You put these on in an airport and the world drops away by about half, which is a genuinely strange feeling the first time. The Sony WH-1000XM5 has been the default flying recommendation since it launched, and the noise cancelling is the reason people hand over this much money. Battery runs around 30 hours with cancelling on, a few minutes on the charger buys you hours if you’re already at the gate, and multipoint keeps a laptop and a phone connected at once. Wear detection pauses the music when you lift a cup off your ear. Big, soft, and quiet. That’s the pitch.
Out of the box the tuning is smooth and slightly warm, the sort of sound you can sit inside for hours without getting tired. Vocals sit forward, bass has weight without swamping anything, and good recordings genuinely sound good rather than just loud. The purists have a fair point though: this is a processed, tuned sound rather than an honest one, and Sony’s app is doing real work whether you open it or not. Spend five minutes in that app on day one. The default preset isn’t the best one for most music, and nudging the EQ is the difference between pleasant and properly impressive.
The cancelling is the whole product and it remains excellent, flattening engine drone, air conditioning, and office chatter into a soft nothing. Comfort is good, with gentle clamp and large pads, and I’ve worn them across a transatlantic flight without wanting them off, though opinion splits here and a fair number of people report headband pressure building after half an hour. The decision owners actually resent is that these don’t fold. The XM4 collapsed into a tidy ball; the XM5 only swivels flat, so the case is bulkier and worse in a packed bag, and Sony reversed course on later models. The hinges also feel delicate in the hand. Nothing breaks in normal use, but you won’t sling these into a rucksack the way you did the old ones.
They’re Bluetooth with multipoint, so a work laptop and a phone can both stay connected and the headphones switch over when a call lands. A 3.5mm cable comes in the box for aeroplane jacks and for the day the battery dies, which it eventually will. Worth knowing before you buy: the entire right earcup is a touch panel, so if you wear gloves through winter you’ll find that irritating. The app holds the EQ, the cancelling modes, and the wear detection settings, which makes it part of the product rather than an optional extra.
These are for people who fly, commute, or work somewhere loud and will pay real money to make it stop. The cancelling is worth it if noise is genuinely wrecking your concentration, and the sound quality is a comfortable bonus rather than the reason to buy. Skip them if you mostly listen at home in a quiet room, because you’d be paying a large premium for a feature you’d never switch on. If packing space matters more than anything, the Bose QuietComfort Ultra folds and cancels just as hard. But for nine hours in a middle seat, these still do the job about as well as it currently gets done.
Pros
• Noise cancelling that genuinely changes a long flight
• Around 30 hours a charge with cancelling running
• Multipoint keeps a laptop and phone connected together
• Smooth, easy tuning you can wear all day
Cons
• They don’t fold, so the case eats bag space
• Headband pressure bothers a fair number of people
• Touch controls are useless in gloves
• Expensive if you mostly listen somewhere quiet
Our score: 8.6/10