Stuff - UK (2021-08)

29

FIRST TEST SONY WF-1000XM4

Every bud ear’s

happy nowadays

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

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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£250 / stuff.tv/WFXM 4

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