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Unreleased Sony WH-1000XM6 Headphones Appear in FCC Filing
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To which Sony responds with "WH-1000XM Pro Max"
Hey now. Let’s be fair. They did change the colors last year. By 2030 I expect another color palette change.
I might be in a minority, but I have a pair of V-Modas from 2016!! I love it. It’s still working with good battery life! (In contrast, most of my friends complain about how quickly their AirPods need to be replaced. Connection/charging/microphone/battery issues.) Apple greenwashes everything, even with products that are designed to be trash in a year or two and are not in any way repairable.
My V-Moda sounds great. Sturdy and flexible. Replaceable pads too. And I love the look of them.
I hear the company was sold, and the newer headphones don’t have the same build quality. Shame. I wanted to eventually replace these with another pair of V-Modas to last me another ten years!
Never a fan of Sony headphones - overpriced plastic garbage - all fake leather - not acceptable for this price range. Prefer my Focal Celestee non-bluetooth headphones - made in France and real leather with aluminium and magnesium frame. Unlike the Sony's they don't look like oversized egg cartons on your ears.
If you ever replace your Airpods Max's ear cushions, you might want to stick with Apple's, since after the ear cushions on mine began to lose some of their cushioning, causing some unpleasant pressure against my ears and head, I recently bought a pair from GVOEARS whose cushions are just a bit smaller on the inside, and so they touch my ears at a few points around their circumference, while Apple's don't. It's not terrible, but it's sometimes a little annoying. I measured the inside of my used Apple ear cushions at 58.9mm x 38.7mm, and the GVOEARS at 57.6-58.6mm (one is different from the other) x 36.4mm. Also, the cushioning of the GVOEARS cushions is no better than my used Apple cushions, so I didn't gain anything.
Apple's ear cushions are $69 a pair, while the GVOEARS are currently $25-$28 depending on color, hence why I decided to try non-Apple ear cushions.
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The USB-C model is actually a downgrade. Audio isn't supported through USB-C, but is through Lightning. They removed a feature with the USB-C models. That was my reason for not "upgrading".
I have the XM5's on right now. I got them the day the came out and I use them literally every day for several hours. I bought aftermarket earpads in an early-90's motif after wearing out the OEM pads. My only real complaints are that the adjustable headbands had poor setting retention to begin with, have no tactile "click" when adjusting, and have gotten slightly more loose after 2.5 years of use. I don't give a crap if they fold - with the earcups rotated 90 degrees they're compact enough.
The Fresh Prince called, he wants his headphones back:
The Fresh Prince called, he wants his headphones back:
Attachments
But you needed Apple’s proprietary Lightning-to-headphone jack cable in order to do that. Maybe not enough people bought that cable so Apple figured there wasn’t much interest?
The only time I ever use my Sony XM4s in wired mode is when on a plane and plugging in to the plane’s entertainment system. For some reason Bluetooth is still not widely supported on planes.
I used to own the Airpod Max and I currently own the Sony XM5s. The first time I listened to the Maxs I remember thinking to myself that this is the greatest audio-quality I’ve ever experienced from a set of headphones and I was in love. Unfortunately the Maxs had the drawback of making my ears sore after extended use. I tried out and purchased the XM5s last year. Although the sound-quality is not nearly as great it’s good enough for me not to miss the Max, plus they’re ridiculously light-weight compared to the Max so they’re perfect for extended wear. I’m not expecting Sony to surpass the Max but I’m curious to see just how close they can get to the Maxs in sound-quality this time around.
M1? Sony’s MDR-M1 are wired studio monitor headphones. The XM5's lineage of wireless noise cancelling headphones went like:
MDR-1000X
WH-1000XM2
WH-1000XM3
WH-1000XM4
WH-1000XM5
Please show me the official documentation where Bluetooth 6.0 actually states it has higher bandwidth and what that bandwidth is.
Be sure not to quote the various Bluetooth Audio Codecs such as LDHC 5, L3C, SnapDragon Sound as Bluetooth 6.0 higher bandwidth ... these are NOT one and the same.
Bluetooth® Core 6.0 Technical Overview | Bluetooth® Technology Website
This paper provides a technical overview of the Channel Sounding feature which brings secure, fine ranging capabilities to Bluetooth technology.
I think it is Apple that needs to adapt industry standards to utilize its Lossless or Lossy codecs and stop having us stuck on AAC codec for Bluetooth audio since the entire Apple Music catalogue has gone Lossy/Lossless.
Apple Music's lossy codec is AAC. And Apple's lossless codec (ALAC) is open source and available royalty free, so I'm sure it could be standardised in Bluetooth devices if there was a demand for that.
Honestly, the MX devices have awesome bluetooth coupling.
Lots of non-Apple ANC headsets these days will allow multiple simultaneous bluetooth connections and just play all of them at the same time with an in-headphone mixer.
I find this better than Apple's implementation to be frank. Simultaneous Bluetooth is almost as fast to connect and there's never any need to "reconnect." With my AirPods, if I'm listening to a podcast and open my laptop, the podcast pauses. If I'm leading a meeting and get an audible notification on my phone, my headphones switch entirely to my phone and don't always switch back rapidly or automatically.
If something does go wrong with an Apple headphone, it's not always easy to fix, either. While fixing an issue with other sets generally boils down to re-pairing them, which takes about 15 seconds. Full disclosure: I had more trouble with my Airpods Max than my current AirPods Pro 2.
Apple Lossless is not part of the AAC standards, no.
Both use .m4a as an audio container format, but that's to be expected -- mpeg-4 is a broad standard that can host codecs that aren't part of mpeg-4. Inside that container are two completely different types of audio data, one that's standardized as part of MPEG (AAC) and one that's a completely seperate standard. I don't believe there is a lossless standard under AAC yet.
As for standardizing in Bluetooth -- ALAC is a storage format, not a transport format. When you listen to an ALAC file on Apple headphones, it's transcoded in real time to AAC at the highest bitrate available given your current conditions. ALAC is lossless and in the worst case scenario (very complex waveform) can require as much bandwidth as the raw bitmapped audio, requiring far more bandwidth than the ~ 1 Mb/s maximum you can transfer via Bluetooth.
Regardless -- transports for wireless audio need to deal with variable bandwidth, as you get up and move around and the amount of real world bandwidth decreases.
An actual lossless headphone standard would need to start with a much higher bandwidth between device and headset -- WiFi or 5G are obvious options -- with much higher power draw. Then we'd probably need to define a different way to deal with reductions in available bandwidth...buffering et al.
I once had the XM3 - just one bluetooth device and coupling was always messy. Huge difference to the AirPod Max
There is already a lossless Bluetooth codec, aptX Lossless, developed by Qualcomm and supported by various headphones that use Qualcomm chips: Bose, Denon, etc.
It works by pushing the Bluetooth bandwidth beyond what is normally available, up to 1.2 Mbps or so, to deliver lossless 44.1Khz 24-bit.
You’re right that they will be sacrificing battery life to accomplish this, and that’s perhaps a compromise that Sony and Apple aren’t willing to make right now, given that 99% of us can’t tell the difference between a high quality AAC stream and lossless anyway.
Yeah, it works nicely most of the time. But the implementation on my Sony XM4s isn't perfect: on macOS, some apps seem to keep playing blank audio streams, even when there is nothing playing, and this prevents the XM4s from switching to another source automatically. VLC, for example, is terrible for this, and some websites do it too. Sometimes I have to kill a bunch of apps or turn Bluetooth off to get the XM4s to switch away from the Mac.
My Bose speakers don't seem to have the same issue though, and I wonder if Sony have fixed it in the XM5s (by detecting blank audio streams?)
Yeah and exactly how much did yours cost in usd and how much better in all measures of sound wispy word vs aisles are they exactly? Any audiophile reviews you can share please??