Introduction
Noise pollution is an invisible danger. It not only disrupts your listening pleasure, prolong exposure to such noise can also cause high blood pressure, heart disease, sleep disturbances, and stress. To destress, more people are turning to music to relax after a day’s work.
Although it helps, your favorite music will still be disrupted with the background noise in public transport e.g. trains, buses.
Sony comes to the rescue with the WF-1000XM4 earphone with noise cancellation that gives you the best music enjoyment experience cancelling most of the background noise.
The earphone comes with the Integrated Processor V1 with richer sound and dual noise sensor microphone. Not only that, experience HI-RES Audio Wireless for exceptional sound (compatible devices supporting LDAC required). DSEE Extreme also upscales the compressed music in real time.
Although we don’t get too many windy days here in the tropics, automated Wind Noise reduction will detect wind and auto suppresses it.
The earphone is able to auto detect if you are travelling, walking or staying. In travelling mode, enjoy your music to it’s max clarity and bass with less background sound. Walking mode will still allow you to enjoy your music but will not filter off everything in the background so that you are aware of what is happening around you.
When you are in stationary mode, the earphone will filter off background noise but will not filter off important announcements.
Another feature in the app is that you could opt to enable adaptive sound control to recognize places that you frequently visit and it will remember and auto adjust the environment settings.
The WF-1000XM4 also work as an external bluetooth earpiece for your smartphone. It uses bone conduction sensor to enable clearer speech when answering calls. You can also use it with Google Assistant or Alexa to query the smartphone for information. e.g. how is the weather today?
The earphones are IPX4 water resistance, thus splashes and sweat won’t stop you from enjoying your favorite music on the go.
The WF-1000XM4 headphones feature intuitive touch control settings – for example, tap on the left earbud to change from Noise Cancelling to Ambient Sound and long tap for Quick Attention, or double tap on the right to skip to the next track. What’s more, you can assign your own functions to each earbud using the Headphones Connect app.
Immerse yourself in sound all around you—as real as if you are there at a live concert or with the artist recording in a studio—every time you put on your headphones. With 360 Reality Audio, music has never been so immersive and so real.
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Pairing up with device via bluetooth
Remove both units of the headset from the charging case. The earpiece enters pairing mode automatically if it hasn’t been paired before. When you pair a second or subsequent device (if the headset has pairing information for other devices), put the headset units into both ears, then hold your fingers to the touch sensors on both the left and right units for about 5 seconds. When the touch sensors have been operated correctly, a beep will sound.
Turn on the device, smartphone in this case and pair it as a bluetooth device.
Once that is done you can start streaming your audio from your smartphone to the earphone.
You can also pair it up with a PC, click the link for the instructions.
In our test, the WF-1000XM4 is able to basically filter off most of the noise when the volume level is set at around 60% we are travelling on the MRT. The Transport filtering is probably too aggressive as it also filters off the announcements. So, do take note and don’t alight at the wrong station.
If you want to be able to modify the default settings, you can do that within the app. You can adjust the levels of ambient sound 1 to 20 (background noise). You can also turn on Focus on Voice detection to amplify the voice levels when speaking to friends without removing the earphone for 4 different environments – Staying, Walking, Running and Transport
Sound quality is excellent and the bass is excellent.
Battery life is very good. So far, I only charge it once after days of use. You can also use wireless charging to charge it up.
Conclusion
