/Ambient” is now labeled “Custom.” In the Sony Headphones app, you can re-program this button to follow the XM3 setup and toggle between noise-canceling and a transparency mode that allows sound in from the outside world. You can also program it to activate Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.

There’s still a headphone jack on the left ear cup and a USB-C port for charging the battery housed inside the right ear cup. Inside the left ear cup, there’s an NFC chip that automatically pairs compatible devices with just by tapping it. The left ear is clearly marked with the letter “L” and the right is distinguished with a red “R.” At Audio Advice, we are big fans of brands that label which ear cup is the left and the right, and Sony makes it straightforward here. The most notable change is behind the left earcup where there’s a proximity sensor. This sensor works with a new feature Sony calls “wear detection,” which senses when you are wearing the headphone so that music pauses or resumes based on the headphone’s wearing status. The earcups swivel and fold just like the previous version so that they fit inside the carrying case with all the included accessories. The foldable structure made the previous version easy to store in a bag and carry around even without the case, so we’re glad to see nothing’s changed on this front.

Active noise-canceling headphones work by intelligently playing with the phase of sound so that incoming sound waves are cancelled out with outgoing waves. A sophisticated system of microphones captures the ambient noise and then the headphone reproduces a precise wave of the same amplitude and frequency that’s out of phase to cancel the ambient wave out.

Sony is one of the best, which is why WH-1000XM3 became an industry leader. There’s a lot of new features to unpack, so we’ll begin with the ones that carry over to the XM4. First, the same great battery life remains unchanged. You still get 30 hours of use with active noise cancellation on and 38 hours when ANC is off. Once the headphones die, you get 5 hours from just a 10-minute charge, which is fantastic. The Personal Noise-canceling Optimization feature also remains unchanged. This takes a series of readings inside and outside your headset for noise-cancellation that’s dynamically tailored for you and your surroundings. This feature helps balance the atmospheric pressure and reduces the “sucking” effect that’s typical in noise cancelling headphones. So, we appreciate seeing this feature again in the new model.

The new WH-1000XM4 also uses the same 40mm drivers as the previous model with Liquid Crystal Polymer diaphragms. So, the premium sound quality of the XM3 across a wide range of frequencies from 4Hz to 40kHz remains unchanged. Sony’s immersive 360 Reality Audio feature is still present, allowing you to hear audio recordings encoded with this format in 3D space like a surround sound experience. Just open the Sony Headphones app on your smartphone to set this up with the music services that support it.

Overall, the XM3 was already the most fun to use noise-cancelling headphones we had ever seen — the new XM4 is even better. For the same price as its predecessor, we think the new Sony WH-1000XM4 is a lot more than a worthy successor to the XM3. If you use noise-cancelling headphones to do any kind of work, we think the performance you get from this more than pays for itself. With so many improvements and useful features, we are really impressed with the XM4. Many of us here at Audio Advice are using these to help us focus at the office and at home.