My running history with Sony 1000Xs is more like a streak left blazing than your passing acquaintance. I have gutted and tested every iteration of the product, except for its legendary predecessor, the MDR-1000X. With each new model, Sony does not just iterate; it innovates; with technology that is far ahead of its time and an entirely new auditory dimension. That’s why year after year, they land on the top of our list of best wireless headphones.
The wait is over. Sony, famous for keeping consumers waiting for release, has finally dropped the WH-1000XM6 ($450). There really were no annual updates, as the transformations of Sony’s flagship headphones happened rather slowly. People treasured the WH-1000X first and then the XM2 and the XM3 like fine wines, with each one arriving right after a year. After that, the world took a big turn. It took two agonizing years for the XM4 to show up, most certainly due to the shades of the pandemic. Almost another painfully long two years went by before the radically redesigned XM5 was finally on shelves. Now, after three long years of silence, the XM6 is out in the open. Will it just be a refinement or a revolution? Get ready to find out.
Sony’s new WH-1000XM6, rather than being a mere upgrade, is a rebirth. A new chipset hums away at the heart of it all, rallying an array of microphones and a noise cancellation system so powerful that silence itself can be felt. But that redesign is anything but ostentatious: every inch of these headphones reflects Sony’s relentless quest for perfection. The sound has been reborn, polished, refined, and ready to reclaim its rightful throne. While others chase sound, Sony builds an ecosystem. It’s an ecosystem where years of innovations come together, where your needs are anticipated and your surroundings are accounted for, and seamless integration enters your life. Others offer sound; Sony offers the complete package – a technological symphony that will redefine the viewing experience and leave the competition in a search for the meaning of existence.
Sony/Engadget
Sony WH-1000XM6
The reign continues. Sony has put in painstaking effort to improve its flagship headphones, thus ensuring that the 1000X series remains atop our list of best headphones. The crown jewels have been polished, enhanced, and placed firmly in the crown.
Pros
- Improved sound
- Better ANC performance
- Tons of handy features
- Supremely comfy
Cons
- Price has increased again
- Speak-to-Chat still needs work
- Call quality suffers in loud environments
Explore More Buying Options
$450 at Amazon
$450 at Amazon
$450 at Sony
Don’t let the familiar facade fool you: the WH-1000XM6 has undoubtedly undergone subtle yet prominent improvements aimed at enhancing comfort and portability. Cushioned with utmost care, all-day listening sessions truly come to mind, thanks to the redesigned asymmetrical headband. It is wider, ensuring the perfect distribution of weight. The design remains light, but it is now perfect. It’s the ultimate comfortable feel-one of those “Cloud 9” moments for wireless headphones-which leaves the competition far behind.
Sony resurrects the classic folding design from its legacy 1000X series-a much welcomed return by efficiency-oriented individuals. They retain the swivel earcups as in recent models, but now inexplicably fold inward, tremendously reducing the lateral profile. Hence emerges an elegant carrying case with a crisp magnetic closure, bidding goodbye to the suede zipper for understated style.
Sony, what were you thinking regarding the ear cup rotation on the WH-1000XM6? It’s baffling. Instead of the ear pads naturally folding downward for the easy stowing into the case- the way youknowthey’re going to be stored- they flip up. It’s like you’re trying to make it hard for me on purpose. The M5 got it perfectly, too! Such a confounding design change feels like a gratuitous backward step.
Controls don’t really reinvent the wheel on WH-1000XM6. Instead, it has a landscape of physical buttons paired with touch-sensitive surfaces on each earcup. Your fingers instantly recognize the power button, which doubles as Bluetooth pairing, and the noise control toggle, which oscillates through ANC, ambient awareness, and complete silence.
Say goodbye to fumbling around for that elusive power button. With its larger surface area and distinctive concavity, the power button just begs to be pressed. It’s a nice sensory way to say “welcome home” to one’s fingertip and immediately sets it apart from the noise control. Now, back to control: say goodbye to mute mayhem. Double tapping the noise control button mutes/unmutes the microphone during a call. You can consider it your personal “cough button” from now on. This means no more searching frantically for muting on your phone or keyboard!
Improved sound quality
Billy Steele for Engadget
The 1000X series is by no means known for mediocrity in sound, and Sony has consistently worked to improve its audio abilities with each iteration. With the WH-1000XM6, the jump was made into three key areas to really enhance the experience of listening. In the center of this upgrade are newly designed drivers that promise “richer details and clearer vocals.” In essence, the voice coil is perforated to allow high-frequency sounds to be produced more smoothly and in a larger space. The XM6’s newly balanced profile is even set to counteract the profile of being highly detailed. This gives the music better balance with a stiffer driver dome, apparently.
With the 1000XM6’s sound, Sony wanted more than just their in-house expertise. This meant going out and bringing mastering engineers from three top recording studios. The strategy was not just subtle polishing-they aimed at delivering audio that replicates the artist’s soul with a deeper and more detailed soundscape. Imagine actually being in the recording booth. And for those of-us who have to live with boring old stereo tracks, Sony has you covered. The M6s come with 360 Spatial Sound upmixing. Basically, it takes regular 2-channel standard stereo audio and turns it into an enhanced spatial experience. It’s a audio makeover, very different from Sony’s 360 Reality Audio and DSEE Extreme.
Sleep Token’s Even In Arcadia does not simply go through the WH-1000XM6; it explodes in it. “Look To Windward” spits out a sonic storm consisting of crunchy guitars and thunderous drums, prompting the headphones for a bass so deep it reverberates through your very being. But there is beauty in this bass’s clarity: highs shimmer above the labyrinthine soundscape of the album, while mids cut through the mix like glass, enabling the listener to grasp every minute detail. Genre-bending production by Sleep Token is like a sonic tightrope, and the XM6 ensures that you will hear every single step. During those fades, so immersive waves of bliss-making meet a glitz soundscape.
Once a recording by Miles Davis is remastered, it becomes a full sonic tapestry. Who cares for notes when the phantasmagoric M6 conveys thefeelof the music? From breathy trumpet sighs to barely there piano taps, the genuine woody bass tones to the subtle shimmer of drums, everything is meticulously presented in glorious fidelity. Nothing short of being teleported back to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in ’55 will offer an equivalent listening experience. Another opportunity to experience this very intimacy is present in Billy Strings & Bryan Sutton’s “Live At The Legion.” All raw vocals and acoustic guitar lay bare, the M6 places one right in between those bluegrass titans to feel every pluck and heartfelt harmony.
New chip, more mics and a dash of AI
Billy Steele for Engadget
Skip incremental upgrades; WH-1000XM6 is not just a step; it is a quantum leap. At its core lies the brand-new QN3 processor, a silicon wonder that Sony proudly claims isseven timesfaster than the QN1 installed in the M5. With QN1 having been the very heart of noise cancellation since 2018, a period that saw the release of WH-1000XM3, one can surely say this is not just an upgrade but an evolution of sound.
Noise is not only blocked by the Sony 1000XM6; it is annihilated. The almighty canceler, now reinforced with 12 microphones, four more than in the QN3 setup, ensures a strong acoustic shield around your ears. But it isn’t just about the brute force. The M6 now has a new “Adaptive NC Optimizer,” which is a smarter, more reactive version of the M5 adaptation algorithm: it achieves peak noise cancellation by adjusting to the way the headphones fit even with subtle changes in cabin pressure anywhere you are. The best part is that Sony has now enhanced blocking of mid-to-high frequencies, which means that they have made the world more silent with higher precision.
All hype around the M6 noise cancellation? Not really-this is the real leap. The difference with the previous model is glaring. Gone are the days when office noise could be tolerated! The M6 goes after human voices quite ruthlessly while being the best among others. It is not the cone of silence, but definitely a class apart. Too long has Bose enjoyed that seemingly omnipotent position, but M6 has indeed put the noise-canceling crown within reach now, signifying a brand new chapter in the war for sonic supremacy.
The Xperia M6 uses a trick its older buddy, the M5, boasts of: the AI-powered noise cancellation. According to Sony, the advanced system trained on a gargantuan set of 500 million voice samples knows how to isolate your voice in the chaos. But M6 goes one step further. Equipped with two newly located microphones, its AI-based assistance making sure calls are crystal-clear is a given.
The M6’s call quality falls into the age-old dilemma: double-edged sword. And a perfect analogy for this situation is that the M6 acts as a noise-canceling ninja, muting external sounds like the furious humming of a fan, but clarity is traded for its killing prowess. While you’ll sound crystal clear in a near-silent environment, with the M6 processing things get foggy, wrecking clarity-a trade-off for blocking noise. Even in the best case scenario, one can say that call quality is nowhere near that of perfect, yet for everyday calls, it serves its purpose quite well.
Sony’s flagship headphones came back to take the crown once again with a symphony that introduced smart automation while leaving all other contenders in its wake. Remember those days of uselessly tweaking settings? Adios to all that. Adaptive Sound Control learns your world and honks the horn for the wall from various sound profiles, whether it is striding into the office or hitting the pavement for a power walk.
Nature/interface: ambient sounds melt into the environment that enhances the calls, whereupon the calls become clear to crystal. Speak-to-Chat still boldly retains its vague demeanor, interpreting even a cough for a conversation, but the moment you speak, it kills the music. Now this year, a Jedi-like wave of the hand will accept calls, while a quick shake will dismiss them. Feature-packed? Oh please. Sony isn’t just within a lead; they are light years ahead in the race with innovation in headphones.
Battery life
Billy Steele for Engadget
Battery life isn’t really where the decision is. Basically, it is a reflection of the M5 in its 30 hours with noise cancellation roaring, and 40 when unplugged from the world. A fast fill is provided: thirty minutes of charging will give three hours of listening escape. Real-world testing fully supports these figures. I put the set through its paces with the volume at maximum for ANC and Sony’s DSEE Extreme upscaling for most of the time, with short spells on transparency mode for calls. After a solid 25-hour musical marathon, the battery indicator remained at 50 percent, proof of its ability to last.
In a subtle yet meaningful way, Sony pimped the M6 battery and charging situation. Imagine the boarding being called, chaos reigning at the terminal, and your pair of headphones dead. You were in for it in the past. Now with the M6, charge and listen at the same time. They kept the music streaming even when charging: Sony’s little present for the weary traveler and avid music lover-Almost like aural salvation at just the right time.
The competition
Just when a new turn in the series comes about, the crown is still crowned by Sony. Certainly, Sony’s noise cancellation might arguably now edge out Bose, though those QuietComfort Ultras? Still a magnificent pair of cups and often spotted at a steal compared to their sticker price. Besides, Sennheiser’s Momentum Wireless 4 cannot claim beauty queen categories, but with twice the battery life of Sony’s M6 and some superb sound and ANC, at a lower price, they’re very serious contenders. The war of noise-cancelling headphones is truly warming up, and Sony, well, keep an eye at your back!
With the FoKus Apollo ($649) from Noble Audio coming into the frame, my reigning champion, the Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S2e, has fallen from its crown. However, the challenger is looming: Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3. Rumors are rife regarding upgraded sound and noise cancellation, but other details such as pricing and release date remain cloaked in uncertainty. Hold on yet, audiophiles. If history has taught us anything about B&W, the Px7 S3 might well be a sonic revelation worth the wait and perhaps a tad less painful to the wallet than an M6.
Wrap-up
Three full years. That’s a technological an agelong period if you put it like that. Yet the WH-1000XM6 from Sony indeed prove that a few things are worth waiting for. Forget about incremental improvements; this is a leap of sound-angularity. There is a completely new chip in town that brought with it richer, more nuanced audio and cancellation that is so good it could very well be considered the field of personal silence. They went really above and beyond and improved comfort through tiny design improvements-so, the headphones actually cradle the ears with all-day comfort. Now that spatial audio upmixing has arrived, be prepared for your music to go beyond your headspace! The price went up a notch again, but the XM6 is far from just another pair of headphones. It is a journey to audio nirvana. To put it simply, these are the headphones everybody wants to stand next to.
Sony WH-1000XM6 review
Touch controls are reliable and don’t require repeated attempts.
Thanks for reading Sony WH-1000XM6 review: The best headphones just keep on getting better
