Review on Review: Sony WH1000XM3 Noise Cancelling Headphones – Black (2018 Version) by Danielle Nosbush

We were able to compare the Sony WH1000XM3 with the Bose QC35II. They are both high quality but optimized for a variety of use cases. In the end, I chose to leave Bose and my wife chose to leave Sony. Sony is optimized for listening to music. You have the feeling of sitting in an orchestra or being the conductor. If the recording is of high quality, you'll hear every detail and breathe along with the musicians. (The default setting is too bassy, but turning down the "clean bass" on the app's equalizer screen improves it.) Bose, on the other hand, doesn't immerse you in the music. You want to be in the audience, you are not a conductor. You can create a mental distance between you and the music so you can focus on other things while listening to the music. Don't get me wrong, the sound quality is still high. And it allows you to work. Sony's "Ambient Sound Control" is very impressive and innovative. Before testing I didn't understand what they were doing with ads and other reviews. I figured they just let you control the level of noise cancellation like Bose does. What they actually do is some sort of "anti-noise cancellation". If you want to hear the world around you while listening to music, turn on Ambient Sound and the headphones will amplify the ambient sounds for you by mixing them with the music. You can apply a human speech filter to this amplified ambient noise to hear people but not other soft sounds. You simply override both active and passive noise cancellation when using the feature. You hear people as if you weren't wearing headphones. Isn't that the coolest thing? I can still talk to people and listen to music by myself. One thing they could improve about this feature is that I really want to boost the human audio around me more than natural levels. That's because I can hear the music and other people can't, so they don't speak as loud as if they hear the music. Even if I hear them on the same level, I have to turn the music down to understand them. If you listen to music, forget about Sony. You'll hear your footsteps as a "thump," three times louder than Bose. When you're on the phone or on a conference call on your computer, forget about Sony. His microphone is surprisingly terrible. People won't hear you. I wonder if this can be fixed with a new firmware. The Sony's touch controls are great and work very well. I can skip a song in a second with a flick of my finger. With Bose, I have to use my right thumb to look for that multifunction button and double-tap it each time. Lasts about 5 seconds. The main reason I prefer Bose is that their ear cushions are bigger and deeper. Sony's ears hurt after an hour. I get along fine with Bose for an indefinite period. But my wife is comfortable with both. Maybe she has smaller ears than me. The main reason my wife decided to leave Sony is that it has much better noise cancellation; She is not distracted at work. From this review I learned that there is no such thing as a perfect pair of headphones. Sony can improve the sound by making the ear cups wider and deeper, working on the hollow sound and using a decent microphone. Bose can be improved by copying the touch controls. Even if the sound quality is worse, I prefer it when I'm working. Do you want to feel like you're in the studio every time you listen to music? Not me. Last note. Sony says it supports the low-latency aptX codec, so you can use it to watch TV and hear sounds that lip-sync with people's movements. Bose does not support this. But I have to admit that I don't notice any lag when watching Netflix on my phone with Bose. Maybe it's not very important, or there's something specific to television that I don't know about.