Sony WH-1000XM4
The king is dead, long live the king.
There’s an unsurprising heir to the wireless, noise-cancelling throne, and while Sony certainly hasn’t strayed far from its regal headphone lineage, the WH1000XM4 is better for it. Quite frankly, it was hard to imagine what could be improved upon when reviewing the forebears to these new cans, but Sony has added enough polish to the WH-1000XM3 crown to keep its gleam intact and add some new precious gems in the process.
From a design sense, very little has perceptibly changed – the lightweight, comfortable, and subtly stylish pair of headphones that you’re used to has returned unscathed, albeit with a tiny bit more padding on the earcups and a touch less on the headband. Battery life remains the same, which is great, but so does the lack of any IP-rating or weather proofing at all.
You won’t be able to see the rest of the improvements as they’re all under the hood, but you’ll certainly encounter them.
Perhaps the most obvious is a retooling of the crown jewel – noise-cancelling. While the M3 already had class-leading ANC, the M4 features an upgraded algorithm on its dedicated QN1 processor along with a brand new Bluetooth SoC (System on Chip) that adjusts the noise-cancelling 700 times every second based on environmental noise picked up through two pairs of external microphones. In practice, this translates to the most thorough noise-cancelling we’ve ever experienced by far. Everything from low traffic rumbles to voice chatter and even wind is comfortably excluded.
A new and genuinely useful feature is Speak to Chat, which automatically pauses your audio and lets in ambient sound when the headphones detect that you’re speaking. This feature, coupled with Quick Attention (hold a hand over your right earcup to let in ambient sound immediately) make for a powerful pair of tools for navigating the outside world.
As for the audio itself, this has also been given an edge over that of its predecessor thanks to Edge-AI and DSEE Extreme processing. These two features offer a more advanced system for upscaling otherwise compressed or low-res audio signals (such as from a streaming service) into something closer to lossless.
Sony’s warm but clear sound signature (a slight but pleasant bass boost and incredible separation and clarity across the board) is present here and sounds gorgeous out of the box, but a five-band EQ is available in the app for further tweaking.
If you already own the WH1000XM3 or manage to find them at an especially good price, they are still exceptional headphones and the improvements in the XM4 might not be worth the cost of upgrading. For everyone else, the best noise-cancelling headphones in the world just got better, and you need them. Harry Domanski