Sony WF-1000XM5 review: the little earbuds that could
Wireless earbuds are a dime a dozen these days, but Sony’s latest category leader offers slight advancements that made my music-loving ears smile
Sony’s top-of-the-line noise-canceling earbuds are smaller, lighter, and more comfortable, offering larger drivers for improved sound. But in a crowded field filled with several competitors, the Sony WF-1000XM5 barely holds its standing thanks to strong noise cancellation and an amazingly clear ambient sound mode. Still, if you want an extremely pocketable pair of earbuds with plenty of bass, these Sony earbuds deliver the goods.
Sony WF-1000XM5 Review
Pros
✅📐Much smaller size
✅🔉Bigger drivers for even better sound
✅🔕Impressive noise canceling
✅😶🌫️Amazing ambient sound/transparency mode
Cons
❌💵Expensive in a crowded category with lots of other options
❌🤔Packed with features that may not always be useful or necessary
🏆Review Score: 4.5 out of 5
Comfort & design
🤏Smaller is better. Easily the best and most noticeable thing about the Sony WF-1000XM5 is that it’s much smaller than its predecessor. The earbuds are substantially less bulbous, so you have less of the buds hanging outside of your ear, and the case is almost as small as the one for the AirPods Pro. According to Sony, the new buds are precisely 25% smaller and 20% lighter.
The overall design of the buds is much more streamlined too. Smooth is the best word to describe the new look of the buds with its simple shape and mostly glossy finish—although that makes them a bit slippery to remove from the case at times too.
The matte finish on the top of the buds outlines the large touch control areas of these buds. By default, these are programmed to execute some very basic commands. Tap the right earbud once for pause and play, and then tap twice to skip a track. Tapping the right earbud, meanwhile, switches between ambient and noise-canceling modes.
🫧Foamy goodness. Not only are the buds smaller, so are the ear tips. There’s a new extra small size that comes in the box for those with especially small ear canals. These ear tips are also made of a super flexible material so you can really squish them down before inserting them into your ear and they spring back to form a complete seal for physical noise isolation.
Sound quality
🔕On-par noise-canceling. When it comes to noise-canceling performance, these new buds offer the best hybrid technology around. Not only are there three microphones on each earbud monitoring sound around you (feedforward) and inside your ear canals (feedback), there’s also two processors—an integrated processor v2 and an HD noise canceling processor QN2e—dedicated to monitoring and blocking outside sounds.
It’s really impressive how well these buds can block out cars, screeching subway trains, barking dogs, wind, and general noises that usually detract from my music-listening experience. That said, they’re not miracle workers like over-ear or on-ear noise-canceling headphones would be. At the gym, I can still hear the obnoxious playlists being blasted at max volume in the speakers right over my head.
👂Hear sound naturally around you when you need it. Ambient sound or transparency mode is essentially the opposite of noise-cancellation in that it amplifies all the external noise around you. The WF-1000XM5 can reproduce sounds around you in an astonishing natural way in case you need to hear more of the sound around you while you’re running down the street or at the office.
🔊Bigger drivers, bigger sound. The Sony WF-1000XM5 also features larger 8.4mm drivers, up from the 6mm drivers in the previous generation XM4s. Comparing Sony’s old and new top earbuds, the XM5s offer a more detailed sound with greater depth. There’s more clarity and refinement, especially in the treble and mids, meanwhile, the bass kicks even harder.
Listening to Makeba feels especially impressive as you can distinctly hear feathered guitar strums and the tiniest blare of a trumpet despite it being such a bass-heavy song. Of course, bass is what makes the Sony WF-1000XM5 stand out. They’re perfect for when you really want to feel the thudding lows in songs like Bad Guy and Dance the Night.
Overall, the Sony WF-1000XM5 offers a fantastically neutral sound and tonal balance.
🎙️Mics on mics. Of course, the Sony WF-1000XM5 uses its six microphones to make for a pretty decent speaker phone. When it comes to strict sound quality, the AirPod Pro 2 captured a more pleasant-sounding recording of my voice, however, they also caught all of the room noise around me. The Sony XM5 buds on the other hand were able to isolate my voice more clearly and a colleague was even able to hear me clearly while a fan was blowing directly in my face.
Features
🚰The kitchen sink of features. Sony always loads up its earbuds with a ton of innovative features and the newest things to come to the XM5s are head tracking and gesture controls. Head tracking is something the XM4s sorely lacked while the AirPods could support spatial sound that changed as you turned your head.
However, there are two problems with Sony’s implementation of head tracking; it only works with Android and it still doesn’t work universally with all apps. If you’re using the buds with an Android phone, you’ll need to enable the feature in the Sony headphones app and it’ll turn on the camera to make sure spatial sound is working properly.
From there it’s pretty neat, you can turn your head and hear the sound balance shift from one ear to the other while watching Extraction 2 on Netflix, especially during the helicopter shooting scenes. Unfortunately, the head tracking experience doesn’t work with YouTube or other apps beyond Netflix.
The gesture controls feel a bit silly and unnecessary. All they do right now is allow you to answer a call by nodding your head or reject them by shaking your head. Hopefully, there’s better and more implementations to come in the future.
📱Multi-device connection done right. Multiport is by far the best software feature on the Sony WF-1000XM5 and it lets you have Bluetooth audio connected to two devices at the same time. You can’t play sound from both sources at the same time, but switching between them is as simple as stopping playing music or video on one device and then starting it on the other.
You can also change your two active connections from a list of every device you’ve ever paired the earbuds to, leveraging a comprehensive list on the app. That’s a cry better than the AirPods, which do work with everything Apple under the sun but you have to often manually switch between devices through their own distinct interfaces.
Battery life
🔋Great battery life for the small size. Despite shrinking so much in size, the XM5 offers the same eight hours of battery life as Sony’s previous generation buds. That figure jumps up to an even longer 12 hours if you switch off ANC.
You also get another 24 hours of charge in the case, so you can easily get through half a week of use even if you’re listening for a whole workday every day. And in case you’re working overtime or your commute runs long, popping the buds into the case for three minutes gives you a full hour of charge. Plus, the case also supports wireless charging.
Why you should trust my reviews:
I wear earbuds and headphones all the time. As creative director at The Shortcut, I spend countless hours listening to music while editing videos and photos, making me a self-professed audiophile. I also own over 27 different sets of wireless earbuds so I’m intimately familiar with how different headphones sound from Sony, Bose, Apple, Jabra, you name it. Prior to this role, I spent over a decade as a tech reviewer for major publications including IGN and TechRadar so I have a lot of experience reviewing all sorts of tech, from headphones to laptops.
Sony WF-1000XM5 vs. AirPod Pro 2:
As the category leader, Apple Airpods continue to be well-loved by the mainstream, and for a key reason: simplicity. The Sony WF-1000XM5 offers more customization, with fine-tuning sound options, superior noise cancellation, and longer-lasting battery life.
These are truly an audiophile’s delight, whereas the AirPod Pod 2 keeps it simple with class-leading spatial audio. The AirPods Pro 2 will still appeal to those who have already fully bought into Apple’s device ecosystem and want a pair of earbuds that easily pops into their ears.
Should I buy the Sony WF-1000XM5?
Yes, if…
✅You want a nuanced and detailed audio experience that fits in your pocket
✅You like to block out the world while listening to music and videos
✅You want to be seen with something other than white pegs
✅You want more fine-tuning abilities than the closed AirPod Pro 2
No, if…
❌You love spatial audio and want to experience it in every app
❌You don’t need the absolute best noise-canceling and audio quality
❌You would rather spend the sizable $299 asking price on something else