Sony WH-1000XM6 review

With autumn here and a new academic or working year under way, most of us are back in our daily routine. During busy periods you often end up working in cafés or libraries, where ambient noise and conversation make concentrating difficult. Background music is the best way to hold your focus, and headphones are perfect for that. As you know, they come in two forms: earbuds and over-ear headphones. Personally I lean towards earbuds, since large headphones are less comfortable and take up more room in a backpack — the last over-ears I used were the JBL E55BT. I still pull them out occasionally for video editing, but working with audio means using a cable, because there’s noticeable latency over Bluetooth. That doesn’t matter when listening to music, but it’s a serious problem when editing sound.

This August Sony gave me the chance to try their newest and best Bluetooth headphones — the WH-1000XM6. Since the name is a mouthful, I’ll shorten it to XM6 in this review. These are the sixth-generation wireless headphones, renowned for excellent sound quality and noise cancellation.

Design

The XM6 design is thoroughly modern and minimalist. The headphones sit gently against your head, ensuring excellent comfort all day. The body is made from good-quality recycled plastic, but it's a real fingerprint magnet. Sony claims the finish resists fingerprints; the black model I tested did not bear that out.

The headband is very wide and rests comfortably. It maintains good balance, so neither your ears nor the top of your head start aching. The slider and the cups themselves adjust easily, so you can fit the headphones nicely to your head shape. The moment you pick them up it’s easy to tell left from right, because they aren’t symmetrical.

You'll find almost no physical buttons, since everything is controlled by a touch sensor built into the right side. Swiping sideways skips to the next track or back to the previous one. Swiping up and down adjusts the volume. A double tap pauses playback. Active noise cancellation and ambient sound modes switch with a separate physical button. That's convenient, because you can always be sure you'll hear the person you're talking to when it matters most. The XM6 power on by holding a separate power button, which also starts pairing mode.

Many people disliked the XM5 because they couldn't fold, so they took up more space. The XM6 brings back the folding design used on the XM4. The headphones fit neatly into the included case, which is well made and compact. The XM6 fold and collapse nicely, and the case closes with a magnetic catch, so you can drop it into a backpack and protect the headphones from damage. There's also room in the case for the charging and AUX cables, so the headphones are always ready to use.

The XM6 come in three lovely colours, all modern and professional: black (which I tested), platinum silver and midnight blue. I’ve no doubt you’ll find one that suits your style. I think platinum silver looks best, though practically I’d pick either black or blue. Prices (September 2025) start from €415.

Sound quality

These headphones stand out for wonderful sound quality and balanced frequencies. The sound is clean and clear, and the equaliser lets you tune it to your taste. The XM6 can be dialled in precisely for each music genre. If you listen mostly to vocal music you can lift the highs; if you prefer instrumental music, especially with bass guitar, you can boost the low end.

The headphones support the high-resolution LDAC codec, Sony’s own audio coding technology. The XM6 support High-Resolution Audio and High-Resolution Audio Wireless. These technologies ensure high-quality transmission both over a cable and wirelessly. If you play music through Spotify, the most popular platform, you won’t notice a difference, because Spotify compresses audio heavily. But other providers such as Tidal, Apple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited support LDAC and send three times more data than a standard Bluetooth connection using AAC. The difference in listening quality is noticeable, particularly in a quiet environment.

In the Sony | Sound Connect app you can enable DSEE Extreme, which uses AI to improve the quality of compressed recordings. The feature recognises different genres and individual elements of a track, so it can improve their quality and widen the dynamic range. That’s useful if you play music through YouTube Music or Spotify, where the audio really is compressed.

It’s very useful that the headphones support different listening modes. In Sound Connect you can choose between standard, background music and cinema modes. Standard mode lets you tailor the sound individually with a 10-band equaliser. Background music mode improves your concentration and increases the sense of distance, as though you were listening to music in a café without it distracting you. Cinema mode draws you into a theatre experience, and 360 Reality Audio Upmix for Cinema lets you feel spatial audio. The XM6 render ordinary stereo as spatial sound that simply pulls you into the action.

Noise cancellation

I somewhat expected over-ear headphones to have better active noise cancellation than earbuds, since their shape covers the ears. But I didn't expect the XM6 to take it to an entirely different level. It's no accident they have twelve microphones, which hear the environment even better and adapt to noise so the sound stays powerful and free of interference. It's precisely that microphone quality that fools our ears and ensures uninterrupted sound. I'd name noise cancellation the best feature of these headphones, because completely isolating ambient sound helps you work far more productively and hold your focus. I tested the XM6 in an office where people talk constantly, and on a train where you hear the wheels on the rails — the noise cancellation works brilliantly everywhere and I have no complaints. Occasionally it even felt eerie hearing no background sound at all, but I'd get pulled into my work quickly.

I’d also praise the fact that music quality doesn’t degrade and the sound stays clear and transparent. Often turning on active noise cancellation dulls the sound slightly, but with the XM6 you won’t notice any difference.

If you want to hear other people, or yourself during remote calls, Ambient Sound mode serves that perfectly. It lets you hear others clearly without cutting yourself off. Admittedly, colleagues in the office once pointed out that I was talking very loudly. You do want to speak louder, sometimes almost shout, because you still feel the cancellation — but the microphones transmit sound cleanly with no delay, and I didn’t notice a big difference from natural speech. It’s very convenient that active noise cancellation and Ambient Sound are separated from the touch control and switched with a dedicated button, so you can change modes quickly when you need to and miss nothing.

Controls

The XM6 offer a very comfortable way to adjust the volume and play music without touching your phone. The intuitive control recognises sideways swipes for skipping tracks, and up and down swipes for volume. Two taps pause the music, which perhaps isn’t always convenient, but with a single tap you’d be more likely to pause the music while adjusting the headphones. It’s worth noting that the sensor is only built into the right earcup.

With Sound Connect you can set a double press of the mode button to launch your favourite music platform: Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music or Endel.

The XM6 have built-in proximity sensors: as soon as they detect the headphones aren’t on your head, the music pauses, and vice versa. This works fairly accurately, though occasionally it sticks and the music keeps playing even with the headphones on the desk. You can answer or reject calls with head gestures. Nodding up and down answers a call, shaking side to side rejects it. It works very accurately and is genuinely useful when you can’t get your phone out.

Adaptive Sound Control adapts to your lifestyle. The built-in AI recognises whether you’re sitting, walking or travelling. The headphones change ambient sound settings accordingly and tailor the listening experience to the activity. I especially liked it on public transport, where the headphones automatically switched on active noise cancellation.

You can also control the sound freely, get help and set up notifications with Google Assistant. Perhaps the headphones will soon receive an update supporting the smarter Gemini assistant with its AI features. Speak-to-Chat recognises when you start speaking and switches to ambient sound mode so you can hear the other person. It’s very convenient, because you don’t need to take the headphones off, and once you finish talking you return to your music.

Connectivity

The XM6 support Bluetooth 5.3, which offers low latency and public broadcasts with Auracast. The headphones support the standard SBC and AAC codecs plus high-resolution LDAC and LC3. The XM6 also have a Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) mode, which reduces the battery used for transmission. That allows audio to be streamed to several devices at once.

The ability to connect up to two devices simultaneously, with automatic switching, makes listening even more convenient and uninterrupted. It’s handy when you need to take a call on your phone and then carry on working on your computer afterwards. Unfortunately I did notice problems with a Windows 11 computer when joining remote meetings. The headphones often wouldn’t connect to the conferencing app and stayed connected to the phone instead, which caused a fair amount of hassle.

The headphones pair easily with a computer — the moment you enable pairing mode, a prompt appears on screen asking whether you want to connect. Android devices offer Fast Pair, which links the headphones to your Google account. If you lose them, you can play an audible signal to help find them.

The XM6 charge over USB-C, which has become the market standard, and I’ve no doubt your phone or laptop charges with the same cable. If you notice the battery is flat just before starting work, it’s no problem — you can simply plug in the charging cable and carry on using them. Charging is very fast: just three minutes gives up to three hours of listening. A full charge takes 3.5 hours.

Battery

Runtime on a single charge is a very important consideration when choosing headphones. It's pleasing that Sony quotes realistic figures. The manufacturer says the XM6 will run for up to 30 hours with noise cancellation on, extending to 40 hours with it off. A single charge should cover an entire working week. Over my testing period I only had to charge them a couple of times. If you decide to use the headphones while they're charging, the XM6 automatically limit the charge to 80% to protect the battery.

The app

The Sound Connect app lets you control the sound and headphone settings, and switch easily between listening and ambient sound modes. You can not only set the equaliser — the app also helps you discover your preferred sound profile by playing music and letting you pick your favourite option. Sound Connect lets you configure the features mentioned above, and choose the connection priority between sound quality, connection stability and low latency. You can create your own 360 profile so the headphones tailor the sound to your head shape. The app doesn’t look especially modern and it’s easy to get lost among the abundance of settings, but it does let you personalise the XM6 to yourself.

The app shows the exact remaining battery percentage in real time. You can check the level either in the app or through a dedicated widget on your phone’s home screen.

Sony releases updates regularly that improve how the headphones work, and updating them through the app is very simple. All that matters is that the devices are charged enough. Sound Connect works identically on Android and iOS, so whichever ecosystem you belong to, the experience is the same.

Verdict: pros and cons

I have to admit the Sony WH-1000XM6 are the best headphones I've ever tried. These are top-tier headphones with excellent sound and active noise cancellation. Long battery life and a comfortable design let you enjoy your audio all day. If you're looking for versatile, reliable and highly effective headphones for work, study or everyday listening, the XM6 are the perfect choice. The price is high, but investing in this series genuinely pays off and opens up a new level of listening.