It's pretty easy to turn noise canceling off. Just tap the left bud lightly on its small touch panel, or hold it longer if you want to pause your music briefly and say hi to someone walking past. When you do that, the outside sounds get piped in, so you don't have to take the buds out to speak if you don't want to. The microphones are also pretty great at capturing ambient sound—I whirled around a few times in my living room, looking for a car, until I realized that they were picking up the sound of vehicles on the street outside, through an open window.
In the app, you can enable a feature that turns the buds off automatically when you take them out of your ears. Normally, you'd have to put them in the case to power them down.
One thing that's missing: quick volume controls. They're optimized for Google Assistant, so I suppose you could use voice controls to make them quieter and louder. But Google's assistant is not the assistant I use, so I pulled out my phone to control the volume instead.
Turn the Beat Around
Including the battery re-ups you can get out of the charging case, Sony promises up to 24 hours of listening time. I didn't get that far, but I’ve been using them for a few hours every day for a week, and I haven’t had to recharge the case yet. They fare well between trips to the case too. It took a four-hour span of straight listening to drain the left earbud's battery to 50 percent. The right stayed at 70 percent.
The controls on each bud differ, and the left and right buds receive audio content from the source independently, instead of being connected left to right like many Bluetooth buds. This means that the battery life can fluctuate from bud to bud. On phone calls, I also sometimes got echoes, but these were brief and negligible.
The buds are part of Sony's 1000 series, which is designed to be used for flights and commuting. There is a running setting on the adaptive sound controls, if you want to use them for working out, but they’re not technically water-resistant or sweat-proof. They’re also a little too bulky to feel comfortable exercising in them.
But most important, the buds sound amazing. You can fiddle around with the EQ in the app—I mostly switched between bass boost and speech settings, but I didn't need to. Most things sounded great without my interference. The swelling drums and complex choral arrangements of Beyoncé’s “Spirit” were rich and layered, as were the driving guitars and Scottish shouting of We Were Promised Jetpacks.
And crucially, I couldn’t hear myself making up nonsense lyrics to Fall Out Boy's “Sugar We’re Goin Down” while walking my dog, which is pretty much all that I ask of any noise-canceling buds (passersby might have different preferences). I did end up using my regular workout buds instead of these for running. But for everything else, and especially traveling, the WF-1000XM3 are a very solid choice.
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