Sony WH-1000XM4 Review - How Does It Sound?

Official Content
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I don’t normally recommend noise cancelling headphones to people unless they’re in certain environments where this feature is essential. It’s important to remember that many people use headphones on the go, while on transit or in places where there’s a lot of ambient noise. And, for these purposes, noise cancelling headphones may be the best solution. But there are also some issues with noise cancelling tech in general that I often worry about. The first is that in traditional examples, using ANC (Active Noise Cancelling) introduces additional noise floor - kind of like a mild hiss in the background. The second issue is that while effective, the noise cancellation can introduce some artifacts or burbles in the treble. How significant these issues are varies depending on the headphones, but so far this has been an obstacle for me.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://headphones.com/blogs/reviews/sony-wh-1000xm4-review-great-noise-cancelling-but-how-does-it-sound
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Great review! All i read is “stay away from the WH-1000 xm4 if you want good sound unless you need noise canceling!”

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I just got these and am very impressed, especially since you can find these under $200 now days. I got these over the XM5 because they fold into a much smaller case and are easier to travel with. Overall these sound fantastic, very dynamic punchy sound, soundstage is surprisingly good, tonal balance with EQ is good enough when out and about. Biggest issue even after EQ is the midbass bloat, which, if I have enough time to care about it I have enough time to pull up my parametric EQ profile in USB Audio Player Pro and clean things up.

For comparison I have Focal Clear MG, Arya Stealth, ZMF Verite, Mojo 2, Denafrips Ares 12th DAC, etc… so the fact that these sound as good as they do for their use still leaves me impressed.

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