The Review

By Yanai Levy, Nov 2020

Do Bees Have Knees?

These headphones are the complete package for most people. Yes, you can get better sound out of a wired pair hooked up to an amplifier, and yes, you can get noise cancelling for less money or less bulk. But if you want excellent sound, magical quiet, and an attractive design that wouldn’t look funny with a button up shirt, look no further. These are the bee’s knees.

Sony’s previous flagship Bluetooth headphones (also seemingly named after a copy machine) were a hard act to follow. They took their noise-cancellation prowess to a class-leading level, finally eclipsing the established Bose and Sennheiser lineups. This year’s iteration, the XM4s, improve on the XM3s in a few key areas, while not breaking the formula that showed them so much success in the first place.

Charge-Me-Not

Normally, when looking for a pair of Bluetooth cans, you know you are giving up several things. No charging, the best possible audio quality, and the rock-solid connection of a cable. Sony is here to tell you that the XM4s address those points almost to perfection, and they make a damn convincing argument. These headphones have 30 hours of claimed battery life, and they hold up to that number in real-world testing. When you consider that most people only listen to their headphones on their commute, between classes, or while doing menial tasks, those 30 hours stretch into weeks. Yes, you do have to charge them, the batteries aren’t magical. But they need to be charged so infrequently that it is a non-issue, and they charge so quickly that 30 minutes in the car or at your desk buys you nearly another month of listening.

The Meat and Potatoes

So, how do they sound? The main question for any pair of headphones to be sure. For the average person, these are probably the best headphones they have ever heard. I listened to tracks like Pentatonix’s Hallelujah, Logic’s Man I Is, and Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man while testing. High frequencies are crisp without being harsh, and do not get diminished when there is a lot going on during a given track. The midrange is “forward” enough to be clearly present, but without that hollow sound that too much midrange can have on less balanced headphones. The bass is absolutely skull shaking when it needs to be, but always remains clear and controlled. These are bassy headphones, and electronic music listeners will love them, though a classical track does not sound out of place through them. If I had to criticize them at their price point, I’d say that their soundstage is a bit narrow. That is to say that the perceived space they give you seems constricted, but that is partly to do with their sides being closed to isolate you from the world, rather than open and obtrusive like true audiophile headphones. On that subject, it is possible to buy higher quality audiophile headphones for the price, just not ones with features like noise cancellation or the battery life that the XM4s manage to include.

Is This Thing On?

What makes the 350-dollar price tag worth it on these headphones is their incredible noise cancelling. Noise cancelling is an active process, as opposed to the passive noise isolation you get on most earbuds or headphones with thick padding. Noise cancelling uses multiple microphones on the headset to create sound that is exactly opposite to the sound around you, therefore cancelling it out to your ear. This is an immensely complex process and requires the headphones to incorporate a serious processor in them just to figure out that counter-tone. The results are seriously impressive though. Steady sounds like a plane, bus, air conditioner, or a fan are almost eliminated, to the point where you might need to check by touch if your appliances are running. They struggle more with irregular sound, like a person talking or construction noises, but still lower their volume as if you were standing 10-20 feet farther away than you really are.

Better than Bluetooth

Sony’s solution to the relatively poor audio quality of Bluetooth was to develop their own audio streaming standard (codec), called LDAC. LDAC allows for nearly 3 times the data transmitted by Bluetooth and is sufficient to get high-resolution audio certification even when operating wirelessly. To date, it is the only wireless Bluetooth encoding solution to get that recognition. The headphones can be used in wired mode as well if you want the absolute highest quality music possible out of them. However, you will most likely run into the quality limitations of your music streaming service before the LDAC connection is not good enough. They also support multiple devices connected at one time, with a high-quality Bluetooth chip so you rarely, if ever lose your connection. In months of use, they have never once dropped the connection unexpectedly.

Up and Down, All Around

The controls on the XM4s are touch based. To pause, you tap the right earcup once, to skip forward and back you slide your finger forward or back. Volume is dealt with similarly, swiping up or down on the right earcup. Interestingly, they have a gesture where you cup your hand over an earcup, and they use their microphones to pump in external sound in situations like someone talking to you in your office. A nifty, but likely not often used feature. Touch controls have a bad rep in the tech industry, with people usually preferring hardware buttons like the ones on the Sony’s main competitors, the Sennheiser PXC550 and Bose 700s. However, after a few days of use, the touch controls seem easier to use than fiddling with tiny buttons you can’t see under your ear. They interpret touches well and are generally quick to respond. The previous version of the headphones, the XM3s, had a problem in cold weather, where the touch controls would get inputs at random, but Sony says those issues are fixed in this version. They haven’t been out long enough to do cold weather testing yet, but we’ll take them at their word for now.

All-Rounder Champion

If you value sound, quality noise cancellation, and design, but none of those things exclusively, these headphones are nigh impossible to beat as of time of writing. I can’t wait to see what Sony do on the next model to top these.