Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Sony WH-1000XM4 Review: The Final Form!”.
What’S up mkbhd here, sony wh-1000xm4: these are those and you couldn’t tell just by looking at them, because they look almost identical to the mark iii’s from the last generation, but that’s totally fine, because no one really had any major complaints with the mark iii’s. At least i didn’t, i crowned them, my active noise cancellation kings, but now here they are, these are the mark fours. They are the same price 349 and sony smartly took the. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it approach and basically just addressed all the small little requests that people like me had with the last generation.
It’S like they lined up all their little nitpicks and knocked them all down. So, okay, what was left to improve? Well number. One my biggest request was multiple device support and it took them two years, but they finally did it and they’ve added multiple device support to the mark iv. So the ability to pair these headphones actively to more than one device at once. It might sound like kind of a niche thing, but it’s such a big deal.
If you have your headphones paired to your computer and your phone at the same time or your tablet and your phone at the same time, you’re listening to music on one thing, you get a phone call on the other and it just seamlessly automatically switches. Then you hang up and go back to music and it switches back. It’S just so much better of an experience than going into bluetooth settings unpairing, then repairing manually every time. So that’s number one and it’s actually been improving over time.
When i first got these headphones, it didn’t really work very well at all, but they’ve been getting software updates and through the sony, app they’ve gotten better. So it’s fixed itself up over time and we’ll probably continue to get updates and hopefully keep getting better in the future. So with that by itself to be honest, they probably could have stopped there and i would have been happy.
That’S all. I really wanted, but number two. They also made the noise cancellation better than on the mark iii’s.
Now i crown the mark iii as my active noise cancellation kings, because the noise cancellation and sound quality was so good on them that i picked them over better. Looking better feeling cooler headphones like the surface headphones because of it, and this is better so the mark iv is again sound, incredible super clean and bright and full with all the same noise cancellation controls in the sony app like before all your eq settings. But now the noise cancellation cancels out slightly more of some higher frequencies too. So it’s always been amazing, with low frequency homes stuff, like airplanes and trains and rumbles that you’ve already known.
But now, with things like dishwashers and cars and even people’s voices, it cancels more of those out too now. I can’t necessarily tell a difference immediately between the threes and the fours. As far as noise cancellation, it’s not like a reason to buy the force, but i did notice that typing on my mechanical keyboard, which has brown switches, the clacking was generally canceled out really well and bottom line here is you’re not going to find a better pair Of noise cancellation headphones just as far as pure isolation and sound quality. So if there’s a better one out there, i haven’t found it yet, it’s like being in another dimension, sometimes there’s also technically some very slight physical adjustments to the dimensions too. The cushions are 10 larger, so that’s technically an improvement and also, if you look inside the left, ear cup you’ll see a proximity sensor and that’s for the wear detection feature that i’ll get to in a second but actually believe it or not.
This helps me find, which was the left and right ear cup a little faster, but the one that really matters is the new mics. So the mark iv now has a better mic pattern with five microphones for better call quality and better voice recognition. So i’ve never really thought the microphone quality of wireless headphones.
Was that amazing to begin with, like as long as they work? You can hear my voice, that’s fine, but these actually have five microphones built into them now, which is an improvement, and so apparently they can cancel out background noise is better. You can hear my voice a little bit more isolated. So as long as that’s true, then that’s also nice. If you fire up the sony app there’s again, some nice convenient features in here enabled by the sensors and mics on the headphones.
You may never use these or you may be like me, and use some of them some of the time, but i’ll go in order of coolest to most gimmicky here. So wear detection is unique to the mark. Fours thanks to the added sensor in the left, ear cup. So with that in the sony headphones app, you can tell it to pause music when you take the headphones off and turn the headphones off after they’ve been off of your head for a while to save battery, which is smart, you can also now, while the music Is playing put your hand over the right ear cup like that, and it will drop the music way down turn noise cancellation off pass through and amplify voices. So in theory, if you want to talk to someone while keeping the headphones on, you don’t want to have to do the whole on off thing. You can just pull one of these and you’re talking to someone, i think, that’s maybe useful, sometimes on public transit or on an airplane.
If we ever get to do that again, if you just want to talk to someone real quick, but as soon as you take your hand off the music comes right back and the noise cancellation is back on and you’re right where you left off. So that’s all right and it’s fast like i think that makes a big difference to actually using the feature. If i put my hand there and you have to wait a second for it to kick in, that would be kind of disappointing. As soon as i put my hand there boom i’m listening to people, but then maybe the most gimmicky feature is the speak to chat function which basically will use the mics, and i guess other sensors in the headphone to be able to tell when i start speaking And when i do start speaking, it will pause my music turn off noise cancellation and amplify voices, so i’m wearing the headphones listening to music.
I start talking it pauses, the music and now i’m having a conversation through the headphones, and i guess that’s fine. It works, it was surprisingly effective at not accidentally doing it when i wasn’t talking, but you know, if someone walks up to me and starts talking, i go what and then the music pauses and then i’m talking to them. Now the music is paused and i have to play it again or go back into the settings to turn the noise cancellation back on and you can. You can tell it in the settings to turn that automatically off after 15 seconds 30 seconds or 60 seconds, but generally this wasn’t a feature. I found myself wanting to use very much, so you can turn it on, but i turned it off. Overall, though, these are basically my ideal headphones, you know, i think the design could be cooler if it had dials on the side like the surface headphones or maybe some more cool colors like a matte red or something like that, but generally this same matte black understated Design is totally fine with me. The same touch pad on the side. That’S cool the same google assistant or amazon alexa trigger from the custom button on the bottom.
It’S fine, the same case they came with, is also fine. I have a designated place in my backpack for them and there’s just really nothing fundamentally wrong with these headphones at all, and i very much appreciate that about them. So it’s pretty clear. These are great and they’re easy to recommend, but a nice bonus of these existing now is that the mark threes i’ve seen on sale as low as about 250 bucks, so i’ll leave a link to those below as well. They again won’t have multi-point support. So if you don’t need two paired things at once, this could be a nice discount i’ll have that linked below, but again the mark iv is pretty sick. So thank you, sony for making this such an easy review. Thank you to the histogram t-shirt for sponsoring this video shop.mkbhd.com and thank you for watching catch.
You guys, the next one peace .