I'm so excited because let's face it, if you're shopping for truly wireless
in your earphones, budget provided,
you've probably got these in your shortlist. This is the fifth generation of Sony's WF1000XM5s.
They've been great for many generations. I spent most of my time with the XM3s.
They were already awesome, but I can see a lot has changed since then.
And even compared to the XM4s, there's some changes.
Extra small ear tips now come along with the smallest, largest, and mediums.
I guess these rolled out of here, I'm assuming. Oh, those must be the mediums.
Someone put the extra smalls on? We'll mess with those later.
What else is in this box? Which appears to be made of recycled material.
You've got this little wallet here for the literature.
Not really gonna mess with that. So this looks like a promotional thing maybe.
360 reality audio. A little tiny USB-C to a charging cable for your case.
And that's it. And then you've got this tiny case,
which is 15% smaller than last year's case
and a lot smaller than the one that I tried, I think.
Still, this colorway is black with the copper highlights.
It also comes in silver. And you've got a reset button on the back
and a USB-C charging port.
Decent, but a little bit sharp on the closed sound. But I can mess with that.
Little indicator for battery level on the front. That's a green right now.
And here they are, the buds themselves, also smaller this time.
20% lighter as well. Okay, so they're glossy looking
with matte black on the touch area
and little copper vents there.
Is that silicone or foam? Kind of foamy.
But you can see there's little cracks and stuff in it, like definitely some kind of foam.
Yeah, they're all foam. All right, let's see how I like that. There's a left and right indicators on here.
Right is red. Stick them in. They're very light.
Oh, I just heard a tone, do-do-do. And now I can sense that transparency mode is on.
These are very light. Holy, I think that I have earplugs at home
that are the same weight as these. And lightness is, I would say,
highly correlated to comfort over time. I just put them back in the case for a second
because I've seen other comments from media saying they're hard to get out of the case.
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
because the clearance on the top end for you to get your finger in there is maybe a bit tight,
but seems okay, honestly.
I probably wouldn't have noticed that. All right, they're back in. I'm gonna check out the app
and check out the interactions. First, you know, these are, they are really in there.
It's like a deceiving feeling. I guess it, you must just have to do
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
for waterproofness. So X means they didn't measure the dust protection
and four is water and that is just splashes.
That is a very typical, even budget earphones will have X4.
So nothing great there. You could maybe wear these in the shower.
Definitely you could wear them in the rain to the gym, but don't go swimming.
Yeah, what's going on in here? They really want you to sign in. What am I gonna get?
Adaptive sound control that learns your actions and optimizes how ambient sound is taken.
And that actually could be sweet. If it can learn the kind of sounds that my kids make
and take that out of there, worth giving them my data for.
360 reality audio setup, I can assume this is kind of like Apple's spatial audio.
Optimizes 360 reality audio on your headphones for an immersive experience
as if you're out of live performance, okay? Know here how it says headphones.
So in the comments, I call these headphones, don't yell at me. We can accurately reproduce the best sound field for you
by analyzing the shape of your weird ears where the left ear is definitely more weird
than the right ear. That's me. What, how is that completed?
I haven't done any photos of my ears. Is this app old?
No, I just installed this app. You just installed this app now? It already has your ears on file.
And we're not even signed into it. How does it know?
Separately though, there is head tracking and that's supported on an app by app basis as well,
including Netflix and YouTube. But this is bunk, let's just get out of here.
This is insane. I didn't know I was gonna be encountering all these new things.
This is talking about like, not even having to touch your phone. You put your headphones into your ears
and it somehow knows what kind of scene you're in and it'll just start playing music that matches that scene.
Like you can just start jogging and it'll be like, ah, you're jogging.
Worth maybe checking out? I'm not gonna try it in this video,
but I'm not gonna be like nah to that either. That's pretty cool.
Finally in the dashboard. And one thing that's interesting around off the bat is it shows what codec you're using up there.
I'm using AAC. I don't know if I can change it from here,
but I'm assuming they also have LDAC, which is Sony's proprietary one,
and then that other one that is just part of the Bluetooth standard.
But cool that that's exposed up there, I guess. Interestingly, you actually have to tap to enable
the battery level of the case itself and they're letting you know
that they're not in constant communication with the case's battery level.
So you only ever get the level that the case was at when you pulled them out.
Oh, here's that activity thing you gotta sign in for. And then some kind of just like about these headphones.
It's a very simple system here. And then in the headphone kind of page,
there's more tabs. Sweet. Who's listening to all this metal on here?
Okay, so now I can see music is playing right here in this app. That's kind of cool.
I doubt I'd ever hang out in here though, but maybe. So you can switch tracks like that
or using the earphone. Is it a swipe?
No? Okay, I went back a track by swiping back.
Tap is playing pause. Double tap is next track.
Oh man, this is not good. This is not good guys. Look at all these misclicks and stuff.
I gotta just learn where to tap I guess. I'll go higher up.
Okay, that's consistent. All right, so there's a dedicated page for changing the interactions.
And it's really interesting what they've done here. Basically there's two like sets of controls.
And by default, one set, which is called ambient sound control slash quick access
is bound to the left. And the other set of controls,
which is called playback control is bound to the right. But you can actually switch it up.
So you could swap that. So playback control is only on the left.
Or you could duplicate it. So you have playback control, like so the exact same functions per earbud on both sides.
It would be really weird if you just put ambient sound control on both
because then you wouldn't have any playback control at all. One thing I didn't realize is that you can tap four times
to raise the volume on the right and tap four times to lower the volume on the left.
So I think you just, you tap four times and you enter the volume control kind of arena
and you just keep tapping to knock it down. I can just try that right now.
It's getting louder. You kind of have to just sit here and tap a lot,
but at least it's pretty intuitive. It does take a while to get into that mode though.
These do sound really good. And they've got a lot of even passive isolation.
Let me see what happens here. Do-do, I think.
Let's see what they got for A and C noise floor if I turn it on and off, do I hear a hiss?
Oh yeah, there's the hiss. It's not too bad.
So I'm gonna get my own opinion on the sound now. Starting with this loud thrash song.
I'm not a loud music listener really. I can see some people thinking these aren't loud enough,
although it might vary by your device.
Another thing I like to look for is whether it gets harsh sounding, especially with electric guitars,
high-end kind of sounds like that. A lot of times when you turn it up,
it gets just really harsh, so. But these,
but with these, that doesn't seem to be a problem. All right, let's go into like a bassier song.
Oh, look at that auto pause. Pause is when you pull it out, that's cool.
Oh yeah, definitely got some low rumble on the bass. This song is a good test track because it has like this,
it almost sounds like a strummed bass line that on top of like the kick drum,
it's just like this really rumbly like,
this song was big when I was first listening to the Apple AirPods Max when they've came out
and they have like really cooked bass and that rumble was just like so apparent
on those headphones more than any other. First impressions of this sound pretty good,
but don't take my word for it. We've already had the LTT Labs team
run their usual battery of tests on these headphones
and they've given us frequency response curves as well as a active noise canceling performance chart.
So let's take a look at it. So the first one we have here is the frequency response
starting the left side of the graph. The bass response is really close to neutral.
Then heading into the 100 to 1000 Hertz range.
You can see there's a little bit of variation,
but this is a two degree that's really not gonna be
discernible to most people. Even Sam, the person who does the audio testing for us
said that he probably wouldn't have noticed this without looking at the chart at the same time.
So very good, very neutral response from these things.
So if you're the type of person who likes listening to the artist's intent
from whatever content you're listening to, these are gonna do a good job,
a lot better than last year. They still have problems in the upper three kilohertz
and higher range. This is where you're seeing more of a discrepancy
up to a 10 dB discrepancy at 8,000.
But this is a great improvement from the XM4s before.
And again, at 8,000 Hertz, your ears are not very good at discerning sounds
at that level. So you might not really notice this 10 dB,
even the greatest difference here, which is 10 dB is probably not that noticeable.
One thing to note though, if you're coming from headphones that have a more V shaped curve,
that is they're overcooked in the lows and the highs, these might sound less exciting to you
or less like present to you. Even if they sound more like neutral
or true to the artist's intent, they could sound boring to you. So you have to just get used to that.
This is the ANC curve. So here the white line is not wearing earphones at all.
The red line is wearing the earphones, but they're not turned on. So that's the passive isolation you get
from just having them stuffed in your ears. And then green is having the active noise canceling
turned on. You can see up to 500 Hertz. That is where the active noise canceling is on
and it is really performing really well.
This is some of the best actor noise canceling that we've tested.
You can see the green line is well below the red line at that point.
And then after 500, it's basically not on. So when we tested these, they sat in the dummy head
and we did not pull them out and put them back in between tests.
All we did was switch the app from ANC on and off. So the differences you see beyond 500 Hertz
are really representative of the actual differences and not too many other measurement errors.
So do the XM5s have good active noise canceling? Yeah, they do.
The microphone, it is a Bluetooth microphone. So it's not gonna sound fabulous,
but I figured I would do a test call for you people and you can just hear what it sounds like.
Be me, your grandma just called you. It's 4 a.m.
She's an early riser. You answer with these on.
Can she even detect who the heck it is?
Is she even gonna know it's her favorite grandson with this audio quality?
You be the judge. So to clarify on the way that they say they improved the microphone on the buds is that
they trained an algorithm on over 500 million voice samples
so that it can recognize what your voice is and take it out from the environment noise.
But on top of that, they also have a bone conduction kind of sensor that'll be able to tell
what's your voice from other voices. So I guess we'll see if that works in the real world or not.
Quick little comparison here. We talked about the weight before,
how they're newer and smaller and lighter than before.
And so we're waiting 50 grounds here for the case and the buds.
This is AirPods Pro 56.
50, you know, buds themselves.
11 grams, these ones.
11 grams. So it's actually the case that is lighter by six grams.
It's pretty amazing that they managed to achieve not just parity, but they're smaller than the AirPods case.
Cause this case is always the smallest when you compare it. That's like the thing that they have
that beats everybody else, but somehow they finally did it.
And that is with 24 hours of battery life, including the charge case,
eight hours continuous on the buds themselves. And even though they shrunk these down,
the drivers inside here are actually bigger than they were before.
They're 8.4 millimeter drivers now, instead of just six millimeter drivers on the XM4s.
Price wise though, the Sony's do cost $50 more at 300 bucks.
AirPods Pros are 250 now. The comparable Bose quiet comfort in yours.
They're also 250. So you are gonna be paying a premium for these,
but they're brand new. All these other things have been out for a bit.
Conceivably the price will go down on these as well. So overall the XM5s are definitely worth a close look.
They've improved the sound quality. They've improved the noise canceling. They've improved the size and the weight.
These are just getting very close
to being the best wireless earphones on the consumer market.
Definitely don't sleep on these. Put them in part of your roster.
If you're in that $250 to $350 US budget
for your wireless earphones, they are worth a look.
So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe,
and check out some of our other earphone content. We've got measurements from the Labs
for the Bose QC in years. You're gonna wanna check those out too,
because you know, they're a competitor.