I'm so excited because, let's face it, if you're shopping for truly wireless earbuds on a budget, you've probably got these in your shortlist. This is the fifth generation of Sony's WF-1000XM5. 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. Even compared to the XM4s, there are some noticeable improvements.
Unboxing
Extra small ear tips now come along with the small, medium, and large ones. I guess these rolled out of here. I'm assuming these are the medium. 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 except this looks like a promotional thing, maybe 360 Reality Audio. A little tiny USB-C to USB-A charging cable for your case, and that's it. 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. 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. A little indicator for battery level on the front—that's green right now. And here they are—the buds themselves, also smaller this time, 20% lighter as well.
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Design Impressions
Okay, so they're glossy-looking with matte black on the touch area and little copper vents there. It's 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 indicator on here—right is red.
Fit and Feel
Stick them in—they're very light. Oh, I just heard a tone, 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. 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's how 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 really in there. It's like a deceiving feeling. I guess it must just have to do with the ear tips themselves. If you've got a good seal with those, they're gonna stay in. They've got an IPX4 rating for waterproofness, so X means they didn't measure the dust protection, and four is water—that is just splashes. This is very typical—even budget earphones will have X4, so nothing great there. You could maybe wear these in the shower, definitely in the rain, to the gym, but don't go swimming.
App Setup and Features
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—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 think I'm assuming this is kind of like Apple's Spatial Audio. Optimizes 360 Reality Audio on your headphones for an immersive experience as if you're at a live performance. Okay, note here how it says headphones, so in the comments, if 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. And that's me. What? How is that completed? I haven't done any photos of my ears. Is this app old? You just installed this app now, 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.
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This is insane. I didn't know I was going to 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 will 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 going to try it in this video, but I'm not going to be like, "Nah," to that either. That's pretty cool.
All right, I'm finally in the dashboard, and one thing that's interesting right off the bat is the show as much 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 is 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.
Earbud Controls and ANC
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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 earphones. 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. It's 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/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 tap four times, and you enter the volume control kind of arena, and you just keep tapping to knock it down. If I can just try that right now—that'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.
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These do sound really good, and they've got a lot of even passive isolation. Let me see what happens here. I think—let's see what they got for ANC 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.
Listening Impressions
Starting with this loud thrash song—I'm not a loud music listener, really. I could 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. But with these, that doesn't seem to be a problem. All right, let's go into like a bass-heavy song. Oh, look at that—auto pause pauses 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 bassline that on top of like the kick drum, it's just like this really rumbly like—oh, the song was big when I was first listening to the Apple AirPods Max when they came out, and they have like really cooked bass, and the rumble was just like so apparent on those headphones more than any other.
First impressions, though—they 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 active noise-canceling performance charts. So let's take a look at it.
Labs Test Results
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 going to be discernible to most people. Even Sam, the person who does the audio testing for us, said that he probably wouldn't notice 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 going to do a good job—a lot better than last year.
They still have problems in the upper three kilohertz and higher range, where you're seeing more of a discrepancy—up to a 10 dB discrepancy at 8000. But this is a great improvement from the XM4s before. And again, at 8000 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 present to you, even if they sound more 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 active 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.
Microphone Test
The microphone—it is a Bluetooth microphone, so it's not going to 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.
Comparison to AirPods Pro: Size and Weight
A quick little comparison here—we talked about the weight before, how they're newer and smaller and lighter than before. So we're weighing 50 grams here for the case and the buds. This is AirPods Pro—56 grams. These ones—50 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 because 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 6-millimeter drivers on the XM4s.
Battery Life, Pricing, and Overall Thoughts
Price-wise, though, the Sonys do cost fifty dollars more at 300 bucks. AirPods Pros are 250 now. The comparable Bose QuietComfort in-ears—they're also 250. So you are going to be paying a premium for these, but they're brand new. All these other things have been out for a bit, so conceivably, the price will go down on these as well.
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 in the consumer market. Definitely don't sleep on these—put them in part of your roster if you're in that 250 to 350-dollar U.S. budget for your wireless earphones. They are worth a look.
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