Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As of about three years ago, I was an earbuds guy. The wireless over-hear headphones I had tried previously never could approximate the kind of audio immersion you get when you wedge little speakers directly into your ear canals. I never found over-hear headphone noise cancellation to work that well - often, turning it on would create more noise than it cancelled, compromising audio quality and, well, just sucking generally. Not to mention the inconsistent and typically non-intuitive affordances for powering on/off, pairing, and controlling playback on these things. But then I picked up a pair of Sony's WH-H900N noise cancelling wireless headphones. I basically fell in love with them on day one and used the heck out of them over the past 3 years. So, now I'm an over-ear headphones guy. Specifically, THIS line of over-ear headphones that Sony is putting out. I still love my H900Ns. But we all know that in tech a lot can change in 3 years time. In fact, I was about to upgrade to the WH-1000XM3s a few months ago but held off after learning about the imminent release of the M4s. So I waited. Then I pre-ordered. Yesterday, I received them. I've now had about 24 hours to toy around with them and I'm already prepared to say that these are clearly the best headphones I've ever owned. Which is to say: They're everything I love about my WH-900Ns, but better: - They're noticeably lighter, and based on about 5 hours of use I'm convinced they're more comfortable to wear - Sound quality is significantly better. I didn't actually expect this amount of improvement, but it's definitely noticeable at both low and high end. Separation of layers is particularly amazing: vocals shine with total clarity, heavy bass tracks shake and vibrate my skull without any noticeable distortion; high-hats and snares are crisp and clear. Very happy with this so far, which i should mention is just using the default settings with songs downloaded from Spotify. I'm looking forward to optimizing further with custom equalizer settings in the sound connect app. - Small thing but the semi-hardshell case with dedicated accessory storage (pictured) is really nice to have (900Ns just came with a bag...) - Clarity of phone calls - both input and output (i.e., the mic works well) - is excellent. This is key as I plan to use these to listen to music and take meetings while WFH for the foreseeable future. The 900Ns were also very good in this regard, but the ability to connect to both my work computer and my mobile device simultaneously will really help me out during the work week. CONNECTING TO TWO DEVICES SIMULTANEOUSLY One of the issues is figuring out how to connect to these things to two devices at the same time. Given that this is a new and much-anticipated feature, I would have thought Sony would have thought to make it crystal clear to new users how to actually do this. Maybe I missed it, but I couldn't find instructions for how to do this. Here are the steps I discovered through trial and error that allowed me to simultaneously connect to both my iPhone and Mac Mini: 1. You may have to enable the feature from within the Headphones mobile app. For me, it was disabled. See photo I uploaded showing the relevant part of the application. 2. You need to first pair the headphones to each device separately before it is possible to connect to them simultaneously. As far as I can tell, there is no way to put the headphones in pairing mode when they're connected to a device. 3. Then, when the headphones are connected to one of the devices, you should be able to connect your second device to the headphones using the second device's bluetooth preferences. 4. If the second device successfully connects, you'll hear a voice notification through the headphones: "Bluetooth device 2 connected". You'll also see two devices listed under the "Status" tab of the Headphones Connect application. Not a big deal, but seems silly that something like the above wasn't just in Sony's own documentation. OTHER MINOR GRIEVANCES AND NITPICKS It seems that the only way to get the most out of these is to use them with your Android or iOS device. This is because a lot of functionality - such as the ability to customize sound - is only available on iOS/Android devices with the Sony Headphones Connect application. The iOS app is decidedly intended for use on iPhones - it only runs in portrait orientation, making it a pain to use on my iPad (which I almost always use in landscape orientation). But the worst thing about this is that I can't customize anything when listening on a MacOS device, which these days is a lot of the time. Fortunately, these sound excellent even with the default settings - just wish the capabilities of these headphones wasn't dependent on which device I was using them with. Final minor grievance (for now) is this adaptive sound control feature that Sony got me to try out. It requires location sharing and by default fires annoying and surprisingly frequent notifications on my iPhone about how it's apparently adapting to my ambient environment. I figured out how to mute the notifications but still need to figure out how to shut the feature off entirely, which I frankly have had enough of. My advice is to opt out of this feature when you first set your headphones up. Very disruptive with totally unclear benefits. FINAL WORD (FOR NOW) Again, best headphones I've ever owned, and I'm very happy with my purchase. But the minor issues I describe above, combined with the high cost of these things, were enough to knock a star off my rating. Buyer beware :)