Sony WF-1000XM4 : Taking Back The Crown!

all right guys so today's video we finally get to check out the brand new sony wf-1000x m4s now this is easily my most anticipated earbud for this year seeing how the xm3s has pretty much been my everyday earbud since it came out two years ago but sony came in with a different approach with these in fact they just redesigned the earbuds in the case where they are much smaller than the first gen they also decided to just design their own integrated processor which now has improved the noise cancelling but it's also now added ldac support which in my opinion is a huge step forward for earbuds to finally start really competing with a lot of over-the-ear headphones but one thing sony also did was hike up the price fifty dollars from the original price of the first gen so now they come in retailing at 280 which puts them with the exact same price tag as the bose quietcomfort earbuds so we need to check out what all comes inside the box we need to see all of the new features check out how it sounds and see if it's actually worth that 280 price tag now i do want to say right off the bat the first thing that you're going to want to do is download sony's app and in my opinion sony has one of the best apps when it comes to working with earbuds or headphones there's a bunch of different things that you can do because sony has 360 audio if you're going to be using it with title or different services like that they also have an air tightness test where it basically will send some signals to your ears to make sure that your earbuds have the right seal and that's important because you want to make sure that the active noise canceling is working the best that it can now some other things that the app does is it does have some pre-built eq options in there you can also tweak the eq settings yourself it does have the adaptive sound feature where the earbuds will kind of adjust its sound based on the environment that you're in now also within the app this is where you can turn on the dse extreme mode now this is what allows the earbuds to upscale your audio but you also need to go in and set your priority for sound and not connection if you're wanting to take advantage of the ldac support now as far as the technology the earbuds have these are actually using bluetooth 5.2 and on top of having that ldac support it also has aac and sbc so there is no aptx support on these but i did not hear any kind of compression with my audio i also did not have any connection issues and another thing i like about these is sony is using the connection that sends a bluetooth signal to both earbuds separately so it doesn't have it where one earbud is necessarily relying on the other and that just helped improve the connection on these and again i just had no issues when it came to that now if you're looking to use these with different types of media i am glad to say that i did not have any kind of lag when it came to movies or videos and i also didn't experience any kind of lag when it came to gaming and in my opinion that's impressive because these don't actually have a low latency or a gaming mode that you can switch them into now as far as connecting these when you first open the lid if you are using an apple device you do have to go in and just manually pair these but these actually have google's fast pair service and it actually has windows as well so if you're trying to connect these to a windows 10 device or your android phone it simply just has the connection pop up on the screen as if you had a pair of air pods with an iphone and it just makes it very easy to connect and then it will also show your battery status level at the top basically where your notifications are located so i do like this feature it just makes things feel like it just works very well together and it's just nice to be able to always see what battery life is on your earbuds and on your case now one thing that is disappointing about this pair is they did not add the multi-point connection basically where you can be connected to two different bluetooth devices at the same time so you know if you're wanting to listen to your laptop via bluetooth and then a phone call comes in you would just be able to switch to both of these very easily and it doesn't have that type of connection and again that's disappointing because it is something that they have on the wh 1000xm4s which is their over-the-ear version now as far as using these outdoors uh one thing that was pretty disappointing about the first gen is it didn't have any kind of ip rating so for a pair that you were spending 200 plus dollars on you really didn't feel safe about using them outdoors but luckily with the brand new xm4s they have bumped it up to an ipx4 rating now that is still kind of like at the bottom as far as protection against water but you'll be fine as far as rain and splashes and light sweat but this is still not a pair that you would want to submerge into water now another new feature that they added to these which they actually do have on their headphones is the new speak to chat feature so if you start talking to somebody the earbuds will actually recognize that you're talking and it will turn your music down so that you're able to hear who you're talking to and also be able to hear yourself so it kind of switches over into an ambient mode and i like this because i also liked it when i tested it in the galaxy buds pro and again i also like this feature in the headphone version of the xm4s so now let's talk about the noise canceling and the ambient mode itself because this is going to be the huge selling point uh and with the 280 dollar price tag this is immediately gonna get compared to the bose quietcomfort earbuds which i honestly thought had the best noise canceling when it came to earbuds but i can now say after testing the sony's i would give them the slight edge over the quiet comfort buds i feel like they do a slightly better job of blocking out higher tones like people talking uh it's almost kind of eerie how quiet things can get and a huge bonus about it is you don't hear any kind of hiss and it doesn't have any pressure when it comes to the noise canceling now as far as the ambient mode this is a feature i also think they nailed because although it still does kind of have a slight digital sound when it pulls everything in it still does a really good job to making it feel like you don't have your earbuds in so it's easy to carry on conversations it's easy to hear traffic and things around you and if you want to you can go into the app and actually just use the slider to kind of tell it how much of your outside surroundings you want to come in and again this is another feature that i like because sometimes you just don't want to hear everything you want to be able to just hear just enough in case somebody's trying to get your attention now as far as what you get inside the box which speaking of the box the the packaging is much smaller and simpler this time around uh and personally i think for 300 i would have liked a little bit better of an unboxing experience but i do understand they're trying to be eco-friendly so i get what they're trying to do but outside of that as far as what actually comes inside the box this is also an area that surprised me i am one that normally likes to use silicone ear tips i'm not the biggest fan of foam ear tips it's just a personal preference which again everybody kind of has their own taste as far as what they like but sony this time decided to only include what they're calling polyurethane ear tips so they're saying that it's actually a mix between silicone ear tips and foam ear tips but i'm going to go ahead and say this now they basically act like foam ear tips so i wasn't a fan of this at first in fact i didn't actually like the way that they fit it first you have to make sure to squeeze the ear tips put them in your ear and allow them to just kind of expand and fit into your ear the way that they need to so it took me a little while to switch between these i even went and grabbed the silicone pair off my xm3s and slapped them on here just to see the sound difference and i can tell you depending on what ear tips you use it will make a difference when it comes to the sound that's coming out of these now as far as anything else they've included in the box it does come with a usbc cable and this time the case on the xm4s is a qi wireless charging case so if you don't want to keep up with the charging cable you could just come in drop this on any wireless charger and it will start charging and speaking of the charging battery life is also very impressive on this pair because if you decide to use these just with the noise cancelling on all the time you're able to get eight hours of battery life on the earbuds with around 24 hours using the case but you can also just decide to use these with the noise cancelling off and if you do that you can actually squeeze out about 12 hours of battery life on the earbuds and around 36 hours using the case and if you do happen to pick the ear buds up and they are dead these also have the fast charge feature where a five-minute charge will get you about an hour's worth of use so now moving over to looking at the actual case itself uh the case is much smaller this time around you can see it's actually a noticeable difference in fact i think sony says it's like 40 smaller uh and you can definitely tell this one's easily pocketable it does have like a matte finish to it but it's very smooth you can see the sony logo up top you can see the usbc input on the back for charging and then up front you actually have a notification bar and that way it just allows you to see how much battery life is on the case it will also turn on whenever your earbuds are in pairing mode and i do like the overall design now when it comes to checking out the earbuds this in my opinion is the biggest design difference between the first gen i mean obviously the case is much smaller but the earbuds from the first gen did not stay in a lot of people's ears very well because it had a lot of the weight of it on the outside which was where the body was and the controls and all of that stuff so a lot of the weight of them especially if you were doing anything active made it very easy for them to just pop out and i can definitely say with the new pair they fit in my ears much better i didn't have any kind of issues with the moving i never felt like they were going to fall out now as far as the controls on this pair i am glad that you're able to go into the app and switch to different control options because when the xm3s came out they didn't have volume control and that's always disappointing but what is disappointing about this pair is out of the box this one doesn't have volume control either you have to go into the app and they have their controls actually grouped as a category so out of the box the right side of the earbud will allow you to play pause skip your tracks forward go backwards and the left ear actually allows you to switch over into your noise canceling mode or ambient mode but to actually have volume control you have to go in and basically sacrifice your ability to switch to noise canceling and ambient mode because you're grouping the volume control options to that left ear so i'm hoping through a firmware update maybe they can just break it down where you can choose specifically what control you want on each earbud but as far as also being able to play and pause the earbuds do have the proximity sensors so as soon as you take them out of your ears it will auto pause and then it just resumes once you put them back in now as far as you guys that like to use your earbuds individually you'll be happy to know that you can use either the left or the right and then as far as the microphone on the xm4s this is another area they definitely improved it seems like everything is much clearer they also added bone conducting sensors so that on top of the microphones these sensors also know that it's actually you talking so it knows that any other type of noise it's trying to block those out and so i just feel like it did a really good job of focusing in on my voice and blocking out anything else that was around me but you guys can be a judge by listening to a test here all right guys so here is a mic test using the xm4s i feel like these are much improved over the xm3s they're still not as good as the mics on the pair of airpods pros but it is still much improved and i think for phone calls it's going to be fun but this is what it would sound like if you were to take a call and so now here is the mic test with a crowd noise being played which you can hear here and so this is what it would sound like if you were to take a call publicly so now let's talk about the sound because with sony's new integrated processor and their new drivers and diaphragms i can easily say these have a different sound signature than the xm3s and you're either going to love or hate that but the huge plus is you can always go in sony's app and play around with the eq options and really get these to sound how you want to and i had to do this because out of the box i didn't like the sound that they had i felt uh like it was pretty warm and actually kind of dull because they had the treble pulled back quite a bit and they didn't even have the bass pumped up to where it just had that really impactful feel it just didn't really wow me out of the box but once i went into the app and played around with the custom eq settings i got it to sound the way that i wanted which i will show you right here the settings that i changed them into just in case you're curious about which sound signature that i like but once i did that the bass definitely has a tight punch it's not as loose or boomy as it was in the xm3s so if you are a bass head you might actually prefer the sound that comes out of the xm3s but the sound on the xm4s is definitely a lot richer and more detailed you're able to get a pretty good balance overall but you can get these to sound pretty dynamic but you just can't get the bass to have that subwoofer type feel now the mids on these i felt like were fantastic you can tell it's boosted slightly forward but being able to hear male or female vocalists or guitars and things like that it never got muddy it never got lost in the mix so there's just excellent detail when it came to that and same thing with the treble the treble has a nice clean tone to it it can get fairly bright but it's not a treble that gets close to being harsh so if you do like that extremely harsh type treble and you like that really really boomy bass this is not the pair for that you can tell that sony is toning it down in a way where you can get the treble to a certain level and the bass to a certain level where it really does stand out but one is not going to completely out do the other so it keeps it a little better balanced so my overall opinion on these is they're an excellent product overall the sound is incredible the noise canceling is incredible i do wish that they gave me different ear tip options out of the box i also feel like the controls are just still not right i feel like you should be able to tell each earbud what you want it to do and not just have things grouped in but outside of that they tuned these in a much better way than the xm3s it is comparable to a lot of over-the-ear headphones which is impressive on a pair of earbuds noise canceling i don't see anything that can compete with them the quiet comfort buds are very close but these don't cause that vacuum feel and you don't hear any kind of hiss or any kind of noise around you which again is very impressive but guys that's my video on the brand new sony wf-1000xm4s thank you so much for checking out this video thank you so much for checking out all the other videos and as always make sure to stay tuned for more

Channel: Gamesky

Views: 73,634

Rating: 4.9147801 out of 5

Keywords: sony, wf-1000xm4, wf1000xm4, true, wireless, earbuds, tws, anc, active, noise, cancelling, new, mic, test, gamesky, review, apple, android, ambient, transparency, bass, bose, quiet, comfort, buds, ipx4, water, resistant, improved

Id: JMLdrgb-2oA

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021