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I'm so excited because let's face it, if you're shopping for truly wireless

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in your earphones, budget provided,

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you've probably got these in your shortlist. This is the fifth generation of Sony's WF1000XM5s.

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They've been great for many generations. I spent most of my time with the XM3s.

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They were already awesome, but I can see a lot has changed since then.

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And even compared to the XM4s, there's some changes.

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Extra small ear tips now come along with the smallest, largest, and mediums.

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I guess these rolled out of here, I'm assuming. Oh, those must be the mediums.

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Someone put the extra smalls on? We'll mess with those later.

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What else is in this box? Which appears to be made of recycled material.

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You've got this little wallet here for the literature.

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Not really gonna mess with that. So this looks like a promotional thing maybe.

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360 reality audio. A little tiny USB-C to a charging cable for your case.

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And that's it. And then you've got this tiny case,

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which is 15% smaller than last year's case

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and a lot smaller than the one that I tried, I think.

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Still, this colorway is black with the copper highlights.

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It also comes in silver. And you've got a reset button on the back

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and a USB-C charging port.

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Decent, but a little bit sharp on the closed sound. But I can mess with that.

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Little indicator for battery level on the front. That's a green right now.

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And here they are, the buds themselves, also smaller this time.

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20% lighter as well. Okay, so they're glossy looking

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with matte black on the touch area

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and little copper vents there.

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Is that silicone or foam? Kind of foamy.

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But you can see there's little cracks and stuff in it, like definitely some kind of foam.

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Yeah, they're all foam. All right, let's see how I like that. There's a left and right indicators on here.

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Right is red. Stick them in. They're very light.

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Oh, I just heard a tone, do-do-do. And now I can sense that transparency mode is on.

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These are very light. Holy, I think that I have earplugs at home

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that are the same weight as these. And lightness is, I would say,

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highly correlated to comfort over time. I just put them back in the case for a second

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because I've seen other comments from media saying they're hard to get out of the case.

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That time I kind of knocked it out without even trying. I didn't notice that, but maybe I can see what you're saying

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because the clearance on the top end for you to get your finger in there is maybe a bit tight,

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but seems okay, honestly.

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I probably wouldn't have noticed that. All right, they're back in. I'm gonna check out the app

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and check out the interactions. First, you know, these are, they are really in there.

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It's like a deceiving feeling. I guess it, you must just have to do

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with the ear tips themselves. If you got a good seal with those, they're gonna stay in. They've got an IPX4 Ingress Protection rating

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for waterproofness. So X means they didn't measure the dust protection

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and four is water and that is just splashes.

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That is a very typical, even budget earphones will have X4.

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So nothing great there. You could maybe wear these in the shower.

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Definitely you could wear them in the rain to the gym, but don't go swimming.

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Yeah, what's going on in here? They really want you to sign in. What am I gonna get?

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Adaptive sound control that learns your actions and optimizes how ambient sound is taken.

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And that actually could be sweet. If it can learn the kind of sounds that my kids make

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and take that out of there, worth giving them my data for.

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360 reality audio setup, I can assume this is kind of like Apple's spatial audio.

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Optimizes 360 reality audio on your headphones for an immersive experience

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as if you're out of live performance, okay? Know here how it says headphones.

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So in the comments, I call these headphones, don't yell at me. We can accurately reproduce the best sound field for you

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by analyzing the shape of your weird ears where the left ear is definitely more weird

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than the right ear. That's me. What, how is that completed?

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I haven't done any photos of my ears. Is this app old?

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No, I just installed this app. You just installed this app now? It already has your ears on file.

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And we're not even signed into it. How does it know?

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Separately though, there is head tracking and that's supported on an app by app basis as well,

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including Netflix and YouTube. But this is bunk, let's just get out of here.

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This is insane. I didn't know I was gonna be encountering all these new things.

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This is talking about like, not even having to touch your phone. You put your headphones into your ears

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and it somehow knows what kind of scene you're in and it'll just start playing music that matches that scene.

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Like you can just start jogging and it'll be like, ah, you're jogging.

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Worth maybe checking out? I'm not gonna try it in this video,

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but I'm not gonna be like nah to that either. That's pretty cool.

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Finally in the dashboard. And one thing that's interesting around off the bat is it shows what codec you're using up there.

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I'm using AAC. I don't know if I can change it from here,

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but I'm assuming they also have LDAC, which is Sony's proprietary one,

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and then that other one that is just part of the Bluetooth standard.

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But cool that that's exposed up there, I guess. Interestingly, you actually have to tap to enable

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the battery level of the case itself and they're letting you know

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that they're not in constant communication with the case's battery level.

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So you only ever get the level that the case was at when you pulled them out.

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Oh, here's that activity thing you gotta sign in for. And then some kind of just like about these headphones.

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It's a very simple system here. And then in the headphone kind of page,

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there's more tabs. Sweet. Who's listening to all this metal on here?

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Okay, so now I can see music is playing right here in this app. That's kind of cool.

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I doubt I'd ever hang out in here though, but maybe. So you can switch tracks like that

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or using the earphone. Is it a swipe?

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No? Okay, I went back a track by swiping back.

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Tap is playing pause. Double tap is next track.

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Oh man, this is not good. This is not good guys. Look at all these misclicks and stuff.

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I gotta just learn where to tap I guess. I'll go higher up.

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Okay, that's consistent. All right, so there's a dedicated page for changing the interactions.

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And it's really interesting what they've done here. Basically there's two like sets of controls.

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And by default, one set, which is called ambient sound control slash quick access

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is bound to the left. And the other set of controls,

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which is called playback control is bound to the right. But you can actually switch it up.

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So you could swap that. So playback control is only on the left.

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Or you could duplicate it. So you have playback control, like so the exact same functions per earbud on both sides.

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It would be really weird if you just put ambient sound control on both

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because then you wouldn't have any playback control at all. One thing I didn't realize is that you can tap four times

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to raise the volume on the right and tap four times to lower the volume on the left.

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So I think you just, you tap four times and you enter the volume control kind of arena

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and you just keep tapping to knock it down. I can just try that right now.

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It's getting louder. You kind of have to just sit here and tap a lot,

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but at least it's pretty intuitive. It does take a while to get into that mode though.

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These do sound really good. And they've got a lot of even passive isolation.

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Let me see what happens here. Do-do, I think.

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Let's see what they got for A and C noise floor if I turn it on and off, do I hear a hiss?

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Oh yeah, there's the hiss. It's not too bad.

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So I'm gonna get my own opinion on the sound now. Starting with this loud thrash song.

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I'm not a loud music listener really. I can see some people thinking these aren't loud enough,

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although it might vary by your device.

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Another thing I like to look for is whether it gets harsh sounding, especially with electric guitars,

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high-end kind of sounds like that. A lot of times when you turn it up,

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it gets just really harsh, so. But these,

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but with these, that doesn't seem to be a problem. All right, let's go into like a bassier song.

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Oh, look at that auto pause. Pause is when you pull it out, that's cool.

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Oh yeah, definitely got some low rumble on the bass. This song is a good test track because it has like this,

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it almost sounds like a strummed bass line that on top of like the kick drum,

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it's just like this really rumbly like,

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this song was big when I was first listening to the Apple AirPods Max when they've came out

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and they have like really cooked bass and that rumble was just like so apparent

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on those headphones more than any other. First impressions of this sound pretty good,

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but don't take my word for it. We've already had the LTT Labs team

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run their usual battery of tests on these headphones

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and they've given us frequency response curves as well as a active noise canceling performance chart.

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So let's take a look at it. So the first one we have here is the frequency response

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starting the left side of the graph. The bass response is really close to neutral.

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Then heading into the 100 to 1000 Hertz range.

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You can see there's a little bit of variation,

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but this is a two degree that's really not gonna be

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discernible to most people. Even Sam, the person who does the audio testing for us

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said that he probably wouldn't have noticed this without looking at the chart at the same time.

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So very good, very neutral response from these things.

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So if you're the type of person who likes listening to the artist's intent

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from whatever content you're listening to, these are gonna do a good job,

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a lot better than last year. They still have problems in the upper three kilohertz

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and higher range. This is where you're seeing more of a discrepancy

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up to a 10 dB discrepancy at 8,000.

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But this is a great improvement from the XM4s before.

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And again, at 8,000 Hertz, your ears are not very good at discerning sounds

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at that level. So you might not really notice this 10 dB,

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even the greatest difference here, which is 10 dB is probably not that noticeable.

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One thing to note though, if you're coming from headphones that have a more V shaped curve,

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that is they're overcooked in the lows and the highs, these might sound less exciting to you

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or less like present to you. Even if they sound more like neutral

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or true to the artist's intent, they could sound boring to you. So you have to just get used to that.

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This is the ANC curve. So here the white line is not wearing earphones at all.

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The red line is wearing the earphones, but they're not turned on. So that's the passive isolation you get

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from just having them stuffed in your ears. And then green is having the active noise canceling

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turned on. You can see up to 500 Hertz. That is where the active noise canceling is on

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and it is really performing really well.

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This is some of the best actor noise canceling that we've tested.

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You can see the green line is well below the red line at that point.

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And then after 500, it's basically not on. So when we tested these, they sat in the dummy head

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and we did not pull them out and put them back in between tests.

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All we did was switch the app from ANC on and off. So the differences you see beyond 500 Hertz

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are really representative of the actual differences and not too many other measurement errors.

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So do the XM5s have good active noise canceling? Yeah, they do.

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The microphone, it is a Bluetooth microphone. So it's not gonna sound fabulous,

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but I figured I would do a test call for you people and you can just hear what it sounds like.

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Be me, your grandma just called you. It's 4 a.m.

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She's an early riser. You answer with these on.

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Can she even detect who the heck it is?

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Is she even gonna know it's her favorite grandson with this audio quality?

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You be the judge. So to clarify on the way that they say they improved the microphone on the buds is that

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they trained an algorithm on over 500 million voice samples

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so that it can recognize what your voice is and take it out from the environment noise.

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But on top of that, they also have a bone conduction kind of sensor that'll be able to tell

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what's your voice from other voices. So I guess we'll see if that works in the real world or not.

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Quick little comparison here. We talked about the weight before,

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how they're newer and smaller and lighter than before.

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And so we're waiting 50 grounds here for the case and the buds.

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This is AirPods Pro 56.

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50, you know, buds themselves.

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11 grams, these ones.

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11 grams. So it's actually the case that is lighter by six grams.

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It's pretty amazing that they managed to achieve not just parity, but they're smaller than the AirPods case.

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Cause this case is always the smallest when you compare it. That's like the thing that they have

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that beats everybody else, but somehow they finally did it.

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And that is with 24 hours of battery life, including the charge case,

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eight hours continuous on the buds themselves. And even though they shrunk these down,

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the drivers inside here are actually bigger than they were before.

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They're 8.4 millimeter drivers now, instead of just six millimeter drivers on the XM4s.

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Price wise though, the Sony's do cost $50 more at 300 bucks.

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AirPods Pros are 250 now. The comparable Bose quiet comfort in yours.

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They're also 250. So you are gonna be paying a premium for these,

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but they're brand new. All these other things have been out for a bit.

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Conceivably the price will go down on these as well. So overall the XM5s are definitely worth a close look.

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They've improved the sound quality. They've improved the noise canceling. They've improved the size and the weight.

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These are just getting very close

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to being the best wireless earphones on the consumer market.

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Definitely don't sleep on these. Put them in part of your roster.

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If you're in that $250 to $350 US budget

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for your wireless earphones, they are worth a look.

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So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe,

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and check out some of our other earphone content. We've got measurements from the Labs

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for the Bose QC in years. You're gonna wanna check those out too,

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because you know, they're a competitor.