This category is the most straightforward and easiest to measure. As with every product review, we subjected each set of truly wireless earbuds to a constant 75dB(SPL) output and compared the results. A single charge of the Apple AirPods Pro supplies 5.1125 hours of playback with noise cancelling on, while the Sony WF-1000XM3 supplies just 4.76 hours of playback with noise cancelling on. Granted, both durations are impressive given how small the batteries are and how taxing ANC technology is, but the AirPods are the clear winner when it comes to standalone battery life.
Sony’s WF-1000XM3 are AirPods with noise cancellation
The Sony WF-1000XM4 takes everything about the XM3 and improves upon it. Sony added an IPX4 rating to the new noise cancelling earbuds, much better active noise cancelling, and a sleeker, more compact design. Oh, and you get a host of memory foam ear tips with the Sony WF-1000XM4 and can test the fit in the mobile app.
During our testing, we found the Sony WF-1000XM3 wireless earbuds last around 6 hours on one charge. If you forgo noise cancellation altogether, you can claim back another couple of hours, which combined with the charging case, gives you 24 hours in total.
I'm fine with that because the WF-1000XM3 has a very different design from the original WF-1000X. It's a totally new headphone with a new charging case (the earphones come in black and beige color), new drivers, new touch controls and a new QN1e processor that improves both the noise-canceling effect and the sound quality. They use Bluetooth 5.0.
It's important to note that with these earphones it's crucial to get a tight seal to get optimal sound quality and optimal noise canceling. As with the Beats Powerbeats Pro, you will likely be disappointed by the performance without a tight seal.
A note about the charging case. It's a little bulky but does have a nice premium feel to it and the buds are easy to get in and out of it. Battery life has improved from the WF-1000X. At moderate volume levels, Sony says you can get up to 6 hours with noise canceling on and up to 8 hours with it off (my tests confirmed those numbers). There's also USB-C charging, with a 10-minute quick-charge feature giving you 90 minutes of battery life. The charging case delivers three full charges on the go.
I thought these performed pretty well as a headset for making calls, though they weren't as good as I hoped. They do have some noise reduction that helps cut down the background noise when making calls outside and I could hear callers just fine. But the callers I spoke with said they weren't all that wowed with how I sounded ("OK" seemed to be the operative word). Perhaps Sony can improve call quality with a future software upgrade, but the early unit I was using fell a little short of expectations based on how high-tech these earphones seem.
I was more impressed with the generally rock-steady wireless connection -- I experienced minimal Bluetooth hiccups and dropouts -- and noise-canceling performance. The noise canceling isn't as strong as what you get with the over-ear WH-1000XM3, but it's a significant step up from what was in the earlier WF-1000X. To maintain more consistent noise canceling, I turned off the "adaptive sound control" in the app and manually set the noise canceling to the highest level and left it there, particularly when I was outside. To be clear, the noise canceling isn't on par with what you get from Sony or Bose's full-size headphones, but if you have a tight seal, it does work well -- it ably muffled a lot of noise on the streets and in the subway.
Sony's WF-1000XM3 are the clear winners when it comes to battery life. You get six hours of playback as standard, while the case has enough power for an extra three charges, giving a total of 24 hours when using Bluetooth and noise-cancelling together. Turn off the noise-cancelling and the battery life jumps to eight hours, with the case bumping it up to an impressive total of 32 hours.
With a good seal, listening without music playing and active noise cancellation activated, you can still hear little noises, but as soon as the music comes on, the world fades away pretty quickly.
My experiences walking around the city with noise cancellation on and music up to a moderate 50% volume on my iPhone washes away most if not all of the chaotic urban pitter patter, bar for some fly-by busses or fire truck sirens whizzing past. For the most part, the city is an eerie, quiet bliss.
The case itself is black with a matte finish, topped with a rose gold coloured lid. Sony advertises up to 24 hours of total listening time, which I've found to be pretty close to the mark. It breaks down into 6 hours on the buds themselves and 3 extra charges using the case with noise cancelling on. Without it, the total hour count goes up to 32 - far more than what you get with even Airpods.
While the options for true wireless earbuds with active noise-cancelling are scant, it turns out the only two legit options also happen to be two of the best in the category. Those two are the AirPods Pro and Sony WF-1000xM3.
With such great noise cancellation technology, one would figure the WF-1000xM3 to be a great calling headset. Lower your expectations, drastically. The several callers I spoke with complained about my voice dropping every few seconds, along with some muffling on my end when chatting in high-volume areas. Something else you might encounter is the mic randomly muting when picking up calls, though the latest firmware update seemed to fix that problem.
At $229.99, they undercut Sony's noise-canceling headphones by almost $120. They also slot the WF-1000XM3 in-between a set of Apple AirPods 2 and Beats' Powerbeats Pro, meanwhile. That's competition I'm well familiar with.
As for voice calls, unlike their predecessors, the WF-1000XM3's benefit from ANC there too. Noise suppression, meanwhile, helps isolate the frequencies of your voice from background sound. It worked well in a busy airport, callers reporting that they could hear me with no problems, while I could hear them just fine. Even when background noise got obnoxiously high, though my voice apparently sounded a little processed, what I was saying was still understandable.
Two microphones on each 'bud, combined with Sony's QN1e noise-canceling chip, deliver the goods. I could keep focusing on work, despite a phone conversation going on in the same room, while road noise was so well kept at bay when out walking that I took advantage of the Sony Headphones Connect app's ability to turn down the ANC in order to avoid getting run down by a car I couldn't hear.
There's an optional setting to have the earbuds adjust the ANC levels automatically based on ambient conditions, too; or, you can tap the left control pad to cycle through ANC off, ANC on, or ambient sound mode. Tap and hold the pad and it temporarily allows through external noise, a Quick Attention mode which can be handy if you're on a plane, say, and want to hear an announcement without taking an earbud out.
After hours of listening to music on and off, or just sitting with the earbuds keeping out the ambient noise, I hadn't come close to exhausting them. When you first put each earbud in, they read out their current battery status; you also get a charge gage in the status bar of your iOS or Android device, or on a per-earbud basis in the Headphones Connect app. Unlike with AirPods, however, there's no way to check the battery level of the charging case.
To say I had high expectations for the WF-1000XM3's would be an understatement. What's impressive, then, is that for the most part they've lived up to those hopes. Sony's active noise cancellation is excellent, but better still the earbuds don't rely solely on that to deliver: they also sound great, and have fantastic battery life.
For $229.99, there's a whole lot to like about the Sony WF-1000XM3 wireless noise-canceling earbuds. Excellent musical quality, improved in-call performance, and more flexible Bluetooth combine with comfortable fit and solid battery life. If you want ANC in a wireless earbuds form-factor there's only really one game in town right now, but Sony has put in the effort to make sure that decision doesn't feel like a compromise.
And recently, Apple has shown that it has the skills to pay the bills in this category, too. In a recent launch, Apple revamped its AirPods with a slightly different design, a shorter arm, and some new insides, introducing active noise cancellation and a new system that makes several tunings per second to make the sound a little better for your ears.
However, my experience, backed up by the reviews that I'd read, suggests that the audio quality of these is overall excellent, with noise-canceling doing its thing quite well. The touchpad on the side of each earbud takes some getting used to, a problem which is confounded by the poor app (more on this in a moment).
Sony also offers an app that lets you fine-tune the sound and noise cancellation more precisely than Beats. When you really want to hear all of the nuances of a song without blasting a hole in your eardrum, you kind of have to use a headset like this. I fine-tuned it to my tastes that were a little more bass-heavy than default.
With noise cancelation, I noticed songs sounded warmer, bass felt deeper, and highs were brighter. There's more clarity across all frequencies and I could hear the difference with and without it in noisy places like the streets and subway.
Compared to my second-gen AirPods, which need to be popped back into their charging case by the middle of the day, the WF-1000XM3's often lasted entire 9-5 workdays (without noise cancelation) before needing a recharge.
Both come with wireless charging cases: the Sony case can recharge the earbuds three full charges (up to 24 hours of listening time with noise-cancellation enabled), and Apple states that the charging case brings users over 24 hours of listening time with Active Noise Cancellation on.
Before I jump into the review part, I did want to touch on the part about earbuds for noise cancelling. I have owned the Bose QuietComfort 20i noise cancelling earbuds before and really loved them. The only reason I moved away from them was that phone manufacturers and tablet manufacturers insisted on removing the 3.5mm headphone jack and Bluetooth was more important. Sure, Bose has a Bluetooth upgrade model but I used the Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones for a while and loved the Sony performance so went with the Sony earbuds. 2ff7e9595c
コメント