Sony WF-1000XM6 reviewed: a little behind

A new generation of Sony’s flagship noise cancelling earbuds are here, and they have serious competition. Are the Sony WF-1000XM6 the year’s best, or slightly behind the times?

It’s been an interesting decade for Sony’s noise cancelling efforts, and in that time, we have seen the company move from strength to strength. The Sony MDR-1000X set everything off back in IFA 2016 (we were there), and since then, there have been serious strides to prove that Sony had the best approaches to building a noise cancelling pair of headphones you’d never want to move away from.

In that time, we have seen some winners, whether it’s the WH-1000XM3 or WH-1000XM4, and then a shift to the earbuds where Sony made waves, as well. Depending on how much of your brain is dedicated to audio gear, you might recall their respective cousins in the WF-1000XM3 and WF-1000XM4, generations that did much of the same dance, albeit in a smaller form-factor.

That’s been the way Sony has rolled for a few generations now: you get a big pair of flagship headphones in the WH-series, followed by their more diminutive flagship earbuds in the WF not long after.

So last year when Sony launched the WH-1000XM6, we expected a “WF” model would materialise sooner or later, and here we are.

Yes, a new generation of Sony’s noise cancelling earbuds are here, ready to adapt from the tech seen in one of last year’s better pairs of headphones. Is the Sony WF-1000XM6 the pair to beat, or are other earbuds already ahead of the game?

Design and features

It’s been nearly three years since Sony let us take its new flagship earphones for a ride, and in that time, much has changed.

Noise cancellation efforts have improved, with Apple and Bose leading much of the charge alongside Sennheiser, while other brands have popped up offering relevant and solid offerings in the space. Technics, we’re looking at you, while smaller brands including Status Audio, Anker’s Soundcore, Nothing, and Nothing’s sub-brand CMF.

It’s not just about the technology inside the buds, but also the design on the outside.

To say there’s a lot happening in the noise cancelling headphone world would be an understatement. It’s crazy busy there.

So Sony’s update of the WF-series can’t be small.

Good news: it’s not, but not necessarily in a way you might expect. Rather, the earbuds are a little bigger.

A new slightly chunkier and more bulbous plastic casing holds the earbuds together, encasing 8.4mm drivers per ear in 6.5 gram buds, as well as batteries, wireless receivers, and sound processing.

That includes the Sony HD QN3e noise cancelling processor and support for the latest Digital Sound Enhancement Engine, the DSEE Extreme. Head-tracking is technically supported, but spatial audio is limited in platform use, and unlike other brands, this won’t engage without a specific format or the augmented-reality game Ingress. It’s a weirdly specific approach.

The earbuds are also IPX4 water resistant, which is about as good as saying sweat resistant, but not much more, with the case holding enough battery life for 24 hours of use with noise cancellation on, making it three full uses since the XM6 earbuds are rated for 8 hours per. The charging case can be recharged using USB-C or Qi wireless charging, so you clearly have options.

In-use

Get past the feature set and you’ll find your way to the earbud tips, which is important because Sony doesn’t just use active noise cancellation as part of its earbud design; it also uses passive. That means Sony’s ear tips play a part, using a combination of silicone and foam to fit into the ear, blocking as much noise as possible, and then letting its microphones and noise processing technology take over.

A few tip sizes are included in the box, and you are encoruaged to try them, because it’ll be important to find the right fit. There’s even a part of the app to let you test whether they’re right, and whether there’s sound leakage.

Once you find a fit, the kicker will be to use the XM6, and several generations in, it might be a little alarming to find Sony behind the times with controls. While earbuds with large tap surfaces offering taps and swipes have become the norm for the high end, the WF-1000XM6 paints a different picture, almost as if the buds have gone backwards.

Instead, you simply get taps. You can tap each side, and you can tweak what the taps do, but you only get the most minor of taps, with no gestures or major controls here. It really does feel like the before times, rather than a 2026 pair of earbuds.

Even the app feels downright minimalist, with less to choose from to control the buds, and a real lack of complexity in what you’re using.

You don’t surely need to have a complex app, or even a more complicated set of controls for a pair of earbuds, but it is surprising to see so much of the WF-1000XM6 earbud experience tapered back.

We don’t need to worry too much about the app to get stuck into the experience, with it just largely being how we turn noise cancellation on and off, deal with ambient sound, and maybe try Sony’s approach to location switching for noise cancelling modes. It’s hardly rocket science.

Performance

But we do need to spend time with the audio to get a feel for whether the WF-1000XM6 are good buds, and that’s where performance testing comes in. As usual, it means it’s time to sit down with the Pickr Sound Test, which you can experience for yourself with your own earbuds and headphones.

That starts with electronic from Tycho and Daft Punk, the tracks delivering a fairly calm and balanced sound that is both slightly warm and meaty, with a fun sense of bass.

The delivery of the drop in Tycho’s “Glider” acts as a turning point in our sound test (intentionally chosen with this in mind), and it hits hard. The vibe isn’t totally guttural, but it’s big enough to matter, and demonstrates the flexibility of the bass in these buds.

It’s a feeling that works across genres, with punchy lows on the bass in Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” and a wide soundstage across the board, even without the spatial audio rendition tracks like Ariana Grande’s “Into You” exhibit.

Overall, we heard a balanced sound with an emphasis on well-toned mids and lows to deliver warmth, and plenty of detail. That’s one area we need to emphasise, with a good round sound that hides nothing. Even in FKA Twigs’ “Two Weeks”, the track delivered all the detail, without punching too hard for an overly guttural sound.

It was much the same across rock and jazz, with the less mastered music delivering a clear balance between sounds.

In typical Sony style, these headphones are about the delivery of sound first and foremost. You’d struggle to complain about these on a pure sound level.

Noise cancellation

One of the main features of any major pair of earphones, noise cancellation is clearly a big deal here. It’s really what the WF range is all about in earphones: Sony’s flagship take on the active noise cancelling tech today. So are these any good?

Six generations in, the cancellation is strong, but just not as strong as the competition.

Not helping Sony here is that the fit has to be really specific on the Sony WF-1000XM6, and that getting the right fit comes down to just how close the tips are to your ear holes, as well as the specific tips you use.

As we’ve seen from previous WF models, Sony’s WF-XM6 uses a material the company developed for noise cancelling buds made of silicone and foam. It’s a little firmer and yet also quite malleable, making it different and simultaneously more snug, and Sony gives you a few variations to try, each colour coded based on the size.

You will definitely want to try them on, going through the aforementioned app to test the fit. However, it can take some time, and you may find you need to jam them in that little bit more, as the buds struggle to get perfectly placed isolation. We were easily doing this for a good 10 or 15 minutes, which is a lot longer than we’ve needed to play with earbuds tips for… ever.

Interestingly, you won’t find spatial audio in this pair of earbuds, so we’ve omitted the section in our review. It may work with Sony’s 360 Reality Audio found on a handful of platforms, but we’re not sure we know anyone actively going out of their way to use that.

Battery

But you will find a battery life of roughly 8 hours, though this varies depending on what you’re doing. Talk more and the battery life goes down, but just focus on music and the battery life will veer around the eight hour mark, and possibly then some.

A good two more charges are in the case, resulting in roughly 24 hours of use all up, a lifespan which seems more or less the norm for Sony earbuds.

There aren’t a heap of changes here for overall battery life, though the eight hour timer for the battery does suggest you’re getting a little more time with the earbuds in than predecessors have seen. That’s a win.

Value

At $499.95 in Australia, the Sony WF-1000XM6 can feel a little overpriced, though this is largely the norm for most noise cancelling earbuds you can find today.

Premium noise cancellation tends to occupy the space between $400 and $550 rather neatly, with models occasionally fetching beyond it, and street prices far lower.

Take the Sony WF-XM6, because while its recommended retail price is just a hair under $500, its street price is closer to between $399 and $449. At those prices, the Sony WF-1000XM6 is much better value, getting closer to the price tag of competitors. At under $400, the XM6 would be stellar value and more akin to a bargain, while its near-$500 price is just normal these days.

What needs work?

The problem with the WF-1000XM6 isn’t the price, however. We can look past that because street pricing is almost never a recommended retail or suggested retail price. Fine, cool,m whatever.

No, the more obvious problem is that aspects of the WF-XM6 can feel a touch backwards compared to predecessors.

Take the overall design, which can feel a little backwards from where Sony was last. Curiously, it’s bigger than the XM5 in just about every way, and not necessarily for good reason.

The previous generation, the WF-1000XM5 not only offered a slightly smaller case for its buds, but also a smaller set of earpieces themselves, a point you can see when you compare the earbuds head on.

It’s just a little unusual to see a company making bigger models in the next generation, when the approach is to normally go the totally opposite way. Sony hasn’t done that, and so the WF-1000XM6 are larger earbuds, and not necessarily for a lot of gain.

There’s also the matter of those tips, with Sony’s combination of foam and silicone being both a good thing and a bad thing.

It’s good because it means Sony is really investing in its audio gear and delivering an ear tip that provides a solid seal.

But it’s also bad because Sony’s ear tips are the only tips that have ever become lodged in this reviewer’s ears. It doesn’t happen all the time, and it really does tell you just how well the Sony ear tips can achieve a seal, but it might just mean asking a friend to help, or carrying something small and flat to help you dig that ear tip out rather than push it in further (at which point go see a GP or specialist).

There are other aspects that really got to us in the sixth-gen, such as the app which is just so minimalist and easy, it does feel as though Sony went backwards here, too.

Maybe it did some UX research and discovered people really do want a basic app, or maybe it received some feedback and took it all to heart. Whatever the reason, the Sony Sound Connect app (formerly the Headphones Connect app) is now so minimalist that it barely offers the features its headphones are famed for.

You don’t get the several levels of noise cancellation and wind isolation control you once did, nor do you get a control system that’s any better than basic touches. It’s the sort of control set we’d expect on a cheaper grade of earbuds, not the one Sony advertises as its most flagship.

Not much has changed on the water resistance side of things, either, leaving the gear at IPX4. It’s difficult to shake the feeling that the XM6 has so much in common with the XM5, and minor touch-ups have been made. Worse, those minor touch-ups don’t make this new model feel any better. Quite the contrary, actually.

It just feels as though the company was so close to brilliance last time, that it decided to try something different this time. And that’s fine — we love seeing different things! — but this is a type of different that doesn’t work, and manages to feel less positive than the XM5.

What we love

Despite this, there’s one thing we absolutely love: the sound.

Sony is definitely a company that knows its audio and build a great driver, excellent encoder, and generally just handle a pair of headphones and earbuds with the sort of care you expect from an expert in the field.

The audio out of the Sony WF-1000XM6 is that warm, brilliant delivery you expect from the brand, and it is no different here. If you love the sound of the WH series of headphones, but want it in a smaller style, we can see why you’d consider the WF series.

It is literally built as a more compact take on those headphones. A variation on a theme made to go (in the pocket).

Sony WF-1000XM6 vs the competition

However, the WF-XM6 is not without its problems. Frustratingly, the biggest problem becomes more obvious when you compare the XM6 to what’s out there already, and what they’re basically competing with. That problem quickly points out how outgunned Sony’s earphones are.

Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 are easily one of last year’s best efforts, even finding a way to out-perform the noise cancellation of the Bose QC Ultra gen-2 earbuds. It’s close, but Apple has the lead.

Both are excellent, however, and an easy recommendation. However, both also have better noise cancellation than the Sony WF-1000XM6, and are comfier, too.

Against the competition, Sony’s gear isn’t as competitive, and that’s a problem because it means Sony no longer has the edge.

Final thoughts (TLDR)

Not helping Sony is the feeling that the XM6 actually goes backwards. They’re bigger than the XM5, feel chunkier, and while the sound and noise cancellation is up, the overall vibe is down.

It’s an attempt to feel more premium, but it just doesn’t work that well. The earphones end up feeling bigger but not better.

The sound is great, and Sony has built a fairly high-end pair of earbuds. But given both its predecessor and competitors, it’s difficult to view the XM6 as the best of the bunch. Rather, it’s a little behind the times, and just not worth the high price.

That’s not to say the Sony WF-1000XM6 are a bad pair of earbuds, because they aren’t. They’re fine, but you can easily do better regardless of whether you’re Android or iPhone, with little reason to consider Sony’s latest beyond sound and a love for the brand, and that last one will only get you so far.