Playfulness with AI and unnecessary features or not, at the end of the day they are still primarily headphones that want to shine with their audio quality. And they certainly can, if you include Bluetooth as a primary usecase context. Of course, there are better sounding wired alternatives for the same price, but they may not have ANC or be as comfortable.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I use Spotify “Very High” Quality Streaming and meetings with Microsoft Teams in my day job as test scenarios and here the WH-1000XM4’s do really well. Especially if you enable “LDAC”, Sony’s proprietary higher bandwidth transmission standard in the Bluetooth settings of modern smartphones, or connect the headphones directly via jack, they can almost compete with headphones-only in their price range.
Of course, the sound is not as analytical as studio monitors, since this is supposed to be more of a lifestyle product for everyone. The bass tones are a bit more accentuated, but still relatively tight and do not interfere. The transition to the mid-tones, which are also more strongly emphasized, is very smooth, so that especially voice and bass-intensive music pieces are really fun.
The high frequencies are a bit more restrained, but sound clean and almost without distortions even at high volumes. Here one could perhaps perceive a small improvement with DSEE Extreme, although probably my source medium is not sensitive enough here. The audio quality is really worth listening to, although this was also true for the predecessor.
Unfortunately, when used as a headset, feelings are a bit more mixed, especially in conjunction with Windows’ Bluetooth driver stack. Even with the most modern Bluetooth standards, there is still a noticeable delay in playback of an estimated 500 ms. Half a second may not sound like much at first, but it makes all real-time applications noticeably more difficult.
Online meetings are usually associated with higher latencies anyway, and with Bluetooth headphones on the receiving end, you are definitely the participant with the longest line. Accordingly, unpleasant situations, where people interrupt each other, occur more often. And mind you, this already occurs in the “headphone” mode of the Bluetooth connection, i.e. where the integrated microphone is not used at all and the Bluetooth connection only transmits in one direction.
I can’t recommend the “Headset” mode at all, as you have latencies on the outward and return directions, the audio bandwidth and thus quality is effectively halved, and the integrated microphone is at the limit of what is reasonable for other callers in all scenarios except a phone booth.
Another thing I can’t recommend is pairing two devices at the same time. In theory, the headphones always try to switch intelligently to the device that is currently playing something, but in practice you are thrown out of a meeting every time a notification pops up on your phone. And even if two PCs are connected at the same time, switching seems anything but intelligent – keyword autoplay.
And even if you disable the feature and only one PC is connected, sometimes it just won’t transfer audio. As a workaround, you then have to change the audio device from “headphone” to “headset” and back again and then it works again, but with the fourth generation of a product you could expect such features to be more mature by now.
Who now thinks: “There’s surely a firmware update!”, I have to answer with “yes and no”. At the very bottom of the app in the “System” tab, there is a menu item for this, but you cannot actively search for firmware updates here. Sony probably wants to imitate the hip lifestyle of Apple here and deny the user the decision when which update is installed. And even after two days of use, a popup finally popped up with a supposed firmware update, I couldn’t see any improvement in behavior. Too bad.
As a long-time user of the previous model, I have to say clearly, the WH1000-XM4 are definitely not an upgrade, at most a sidegrade, and at an MSRP of 379 Euros, unfortunately a questionable choice. Unfortunately, the competition in the ANC market is asleep and Sony already had a real cash cow on its hands with the WH1000-XM3. So it’s no wonder that they continue to try to milk this with new glossy features and charge the proud price of a market leader for it.
To make up for almost no improvements in critical areas like Bluetooth latency, app operation, pairing and switching devices with features that probably no one asked for, to seemingly remove individual features like the manual Transparency Mode altogether and then charge an almost 50% higher price for it, that’s a really bold move.
The decision to stay with the predecessor model WH-1000XM3 was therefore very easy for me. And it’s just as easy for me to give a clear recommendation for the predecessor model WH-1000XM3, especially if you can get it relatively cheap at the clearance price of under 200 Euros, and against the current model from today’s test WH-1000XM4.
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