Sony WF-H800 Truly
Excellent in-ears with some serious sibling rivalry.
You’ll be pleased to know that the h.ear in 3 retains everything that makes Sony’s personal audio products truly excellent – the sound quality.
Like their over-ear counterpart, we rate the WF-1000XM3 as the best true wireless in-ears you can buy right now, so the fact that these fresh WF-H800 h.ear in 3 earbuds don’t quite hold up to them certainly doesn’t spell defeat.
As the name suggests, these new true wireless earbuds are part of Sony’s h.ear range, which sits beneath the flagship 1000X series in terms of pricing, and focuses more on giving listeners a unique array of colours and styles to better express themselves aesthetically.
The main strength that the h. ear in 3 boasts over its noisecancelling Sony sibling is in its design – both aesthetically and practically.
It’s likely clear by now that the h.ear in 3’s various colour options are something of a selling point. It’s the first thing mentioned on the official Sony website, and rightfully so – for those seeking a repreive from the black or silver options of almost every other audio product, the vibrant offerings here are refreshing.
There’s five options in total, one of which is purely black if you’d prefer the discrete look, but the other four offer a variety of colour combinations and some nice speckled textures to make them unique.
The charging case is more compact than that of the WF1000XM3’s, but unfortunately this comes with a significant hit to the reserve battery life – 8 hours down from 18.
We’re thankful to see that you can still fast-charge the case via the USB-C port, injecting 70 minutes of playback time with only 10 minutes of charging, but the diminished backup battery reserve is a bit of a shame
On that note, we’re not too fussed that these ‘buds don’t sport noise-cancelling abilities because the in-ear form factor tends to create enough of a seal to offer decent passive isolation anyway, but we are miffed that the lacking headline feature didn’t also come with more of a price reduction.
You’ll be pleased to know that the h.ear in 3 retains everything that makes Sony’s personal audio products truly excellent – the sound quality. With direct comparisons, we couldn’t tell the difference in sound between these and the WF-1000XM3, which is to say they’re some of, if not the, best sounding in-ears on the market right now.
All the Sony bells and whistles are found here too, like the Digital Sound Enhancement Engine (DSEE HX), which essentially upscales compressed audio formats, as well as all the EQ options found in the companion Sony Headphones Connect app. Sony’s latest true wireless in-ears, the WF-H800 h.ear in 3, are up against some tough competition from their own WF-1000XM3 siblings and, for the most part they seem to lose out – but there’s still a place for these colourful ‘buds.