SONY

Brand wants to wallop AirPods, Powerbeats Pro AND Bose with noise cancelling WF-1000XM3 true wireless buds
Sony WF-1000XM3 headphones are long overdue successor to the WF-1000X, which are among the true wireless buds you could get, in some ways, and a massive pain in the butt in certain other ways. Interestingly, although this is 1000XM3, there was no 'M2' version - figure that one out.
Clearly intended to take on the Beats Powerbeats Pro and Apple Airpods 2, WF-1000XM3 have one additional trick packed in their lavishly hand-tooled carry case: these are noise cancelling buds. So you could also see them as a rival to Bose's over-ear QC35 II. According to Sony, it's not just noise cancellation, it's Industry-leading Noise Cancellation. Boom!
Gosh, that was exciting. So, yes, the headline feature on the WF-1000XM3 headphones is Dual Noise Sensor technology - forward- and rear-facing mics that pick up 'more' ambient sound. Paired with an HD Noise Cancelling Processor QN1e, this cancels noise 'so that all attention is on your music'.
As you probably know, noise cancelling involves using an inverted sound wave to offset background noise, with Sony promising great results on everything from aircraft cabin noise, to city 'hustle and bustle'.
Now the original Sony WF-1000X sounded remarkably good - only the much more recent likes of Sennheiser True Wireless and Beats by Dre Powerbeats Pro have really overtaken them in that department. They have also had good sound cancelling, but for the WF-1000XM3 Sony has upgraded that in terms of both the tech and its positioning in the marketing material.
The problem with the original was that on the NC reduced the already short battery life to something like the duration of a football match.
This time around, lower power consumption means you can run them with NC on for up to 6 hours. By recharging in their battery case, you get a total of 24 hours, while a Powerbeats-style quick-charge function means you get 90 minutes more play - enough for a football match! - from just 10 minutes of charging.
Turn off the noise cancelling and you get 8 hours of playback - 32 hours in total with in-case recharges.
I'd expect the WF-1000XM3 to sound great. The originals did and they appeared when true wireless was in its infancy. The battery life improvements are a real bonus and Sony will by now have fixed the connectivity issues that plagued the first version of these buds. Sony says it has. Again like the Powerbeats, the Bluetooth connection is via the left and right bud simultaneously, rather than audio being pumped to your left bud only, and then relayed to the right bud from there. 'Teamed with the new optimized antenna structure, this results in a highly stable connection,' Sony assures us. Lower latency means you can use the WF-1000XM3 when watching movies, too. That was not very possible with the original. Sony adds that the HD Noise Cancelling Processor QN1e uses 24-bit audio signal processing, while the Digital Sound Enhancement Engine HX-DSEE HX, pur-lease! - upscales compressed digital music files including MP3, 'to bring you closer to the quality of High-Resolution Audio.' Duncan Bell