Sony 1000X M3 Review: Supreme noise canceling

Sony seizes the title for best noise-canceling cans with a winning redesign

here’s an enthusiastic “It’s a Sony” sticker on a kitchen wall in my childhood home. I put it there more than 20 years ago when my parents brought home a big-screen Sony TV and an accompanying Sony VCR. Since that day, I’ve owned a Walkman cassette player and a Walkman phone, a PlayStation, a NEX mirrorless camera, and an illogical desire for VAIO laptops. Like any child of the ‘90s, I grew up with Sony’s name being synonymous with the most desirable technology. This is why it’s such a nostalgic pleasure for me to today be reviewing a new Sony product that is the undeniable best in its category.

The Sony 1000X M3 over-ear, noise-canceling headphones are the third iteration of Sony’s already great 1000X series. The original 1000Xs cost a cent under $400 and were instantly among the best in their class. Sony seemed to find little room for improvement with its secondgen 1000X M2s, so it chopped $100 off the price and polished up a couple of technical aspects — though that came at the cost of some excitement in their sound. Just as it seemed as though Sony would slip behind the rapidly improving competition, however, the 1000X M3s arrive and rectify almost every issue the series has had so far, while splitting the cost difference between its predecessors with a sensible $349 price.

Sony got two things very right with its first-gen 1000X headphones: the noise canceling and the fit. That’s why I find it surprising that the company has gone for a major redesign with its M3 generation: the physical design didn’t seem in need of much tweaking. But everything that Sony has changed has been for the better. It takes courage to tinker with a popular design and skill to actually

improve on it.

EVERY CHANGE

SONY MADE HAS BEEN FOR THE BETTER

Some 1000X M1 and M2 users had complained about the headband being susceptible to cracking (an issue I never encountered in months of contented use of those headphones), and they’ll be comforted to know Sony’s design shakeup has delivered a new headband with more padding. The updated headband has a more oblong shape than previously, which makes the headphones more discreet by fitting them closer to the wearer’s head. Even when they’re not being worn, the 1000X M3s are easier to grip and tote around because of their narrower shape, plus they still collapse down to fit into the provided compact carrying case.

Somehow, Sony has reduced the weight of its latest 1000Xs while increasing the battery life. With noise canceling turned on, Sony now claims 30 hours of endurance, a full 50 percent more than the previous 20 hours. Even as someone who deals with the constant improvement of tech on a daily basis, I find this massively impressive. More on battery life later, but the new lighter weight truly elevates Sony’s headphones to the absolute top tier for comfort, whether you’re talking wired or wireless over-ear models. Bose’s QuietComfort 35s endure in popularity in large part because they’re so effortless to wear, and Sony goes that one notch higher.

When I reviewed the 1000X M2s, I noted that I wore them without a hint of discomfort for a full five-hour trip, and the M3s are even less intrusive. Sony has made the space for your ear inside the M3 pad a little deeper, and the pads themselves are designed to distribute pressure evenly. I’ve used these headphones across three different two-hour flights in the past week, and my colleague Chaim Gartenberg (who wears glasses) also found them exceedingly comfortable on the eight-hour journey from New York to Berlin. In fact, there’s not a member of the Verge staff that’s tried these headphones without falling in love with their fit and feel.

Design critiques are hard to find, but I still have a few to offer. One is that the headband’s sizing adjustment slips out of position easily. If you’re super pedantic about setting your ideal fitting and never wanting it to change, that might irritate you. You don’t, however, have to be punctilious to be annoyed by the blue status LED on the left ear cup: this is a remnant of Bluetooth headphones of yore, and I’ve no idea why Sony keeps putting it on its l at est headphones. Beyerdynamic recently showed off a much smarter design that put the LEDs on the inside of the ear cups. And the final issue I came up against with the 1000X M3s is that they do heat up and get sweaty on a warm summer’s day. This is the one aspect where I think Bose’s more airy QC35s have the edge over Sony and most of the rest of the competition.

PHYSICAL BUTTONS

AND SWITCHES >

TOUCH CONTROLS

I don’t expect everyone to agree with me on this point, but Sony’s touch controls remain the same as they ever were, and I remain fundamentally opposed to them. They’re reasonably functional: swipe up and down for volume, forward and back for track change, and double-tap the middle to pause, play, or pick up a call on your connected phone. The problem comes in when you’re rocking out to some track and you want to raise the volume but accidentally fast-forward to the next song. I did that more than once. There’s also a slight lag to the headphones recognizing double taps, leading to a recurring split-second of uncertainty anytime I want to control playback. Touch controls on headphones: cool when they work, infuriating when they don’t.

We have to talk about Sony’s noise canceling. It’s unreal. It’s like noise insulted Sony a long time ago and Sony retreated to its dojo for many years, trained hard, and then came back to kick noise’s butt. Bose, Sennheiser, AKG, Bowers & Wilkins, Bang & Olufsen — name any company that produces noise-canceling headphones, and I guarantee you that its noise canceling is not as good as Sony’s. There’s a new dedicated chip just for processing the noise canceling inside the M3s, and I’m convinced that chip alone is worth the price of admission with these new 1000Xs.

THE NEW HIGH-WATER MARK FOR NOISE-CANCELING PERFORMANCE Some headphones, I wear because I have to. (I know, it’s a tough job I have!) Others, even when I’m reviewing them, I just wear because I enjoy them. With the Sony 1000X M3s, the latter is universally true. They even nudged out my AirPods, which are the buds I usually opt to wear when I’m tired and intolerant of any discomfort in fit or sound.