Sony WH-1000 XM5 Specs

 

- Hey, what's up, here. Okay, so for the past few years, Sony's flagship noise canceling headphones have been the king of the hill. Of course, they've made some minor adjustments, and feature additions over the past few, so by the time they got to the Mark 3 with their comfort and noise canceling, and USB type C, they were the top of the market, and then the Mark 4 added multiple device support, but they've essentially looked the same, sounded excellent, and they've been an easy recommendation as a result. But these new Mark 5 on the other hand are a real departure from that formula. A lot of the changes I do really like, but there is one big one that I definitely don't. So the first thing you might be wondering is there actually a sound improvement, but actually wanna just start with the new design 'cause you can see that they have this new shape that is this pretty minimal, sharp and clean look, there is still a dark and a light, this light is a sort of a cream colored version, and there's a lot of good things about this design. The ear cups are slightly bigger and wider, the new vegan leather material is so much softer. It is, it's kind of amazing. Honestly, I'm just gonna say this is the most comfortable pair of noise canceling headphones I've ever tried. You still have a touch sensitive panel on the right side ear cup for skipping, pausing, et cetera. And they actually still have on off head detection despite not having a plastic cutout in the ear cup, like the last one, and there's now twice as many slots for microphones around the outside. It goes from four total to four on each side, eight total microphones. And I'll get into what that does for noise cancellation and voice quality in a second, but you can see, they're fairly minimal, and hidden well in this new design. But overall, overall, I actually still feel like this design is a downgrade for one main reason. So what do you get noise canceling headphones for, right? Travel. You're getting them to travel, and so these old versions were the king of the hill because they were obviously super comfortable, had great noise cancellation, and lots of features and good sound quality, but this new version with this new design does not fold at all. So with this new sliding headband design, which is kind of like the Bose 700s, and the Air Pods Max and so many others, It's basically exactly like the Bose 700s, but yeah, now it's just huge. With Bose though we saw them do this new design with the 700s, but they at least kept around the quiet comfort series, so the QC 45s still fold down like they always did, and the Air Pods Max are notoriously annoying to travel with even though I still try to make it work, but these are WH 1000 Mark 5, which on paper makes it the sequel to the Mark 4, so that's a little bit dangerous, but I do know that they're keeping around the Mark 4these new Mark 5s are gonna retail for $400, and they're gonna keep around the Mark 4s for 350, although you can already find them for like 329 or 300. So these are starting to look kind of like a deal, but let's just get past that design flaw. They're still premium, lightweight, comfortable noise canceling headphones, and they have yet again bumped up the noise cancellation capabilities pretty significantly. So I've been saying for years, they're the king of the hill for travel because as far as white noise is concerned, like airplane engines, road noise, all that sort of stuff, they do an A+ job at canceling that. Right when I put these on, I immediately noticed it's even stronger. It still crushes that drowning low end, but now some of the more higher frequencies are better canceled out too, appliances, whinier stuff, human voices too. So yeah the last Sony's did have world-class noise cancellation, So you plan on using these for travel, listening to music, phone calls, if you're working with these, all that sort of thing, these are gonna be amazing. You get the Sony app, you've got all the customization in the world. You wanna do LDAC listening even they sound like very good headphones, and they work really well, so comfortable, love these headphones. "And we'll do our own version of it." And so they did an even bigger version of the same thing, sliding design, magnet in the case, and everything. And I'm slightly annoyed by the much bigger footprint here, but I mean, let's be real. These are really good, really comfortable, premium noise canceling headphones for 400 bucks, with a terrible name, as we'd expect from Sony, but that's about what we'd expect. It's good. All right.

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