Sony brings noise cancelling to wire-free headphones with new in-ear WF-1000XM3 headphones

Sony’s been one of our longtime favourites at Ausdroid for their noise cancelling XM headphone series, and today they’ve announced the expansion of that series with a new wire-free entrant, WF-1000XM3.

Physically, the headphones look like a standard in-ear bud with a larger piece sitting outside the ear housing a touch surface, battery and noise-cancelling apparatus. Despite this, they still look pretty small and easy to handle. Despite the looks, Sony says they’ve carefully engineered the buds with an “ergonomic tri-hold structure” to ensure they stay in place.

The new in-ear headphones come in a familiar buds-plus-charging-case setup, with the case providing three full charges for the headphones. Battery life is said to be six hours on a full charge with noise cancelling features enabled (eight hours without), so the full setup can provide 24 or 32 hours of music playback. They also charge quickly, with 10 minutes of charge yielding 90 minutes listening time. The case

The headphones feature Dual Noise Sensor technology, with one feed-forward and one feed-back microphone feeding into a dedicated HD Noise Cancelling Processor, handily named QN1e (because why not?) that produces the appropriate inversion of background sound to cancel ambient noise. In-ear buds already benefit a little from blocking outside sound, but with the addition of noise cancelling technology you should be able to hear just your music.

Being a member of the XM family, there’s some neat touch controls built into the buds as well. You can play, pause, skip and activate Google Assistant on the headphones, and they’ll automatically pause/resume if you remove and replace one of the buds. You can also customise what does what with a companion app if you so desire.

The headphones will hit the market this month with an RRP of $399.95, in black or white options. At that price, WF-1000XM is coming in pretty much at the top of the market for in-ear headphones but it’s also bringing noise cancellation, a rare feature for the form (and Sony’s noise cancellation feature has been a winner on the WF-1000XM’s older siblings).

We’ll be putting the headphones through their paces shortly to see just how they perform.