Sony 1000X The Collexion Headphones Review: Sony's Magnum Opus?

Ajouté : 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]In a surprise announcement to anyone not staying on top of leaks, Sony is launching the WH100XX the collection. While this video was shot in advance and I'm currently in Japan for the launch event, Sony was kind enough to send me two units to test in our labs before it went live. Just a side note here, this video is not sponsored by Sony. They sent us their unit for review, but have no say in our editorial process whatsoever. So, what is it? How does it perform? and is it worth the eyewatering $649.99 USD price tag? Let's dive in. Before we continue with this video, we want to show you a great deal from Sennheiser on Amazon that may be great if you're looking for alternatives to Sony's own.

[00:00:44]You can find the link in the description below. This is a paid link, so we do get compensation when you click on the link.

[00:00:50]But if you're enjoying all of our free lab data and reviews, then this is a great way to support everything we do here at Sound. Thanks so much. Now, on with the video. Unlike Sony's other options in the wireless headband line, the Sony WH100XX, the collection, God, that name is cumbersome, is not simply a utilitarian set of headphones with few external features. Instead, it uses stainless steel, leather-like coating, ample padding, and a very robust design practice to make a set of headphones that, while a bit heavy, is durable and fashionable. The buttons sit nearly flush with the exterior, which sports the same leather-like material as the padding. The microphone grills don't stick out at first glance, and you'll only see them if you go hunting for them. The band uses a metal friction rod and stopper design and is quite robust, though some might be the lay flat design as opposed to the hinge. I can give Sony a pass for not wanting to wait into that again for a while. The case looks a little weird, but it uses the lay flat design to its advantage and offers a handle at the top for easy porting around. Popping open the magnetic flap.

[00:01:53]You can see the recesses for the headphones and a pouch for the 3.5 mm TRS analog cable. Under the hood are a few notable upgrades over the WH100XM6, which makes me wish Sony's mass market monsters had waited just a little bit longer to release in order to incorporate some of this tech. For starters, there's a 30mm carbon transducer, a different material than in other models, and an upgraded DSP chip to handle the upgraded processing tasks.

[00:02:21]Though the dedicated ANC chip and mic array is largely identical to that of the XM6, considering just how effective it is, I don't think anyone's complaining here. Actually using the headphones is a quite comfortable experience, though it's not without some oddities. For example, the pressfitit ear pads can frustrate those used to magnetic ear pads like those found on the AirPods Max and successor.

[00:02:40]Additionally, the capacitive sensor in the left ear cup that detects wear can sometimes sit too far from your ear, leading the ANC performance to be a bit wonky if you don't get a tight fit.

[00:02:50]Getting a slightly tighter seal is usually enough to fix this, but my ears are not completely friendly to this design and gave me fits in the lab and in my own use. Luckily, I know a thing or two about headphones, so I was able to address it. Totally not last minute or anything.

[00:03:07]controls are virtually identical to the rest of the WH100X line with a touch pad on the right ear cup governing playback gesture controls, call controls, and transparency modes. On the left ear cup, there are three buttons, a power Bluetooth button, an ambient sound control button for ANC and ambient sound modes, and a new button, the listening mode button. This physical toggle allows you to cycle through listening modes that include three upmixing settings to make your audio sound more like you're within a performance, movie, or game.

[00:03:34]You can also make it seem like your music is playing off in the background somewhere, which is kind of cool if you're trying to focus on something and you don't necessarily need music to be dominating your senses. As far as features go, a lot of what made the WH100XM6 great shows up again here on the WH100XX.

[00:03:52]Downloading the Sound Connect app from Sony enables a lot of tweaks under the hood that allow you to customize your experience and also explore a few things that may not have occurred to you. The app itself is a little bare bones, but if you go to the all settings feature, you can pin your favorite or mostus settings so that you don't have to go digging through a giant list of them every time you want to change something small. The Sony WH1000XX connects to devices via Bluetooth 6.0 and supports SBC, AAC, LDAC, LC3, and OraCast along with a slate of features debuted with Bluetooth 6.0 that you can read more about in the link in the description.

[00:04:32]Sony's high-res Kodak LDAC is always a nice thing to fall back on, but the app allows you to select a number of different connection priorities if you're in a pinch. If you find yourself with connection issues or you just want better sound quality, try tinkering with these. For wired fans, the headphones come with a 3.5 mm TRS cable for analog sources. And that's it. Still no USBC listening. Come on, man. You make a set of headphones for Audio Paris and you don't offer a way to use the onboard DSP to handle decoding instead of the source device. It's 2026. You're behind, Sony.

[00:05:08]Speaking of falling behind, here's where some of the less fun bits start to show with the WH100XX.

[00:05:14]Battery life. Sony claims that the headphones will last a mere 27 hours on a single charge, as opposed to the WH100XM6, which lasts over 30. While this is better than the AirPods Max 2, it's far behind options like Sennheiser's HTB 630 and the Nothing Headphone 1 and so on.

[00:05:32]I'm pretty sure that the upgraded silicon has something to do with this, but considering that this means you'll have to charge your headphones more often, I strongly suggest you toggle that battery care function. EV owners will be familiar with the concept of battery hygiene. But the long and short of it is is that it's not great for the long-term health of the battery to store it at 100 or 0%. By enabling features to keep the cell at a level that limits degradation with use, you can extend the operational life of that battery. You may not like that it caps your charge at 80%, but trust me, you'll be thankful for it as the years go on, and you don't have to panic about a battery replacement on a set of nearly $700 headphones. As always, the only proper way for you to judge microphone performance is to hear it for yourself.

[00:06:16]I don't do this on YouTube because we already have a great way for you to make apples to apples comparisons between the Sony WH100XX and most other headphones we review on our site. Link in the description.

[00:06:29]As this set of headphones has the same ANC guts as the Market Monster WH100XM6, I'm not surprised that the WH100XX does a very good job at attenuating noise when the sensor is triggered.

[00:06:42]Anyway, you can see here that the headphones are exceptionally good at isolating you from outside noise to begin with. So, the active noise cancelling unit doesn't really have to be stellar for you to get decent performance. Though, it's not exactly as good as the XM6. The WH100XX does still attenuate a total of about 86% of all outside noise with the A&C unit on and functional. Not bad. The headphones are especially good at quieting engine noise, which is excellent for flights and commuting.

[00:07:14]Looking at the chart, you'll notice that the noise cancellation isn't exactly even across all frequencies. That's pretty normal. But the main headline here is that on average, it can handle noise attenuation pretty well, a little bit higher than most other headphones will give you, which is great. This means that where most annoying sounds or the really really frustrating stuff like babies crying, nails on a chalkboard, jackhammers, anything from about 400 hertz to 2K is actually going to be attenuated fairly well in comparison to the competition out there. But as I mentioned before, if you have small, hairy, or oddly shaped ears, the outside possibility exists that the sensor in the bottom of the left ear cup may not register you as wearing the headphones right away. When this happens, the ANC unit won't do as much as it's supposed to. I found that getting a slightly tighter fit was enough to solve this for most heads, but after going back and forth with Sony engineers last week, I and a handful of my colleagues seem to be the only ones with this problem so far. The good news is is that this is fixable for normal users. Something to watch out for, but not really a dealbreaker. So, an expensive set of headphones should sound like one, no.

[00:08:25]Let's take a look at our lab collected measurements to see how the WH100XX stacks up. Here is a frequency response chart for the headphones. This tells us which frequencies are emphasized over others. The bottom scale for goes from low to high and spans the range of human hearing. The vertical axis shows us how loud or quiet a certain frequency is and the dashed pink line behind the blue measurement is the sound guy's headphone preference curve. We use this to provide context when comparing headphones, but headphones don't have to meet this to sound good to you. It's just that good sounding headphones often measure this way, not the other way around. The sound of the WH100XX is a little on the odd side. So, for the most part, lows and mids are about where they should be without much to gripe about. Lows are boosted a bit, but that's beneficial in situation where there's outside noise or if you don't have a good seal.

[00:09:15]Additionally, it can help balance out overemphasized highs, but that's not what's going on here. On two units, there was a notable dip between 600 htz and 2 kHz that can make some instruments sound a little duller than they should, but this is somewhat addressable with the EQ sliders by boosting 1 kHz by about 2 to 3 dB. The rest of the highs are a little on the underemphasized side, but present with one odd feature, the drop at 7 kHz. This can vary a lot with fit, so it's not guaranteed that you'll even hear this, but it can make spatial content sound like you're not really listening in a semi-reflective room. Little details like guitar picks and some echoes can live in this range, but not always. While enabling the ANC means you're not likely to have outside noise drown out what's there, it's a little strange to have such a dip here.

[00:10:05]When you turn the ANC off, the sound quality changes a bit, as you can see.

[00:10:09]But what's not shown is the fact that some people may prefer the distortion presentation of the WH100XX when A&C is disabled. At Sound Guys, we augment our measurements with something called multi-dimensional audio quality scores from head acoustics, which calculates the mean opinion scores of 200 or so untrained listeners by means of the magic of machine learning on a vast mountain of listening test data.

[00:10:35]This helps us predict which headphones will be received well by most people and which ones won't. When you compare the multi-dimensional audio quality scores of the WH100XX with the A&C turned off and on, we consistently see higher scores for ANC off measurements versus ANC on. If you were to limit the pool of comparison devices to only headphones, the difference between the A&C on behavior and ANC off behavior is more stark, but centered around the tuning of the headphones themselves. This is interesting, but it reflects my earlier assessment of the odd dips affecting sound in certain ways that can make them sound a little less clear than other headphones. However, as these are cans that are very sensitive to positioning changes, you may not agree. It should be pointed out that even when you stack the deck against the WH100XX, it still scores a respectable 3.9 to 4.2 overall, which is right in the good bin that's very difficult for headphones to achieve as a product category. So, while these aren't perfect, they don't sound bad to most people, and in fact, many would rate them quite positively. Now, remember when I mentioned the upgraded processor that enables a feature called D Ultimate over the previous D extreme.

[00:11:47]The difference being is this. The Extreme version only allowed upscaling in the frequency range, but Ultimate uses AI to upscale content in the bit depth range. So, if this works in theory, it should be able to make your music sound a little bit better in situations where the bit depth may not be as much as it should be. I think we're talking about really old MP3s.

[00:12:12]While it wasn't an earthshattering experience for me, those of you with old collections of music that may not have been encoded well, or if you've compressed them to save a lot of space, may really like this feature. Given that anyone looking at seriously buying the $650 Sony WHh1000XX the collection headphones is probably not looking at a value proposition. It's unfair for me to say you shouldn't buy them. Instead, what I'm going to do is point out that yes, they perform well despite some hiccups in our testing and yes, they look great. Now, if that's what you care about, then you'll be happy with these headphones despite the 100 plus premium you'd pay for them over other options. However, I do want to point out that these headphones are not a great value proposition on paper and in practice. And it's the issues I've listed previously that will make these headphones a tough comparison to less expensive models. For example, the Sony WH100XM6 runs circles around these on paper. So, don't think of the WH100XX as a straight upgrade. Think of these as getting a small bookshelf made out of maple or oak instead of IKEA particle board. Think of the collection as a status symbol or buying a Cadillac instead of a commuter car. You're paying for comfort and image, not necessarily for performance upgrades. In that light, it's a lot easier to see where the eventual fans of this headphone will come from, despite the fact that there are a few things that the collection could have improved upon. People who like the collection will likely gravitate to it for its aesthetics and build quality, and it's hard to argue that they don't have a point. Now, when you're making the case for people to spend a ton of money on headphones, you're going to get a lot of deserved scrutiny. And in this light, the headphones are a mixed bag. Given that so many others offer things like USBC listening, magnetic ear pads, and replaceable parts, it's a little mystifying that Sony didn't ensure that common frustrations weren't eliminated with prejudice on its latest headphones.

[00:14:05]But taken at its own merit, it's a good product. But if you are not looking to dump out your bank account for your next headphones, why don't you click on over here where I break down the performance of something under a third of the price.

[00:14:17]The Nothing Headphone A. while it doesn't quite stack up to the WH100XX, it definitely has the Sony beat on value.