FIRST TEST SONY WF-1000XM4
Every bud ear’s happy nowadays With so many fine active noise-cancelling true wireless rivals around, Sony has hit back by making its own in-ears smaller and lighter – while piling on the features
£250 / stuff.tv/WFXM4
ony is the reason there are so many brilliant active noise-cancelling true wireless earphones around right now. The company kicked the whole thing off in 2017 with the original WF-1000X buds, and since then everyone else has been playing catch-up – some
[ Words Simon Lucas ]
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with more success than others. And while the WF-1000XM3s were always near the top of the class, in the two years they’ve been on sale everyone from Sennheiser and Bose to Bowers & Wilkins and now Devialet (see p32) has been trying to take the crown. But anyone who expected Sony to just fiddle around the
edges of a proven design is going to be surprised. The WF-1000XM4 is Sony’s latest demonstration of the state of the art, and it’s an entirely new design, fresh from the ground up. The earbuds themselves are smaller and lighter than before (7.3g per bud) and the charging case they live in is fully 40% more compact than the old
model. The packaging is reduced too, and it’s now all paper-based and recyclable. Despite reducing the physical dimensions, though, Sony has been able to include a stack of new features – from adaptive noise-cancellation to fast pairing for Android and Windows. All the buds have to do now is sound better than all their rivals…
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