Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Sorry, I can’t hear you with these Sony WH-1000XM4s”.
This video is sponsored by sony, [ Applause, ], one of da vinci’s, most meaningful quotes still holds true. Today. Nothing – and i mean nothing in this world is perfect, but if you want to get close to perfect, you have to pay really close attention to the details and it’s very clear that sony has done just that with the wh 1000 xm force. So for those of you guys that maybe aren’t that familiar with with headphones or sony’s headphones, the mark three of these, so the previous version came out about two years ago and for a large part of its life, it was the noise cancelling king sony’s, been at The noise cancelling game since 1992 and they’ve been perfecting that technology for years it didn’t appear like there was that much to improve on until i got a chance to take a look at the mark, fours and i realized how far ahead these are from the already Really really good mark iii’s, and so like that quote at the beginning about the details.
When you look at the mark fours and if you compare them to the mark iii, you might not notice that much has changed when you start to use these and put them on your head and experience all the small nuanced changes that have got into these headphones. You can appreciate sony perfecting their craft and making an already awesome pair of headphones even better. So, looking at these headphones side by side, it can be pretty easy to not know which one is which, but if you turn the headphones over and you look inside of the ear cups you’ll see, the mark iv actually have a proximity sensor built in.
So you take the headphones off your head. Your music will automatically pause. It’Ll know that your ears aren’t inside of those cups and then obviously the reverse. Whenever you put them back on it’ll, know and they’ll start your music up again, it’s a small change, but one that was really helpful to have you guys might not know this about me.
But when i was little actually eight years old, i had surgery on both of my ears and i have scars in the back so headphones that push my ears on my head tend to get really uncomfortable for me over a longer period of time. So i’m pretty selective about what i wear and so the mark iii’s already pretty comfortable. The mark fours take that kind of to another level, so the ear cups are 10 bigger, there’s more cushion on them, there’s also more padding on the headband as well, so just kind of more comfortable all the way around. They almost sit like a pillow. On top of the ear, instead of sort of pushing your ears, all the way in which i’m really sensitive to, i haven’t been able to wear a lot of headphones for really any time longer than an hour, because it starts to hurt behind my ears and there’s, Like a big clap to multi-device support uh if you’ve used modern headphones, you kind of know the annoyance of. If you want to make a phone call, you got to go to your bluetooth connections pair them again and then repair it against whatever you’re, using before it’s a bit annoying. For me, this has been helpful to connecting to two devices. So generally it’s my laptop and my phone. I can listen to music. My phone rings it’ll automatically switch over to my phone.
I can answer that and then, when i hang up it automatically go back to my music without me having to fiddle uh with settings. So like again, this might seem like a small thing, but it’s a small detail and when you add up all those small little changes, you’ve got something really big all right. So the comfort stuff is all fine and good, but i think the two reasons that anybody’s buying these headphones is for the audio quality and noise cancelling and what sony’s done here is really impressive, and i think the mark iii’s already really good. But you see different with the mark fours.
You can hear a separation between the vocals and the instruments. It’S like a well-mastered song you’re meant to hear every sound in it right. You want to be able to hear those vocals have them be brought to the front. So they’re not lost in the music underneath it with other headphones.
They tend to kind of muddle that sound together the very least kind of create a linear structure where all that sound kind of gets combined. So it just created separation that generally you get when you listen to music in person or when you’re spending crazy amount of money for sort of studio headphones. The audio quality that comes out of these, if you couldn’t tell, is just like really good. So the noise cancelling was so good.
I have been working from home, it’s probably no surprise to you and i talk about it. Often i have three kids, who are also stuck at home because school for them has been at home. So it’s been really hard for me uh to get work done. I love my family if you can guess they’re talkers and they are loud and when i put them on sounds like it may be a bad thing to say. But i couldn’t hear my kids and it was nice because able to focus on my work and i don’t mean that like i could still hear some stuff. In the background i mean i couldn’t hear anything at all, and that is a huge step up.
I think from what the mark threes did. Those had really good noise cancelling but had two microphones, the mark iv sort of take that to 11.. There are now five microphones on there sort of use, all of that noise sampling and all that data. To do an amazing job canceling out noise also, it should do a much better job at some of those sort of monotonous tones.
I can’t test this because i can’t fly anywhere, but things like airplane noise, for example, sort of that hum that you get of an airplane engine. This should almost completely cancel out. So i think hearing, though, is believing so here’s a sample of what the noise cancelling actually sounds like when you’re out and about so these have five microphones and they do a really admirable job of silencing the noise around you.
I’M sitting in front of a babbling brook and with these on and noise cancelling active, i cannot hear that behind me at all and they’re also really good. If you want to take phone calls now, it doesn’t sound quite as good as if you held the phone up to your ear. But if you took a phone call, while you were in a busy airport or in front of a babbling brook, for example, a person on the other end would have no idea, you were somewhere busy, so also the headphone support 360 audio.
We actually did a whole video on 360 audio, but if you don’t know what it is so 360 audio is a hard thing to explain, but 360 video, you know, you’re not limited to just one frame. You can move and experience the world differently. It’S the same thing with 3d audio. Imagine you could have the drums here. You could have horns set up here. You could have your vocalists here and you’re all standing almost in the middle of it.
It’S like a special concert just for you all right. So speaking of, i guess, speaking uh sony’s added a couple ways that you could sort of talk and hear ambient noise about having to take the headphones off, and this is one of my favorite features that was in previous versions of sony headphones. You just put your hand over the right ear cup. You hold it here and then you can hear the ambient noise start to get piped in and that worked really well on the mark threes. But there was a bit of delay before it happened here. On the mark fours, it is crazy, fast, put your hand over it and immediately it sounds like you’re kind of doing this.
You can hear what’s going on around you, you can have conversations while you still have the headphones on your head. It’S a small thing and one you might not use every day when you do use it like you found an airplane and the flight attendant is asking you what you want to drink. It’S real handy to have that option so another way, it’s something new. It’S called speak to chat you can enable it inside of the app and obviously it’ll work with ios or android.
It’Ll actually know that you’re talking and it’ll pause what you’re listening to and pause and always canceling and pipe in the outside noise. You could say sorry what or just say what and it’ll sort of make that happen by time, you’re at the in what it already has the outside noise coming in. So it just lends itself to a more natural conversation to talk to somebody, and you don’t have to worry about holding your hand over your head, something that i liked to have. But i did find myself kind of singing along with music sometimes and then it would cut out and sort of pull in the ambient noise. So you can pick and choose when you want to use it.
I liked it. It was there. So thinking of the app it does, the stuff you’d expect you can customize noise canceling there are certain presets you could set for audio fidelity to make it sound best for you, sony’s been really good at sort of making that app better and better. What is new here, though, is sort of algorithmic learning. So if you turn on location services, the headphones will start to learn what you do and tailor the music experience for you. So headphones will know if you’re, walking and you’re outside in a busy area it’ll automatically turn up the noise canceling. If you’re sitting down in a quiet area, it’ll know that as well and kind of learn what you’re doing and it could sort of make that audio.
Just sound better without you having to do anything at all, there’s also a custom button built in so if you hold it down, for example, it’ll optimize the noise canceling for you, but there’s more than that. Obviously it’s a custom button, so you can customize it. But if you tap, it also will pull up your choice of assistance either. Google assistant or alexa so also like battery life is a big concern.
Here, too uh you’ll get 30 hours of battery life with noise. Cancelling turned on and 10 minutes of charging will give you five hours, so you can go across country flight with essentially 10 minutes of charging and be good to go so the headphones like most modern headphones have over-the-air updates uh. What sony’s doing this is interesting was they’re, making the noise cancelling tech better. So since i’ve had these, i’ve had updates that have made the already really good noise cancelling now sound, even better and with these being sony’s flagship headphones.
I expect that support to continue for the next few years and keep getting those updates. Those upgrades so as good as the headphones are now in a few months. They should be even better.
It’S like headphones are a strange thing to review they’re, not something that you buy all the time you buy a pair and keep them for a few years until there’s a compelling feature like a reason to upgrade, and you look at the mark fours and compare them To the mark iii’s, you don’t necessarily see the changes, but experiencing the headphones and hearing the difference and hearing the noise cancelling and allowing me to do my work and not having to take the time to pair and unpair it. I’M changing devices have made the wh-1000xm4s an important part of my workflow, and it’s kind of made me excited to travel again when i can do that to put these in my bag and experience the audio, i find myself enjoying my music more and be more productive. So, if you’re in the market for new headphones, i think you owe it to yourself to at least check out the latest from sony.
.