In today's episode of the Headset Advisor Podcast, I'll be talking about the Sony XM5 headphones. As many of you may know, the XM5 replaced the former XM4 model.
When you listen to this Podcast, you'll find out some interesting things about the Sony XM5. Things such as:
- How it sounds
- How much battery life you get
- The different ways it connects to your devices
- Whether or not it does a good job to reduce background noise
- How you can hear your surroundings without removing the headphones
Sony, like other premium brands, has a reputation for making high quality, great sounding products. Their name has been synonomous with quality for decades. So, does this new pair of headphones deserve to wear the Sony badge, or does it come up short? Let's take a look and find out.
First, it's a bit lighter than the former XM4, and it doesn't fold up like it either. Instead, the XM5 comes with a hard shell carry case so you can transport it without risk of damage. Good to know for those who are on the go, and need headphones.
The Sony XM5 connects to computers and mobile devices, and does so through Bluetooth and 3.5mm connections. This gives you more than one way to connect the XM5 to your devices. And while on the subject of connectivity, the XM5 doesn't come with a USB Adapter. This means that you won't have the remote call answering feature. For some, that's a deal breaker because being able to answer calls when away from the desk not only gives customers better service, but helps you to avoid that mountain of voice messages to wade through.
The battery life on the Sony XM5 is as follows:
For music, you get 30 hours of listening time when using the Active Noise Canceling feature. And, you get 40 hours when ANC is turned off.
When it comes to talk time, you get 24 hours when using ANC, and 32 when it's off.
The battery recharge time is 3.5 hours, and you get 3 hours of battery life by charging for only 3 minutes. Pretty amazing really.
All in all, I'd say that's a pretty robust battery that clearly provides more than enough battery power for anyone's day.
When listening to music, you can pause it by removing the headphones, and resume by placing the headphones back on. You can also pause the music by just starting a conversation. Sony refers to this as Speak-to-Chat. Music resumes when the conversation is over.
You can hear your surroundings by placing the palm of your hand over the ear speaker housing. When you do that, it opens up some microphones that allow you to hear what's going on around you. Remove your hand, and the feature is deactivated. This feature helps to avoid the need to continuously remove the headphones every time you want to hear something.
As for sound quality, and noise reduction, Sony did a great job with both. In fact, they used an Ai machine learning algorithm that listened to 500 million voice samples to learn how to surpress it, while keeping the voice audio quality high. Well, in my estimation, Sony knocked it out of the park. The XM5 sounds great, and it did a surprisingly good job at reducing unwanted background noise.
As I mentioned earlier, the Sony XM5 comes with Active Noise Cancelation. This is a feature that electronically lowers room noise. This feature is designed to allow you to better focus on your tasks while not being distracted by the sounds going on around you. And of course if you do want to hear what's going on around you, you can cup your palm over the ear speaker housing as I mentioned earlier.
All things considered, this is a great pair of headphones, albeit not perfect, but great none the less. This product could be improved if it included a USB Adapter that was optimized for use with the leading UC platforms. Short of that, this is a pair of headphones well worth your time to consider.
