Sony WH-1000XM4 First Thoughts

My old Plantronic Back Beat Pros bit the dust, so I picked up a new pair of headphones. Those BackBeat Pros were some of the best headphones I’ve ever owned. I bought them back in 2015, and they got me through a lot of cross-country flights. Really like them so far. They fall behind the Back Beat Pros as far as controls go, but everything else is solid.

I’ve had these Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones for a few months now, and continue to be impressed with sound quality and comfort. They easily connect to my iPad and my iPhone, and the battery life has been great. I haven’t let them run long enough to die, but they’ll definitely get through a long plane ride and still have enough juice for the Uber to the hotel.

I like my bass to be a little on the heavy side, and these do well in that department. The Sony app that lets you tweak headphone settings helps with customizing the sound to fit your tastes. I do think there are too many options in the app, and I really don’t use many of the features. I don’t want the headphones to automatically try to guess what I’m doing and set the ambient noise accordingly. If they’re on my head, I don’t want to hear anything else unless I manually set the attention mode.

The only negative I have, and it’s only a negative because the BackBeat Pros did it better, is the attention mode. I could hit a button on the BackBeat Pros and it would simultaneously lower the music volume and fire up the external speakers. Perfect for in-air announcements. The Sony headphones have a similar feature, but I don’t feel it works as well. I’m really just being nit picky, but it’s worth mentioning.

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