The Sony XM6 Hype Train.... were they wrong?

This is the new Sony WH-1000XM6. And while I know you're thinking, wow, that's such a nice and simple name. I sure am glad they named it in a way that's easy to understand. I'm thinking that too. But what I really want to know is, does it sound any good? And me and Resolve are going to talk about that today. Let's get into it. Hey, hey, hey, Douglas. Hey, hey, me. How do you feel about the XM6? Oh, do you want to spoil it that early? We probably have a different perspective on the headphone overall. but I think that our reasonings will be agreed upon. I think we will share that perspective. As is tradition, should we start with building comfort and then talk about sound and then go over our measurements? Let's do it, yeah. I think we agreed on some things with the building comfort as a whole. A few things that were different. It's a little bit clampy. I don't mind clamp force. I like the ear cups a lot on these and I hate, with a burning passion, the headband. Yeah, and because I have a bigger head, the clamp force is more annoying for me and the headband comfort issue is less annoying for me, but it definitely, the headband sucks. Like there's no two ways about it. The cups I find are actually really good at isolating. And part of that increased clamp on my head, at least is beneficial, I feel for the ANC that this has. Like it's super isolating. And in that sense, I think that's good. But yeah, it's not the most comfortable headphone. Like the QC Ultra is just way more comfortable for me. Yeah, I find the ear cups on these comfortable, but the headband has like two millimeters of padding before you hit hard plastic on top of your noggin. And I just don't like that. I get the idea of wanting to keep it lightweight, but man, like they gotta increase the surface area. Like for these types of headphones, like it just needs to be wider up top. So it spreads it out over the top of the head. Yeah, or at least just more foam, something. Other than that, there have been some small changes to this that I thought were interesting. We talked before about how the microphones, at least you and I talked offline about the microphones on ANC headsets and about their SPL thresholds. And something I didn't experience with these that I usually experience with other ANC headsets is these didn't clip for me when I was taking off on an airplane. Now, I know you've said you've had some headsets that also didn't do that. It's been a very common experience for me. I took these on two flights and never once did I hear any popping sounds from the microphones clipping out, which was kind of cool. So to me, the ANC for this headphone has been like the best, the best that I have experienced, not necessarily because it's meaningfully better than like the other class-leading ANC products like the Bose QC Ultra. But because of its increased clamp force, like it really does isolate me like way more. And it's the kind of thing that I've been really thinking about lately as I listen to more of these ANC products is that in environments that are like, let's say more noisy, the signal-to-noise ratio is so beneficial. The signal-to-noise ratio benefits to really good ANC is awesome. For me, I found it really dependent on the environment because if I'm sitting in like a cafe, I would get better ANC on the QC45. But if I was on an airplane, it was notably better on the WH-1000XM6s. Yeah, to me, it's also the high frequency attenuation. Like it's insane. I did do the measurements of the ANC here and it competes with the Bose QC Ultra. But just like from like my subjective experience using it, this is better. And we'll show, I guess, both of our different ANC measurements. You did some in-house and then I did some on an airplane where I used an open canal in-ear microphone, measured all of the just regular airplane noise, and then put on multiple ANC headphones and took measurements again. And what I noticed there was in all the low frequencies, I was getting better results on the Bose QC45s, but in the higher frequencies, I was still getting better results on the Sonys. Actually, in some areas, as much as 7 decibels difference. Yeah, I wonder how this would change for a bigger head with stronger clamp pressure, right? That's something I'm wondering, yeah. Most of the, yeah, for most, for a lot of the passive attenuation, like the high frequency stuff is what gets obliterated there. And so for a lot of the, for a lot of headphones, like the active portion of ANC is lower down because that's harder to cancel. So I'd be curious how that, how that is for people. Cause like even right now I can tell, like I'm, I don't know how loud I'm speaking right now. I could be yelling at the top of my lungs. One thing I will note is, you know, that cabin pressure feeling that you get with like ANC headphones sometimes. I get that with these to a degree that is almost nauseating. I don't get that at all, but I also don't generally get that. I used to struggle with that a lot. It is not as bad for me on things like the AirPods Pro 2 or the QC45 or the QC35. It has been really bad for me on some previous Sony headsets and some other kind of like off-brand ANCs and things like that. And I wonder if it's just down to a difference in methodology. This is what people call eardrums suck, right? Yeah. I generally don't experience this. Like sometimes I feel like I like maybe there's something there, but like this is not a common phenomenon for me. I envy you. It's sort of like the opposite of barotrauma or maybe it's still just barotrauma. Oh, speaking of trauma, should we talk about sound quality? Yes, that's the perfect segue. But before we get into that segment, let's talk about headphones.com. Have you ever tried buying a headphone from an online mega retailer and you either receive a headphone that you didn't know was a return or open box, Receive a headphone that's missing parts or accessories? Or receive an entirely different headphone than the one you ordered? Headphones.com always makes sure to label when something is open box, and they inspect their returns to make sure that all the correct contents are present. So if you want to buy with confidence, buying from Headphones.com may just save you the heartache of expecting one thing, but receiving another. Thanks to Headphones.com for sponsoring this video. So, uh, I heard you like mid-bass. It's just infinite mid-bass. It's all mid-bass forever. It's mid-bass with a bunch of 10 kilohertz. Mid-bass and a mountain of 10 kilohertz, yeah. So here's the thing though. They did some things with this headphone that are so much better than the vast majority of ANC headphones when it comes to sound quality. So they gave you a 10-bend EQ in the app. I've been playing around with that and I've been able to get it to sound really good to the point where I put it very highly on my sound quality ranking for ANC headphones. There is still an issue and that is to do with the treble where there's things you can't fix. But just by default out of the box, I think we agree. Like when I first put this on and listened to it, I was like, this is just the most hilarious amount of mid-bass. Yeah, it's just tubby, muddy garbage. This is my problem with a lot of these is that they're so by default, just this store demo mode thing because they think that's going to wow people. And maybe it does. Like maybe they're probably doing it because it's effective, but it just obscures everything when you have that much mid-bass. I'd be curious. Do you have your EQ settings dialed in on your phone on your app right now? Yes, but the problem is, is that the EQ in the app does not let you affect the treble peak. It lets you affect like every area around the treble minus the one area where there's a big peak. 100%. And that's my biggest problem with the sound quality of this headphone. It's not the bass. Because the bass, I can fix it in the app. But from a sound quality perspective, you can fix most of its response and make it sound mostly excellent. Just that you cannot fix the issue at 8 and 10 kilohertz. So there's a massive dip at around 8kHz, and then there's a substantial elevation at 10kHz. And the graphic EQ, it's not fine-grained enough to be able to fix those issues. I'm curious what we EQ'd this to. I just pulled down the mid-bass. Oh, you didn't do anything else? I did a little bit else, but not much. I actually did part of the tuning based off in-ear mics, which, funny enough, the mid-range does measure notably better on in-ear mics than it does on the head and torso simulator. So the EQ that I ended up doing for this was pulling everything down a little bit between 31 and 250 hertz. I pulled down a little bit also at 2 kilohertz and a little bit down at 16 kilohertz. Okay. Yeah, I went quite a bit more granular with mine for the rest of the response. Yeah, I pulled down 2 kilohertz. I bumped up some of the mids. I think I dropped the mid base by quite a bit. But I left a bit of the sub base and just base generally because I couldn't fix that 10 kilohertz peak. And I found as soon as I made the bass more in line, made the bass more normal, that peak is just piercing. It just comes through with a vengeance. And so it needs, like all things in life, sound quality is about balance. And so it needs a little bit of that extra bass to balance out that treble zing. But once I did that, this is a headphone that sounds as good as any other, as good as some of the better ANC headphones. I think it's worth kind of asking that question with products like this, where, you know, there's a default sound signature and then there's what you can do with it with their app. I have to commend Sony for giving users a lot more customizability than the vast majority of other ANC products that are out there. But at the same time, it's still worth criticizing that default sound profile. My feedback to Sony with this one would be, it's so cool that you did that 10 band EQ, but we need one at like 10 kilohertz for this product. Let us affect the frequencies we actually need to change. Yeah, but it is better. Like, this is better than before, where it's just like, you know, most other products, you get like three bands, and that's it. So to me, it's like the real competitor for this is the QC Ultra. And I've been sort of thinking about this. Like, in my scenario, if I'm going to be using this product on a trip somewhere, comparing which one I would choose, which one would I take? And I would still take the QC Ultra, mostly because of comfort, though. Even though the ANC on this, it seems to work better for me. And I do think that I can get the sound on this to sound at least as good, if not even better, because of its more flexible EQ. But I just think that the comfort on the QC Ultra is better. And you don't need to do as much adjustment to make it sound palatable. It is wild to me the number of non-audio tech channels I've seen that have taken this headphone on the default tuning profile and have said it's the best sounding thing on the planet. Yeah, that's just raw-dogging insanity. It brings me a level of pain that I struggle to articulate. Well, I guess the question is, do you think that there's some sort of firmware update that they could do to this to make it better? Yeah, but you can't update the comfort. And I can't wear these for more than like 15 minutes before it's painful. So I don't think it matters what they do to the sound quality. I'm not going to be wearing them in the future. Maybe in a future version, if they actually like, you know, learn what padding is and implement it. I think that would be super helpful. I mean, like this is the thing, though, right? This is a massive company and they put a lot of R&D into these products. And I just I want to be in the room. And I want to be like, OK, that's a good decision. That's a bad decision. But I'm just one person, right? So just one s*** online. What do I know? It is wild to me, yeah, how much money must go into products like this for them to be really oblivious to a lot of the industry and also what things are actually important. You know there's a ton of people out there that have to find this uncomfortable in various ways. And it would be a very easy thing to change. So why not do that? If you're already putting millions into this, why would you not just put a pad on top of the headband? It is a shame. But this is the woeful state of active products. It's a bit like getting a super fast car, but then having like flat tires. Yeah. Driving it with flat tires. You know, I've tried the other headphones in this lineup. The XM2s and the XM3s had more padding than this. That's true. That's true. Did you mess around with the spatial audio at all? A little bit. I don't find Sony's 360 audio to be that good compared to Atmos. Yeah, it's not. It's just, yeah, it's not great. To me, it's the novelty aspect of it. I was very impressed, again, with the Bose QC Ultra's sort of snapshotting ability for the spatial stuff. But that is also very different from Atmos, and it can't do that. It depends a bit on the technology that you want to use for that. Yeah, what content you're consuming. Yeah, but for me, still in the realm of novelty. Call quality. People care about call quality. How do you feel about the microphones in this as far as taking calls and stuff like that? Surprisingly decent. Yeah, so you can hear me through this right now, right? How does that sound? I would say the actual quality of these is notably better than things like AirPods. Like any of the AirPods I've heard, it is notably better. And I would say probably better than the Bose that I've had also. Like the microray on these is pretty decent. It's not like, you know. The microwave? It's not going to sound like our microphones we're using to. It's not going to sound like a microwave. So you just said. It's the audiophile microwave. I love making phone calls from my microwave. I was just saying it's not going to sound like our, like, the microphones we're using to film this video. but it's way better than what most people are using on the Zoom calls or probably even better than the microphones built into most of the ANC things I've heard. I do think the mics on these are pretty good. It does seem to have a pretty competent mic array. For sure. Okay, so let's do some quick comparisons and then do a conclusion, yeah? Sure. Sounds good. So I know that you're not super keen on this. Would you take this over any of the Bose products, so like the QC Ultra or just the regular QC? No. It's your shot. I would take it over the regular QC, but probably not the Ultra. So I take it over the QC45 as well. Would you take this over the AirPods Max? Yes. I would also take this over the AirPods Max. Would you take this over a Focal Batiste? Probably not. No, because the Batiste is really comfortable to me. I can wear it for super long flights and I find it to be very convenient. It does all the things I want it to do. The fact that it's comfortable and it has bigger ear cups is actually, we don't talk about that enough because most of these products have like really small ear cups. Okay, would you take it over the Momentum 4? I find the Momentum 4 more comfortable, so I'd probably go with the Momentum 4. To me, the comfort is about on par between the two. But again, I got a big head and big ears, right? Everything about me is large. So that's a tough one. I actually do think that there is a scenario to take it over the Momentum 4, especially given how good the AMC is for this one. So for flights and stuff like that, I would probably take this over the Momentum 4, specifically for travel purposes. But like as a walking around headphone where it's not that noisy, but if you still want to cancel noise, Momentum 4 probably still sounds better by default. Yeah, because Momentum 4's ANC is like okay, but not amazing. Yeah, exactly. Would you take this over the Sonos Ace? Yes. Yeah, I would as well. What other ANC headphones are there out there that are like around the spray point? There's that Kef one. I haven't heard that one. I can't comment on it. Consider yourself lucky. We're going to get roasted in the comments for missing some ANC headphone that I'm not thinking about. What about the Dyson Zone? Oh God. Yes, I would take this over the Dyson Zone. Yeah, me too. I want to look like a f***ing moron headphones. I would definitely take this over the Soundforce-based ones or the more recent beats also because those were just like extreme mega treble murder death. I would take this over the Bowers and Wilkins PX-8. People are going to get mad at me for that, but yeah, I would. Sorry. I would take no headphones on a flight over the Bowers and Wilkins PX-8. I would just raw dog the flight. I don't know about that. I don't know if I could do that. I can't wear them, man. They're so uncomfortable and they sound so bad. I got, I'm just at that point, like give me regular, like just I'll play with no sound on my steam deck. It's fine. I can't think of anything else to really compare this to. So, uh, I think we'll just wrap this up and say there's some things here that are great. There are things that they did not do so well. And there are things that we hope that they can improve upon maybe with a firmware update or something like that. Yes. Can't improve the comfort, I guess. Yeah. But that's going to be really subjective. I mean, for some people, this will be fine for some people it's going to be a screaming nightmare just depends on who you are so for you is this where does it rank for you between screaming nightmare and 10 as a whole with 10 being really good and screaming nightmare being really bad maybe like a six okay we're just talking about amc headphones only only amc headphones yes with the best being a 10 and the worst being screaming nightmare i'd say this is like a six for me if it was a lot more comfortable and if i could adjust the 10 kilohertz band it would be like a nine other than that it's going be a six yeah i'm inclined to agree with you by default i rate this a little bit more highly i'd say probably like a seven just because the anc is like it's another world man of that makes our ratings pretty close so i'd say but also for the same reasons i think we agree on most of the the the upsides and most of the downsides we've got consensus does it bring you joy does it bring you joy that's the that's the question no all right sony wh1000 xm6 do we recommend it doesn't bring you joy. Maybe. What a delightful review this is. Yeah, I would say I recommend it. I think it's for people who are looking for this kind of thing, I do recommend it. I think it's going to deliver that. It's just that the default sound is poo. You have watched this video. If you're at this point, draw your own conclusions based off the things we've said and decide if those trade-offs are worth it for your use case. And if this sounds like the right headphone for you, I think that's all I can say. And that's it. That's the end of the video. Bye-bye.