The premium over the ear wireless headphone market is a competitive, if highly priced, market. Battling for top spot on the list of devices you’ll normally find Sony and their active noise cancelling WH-1000 line of devices.
Thanks to a tear down of Sony’s Headphone Connect app we’re getting a look at a few potential features and the device. So what’s new? If the code in the app is correct, and final, you’ll finally be able to pair more than one device at once. This is a common feature with other premium headphones, and brings Sony into line with the premium feature set.
Another new feature is “smart talking” which will monitor the environment for people taking and adjust the level of playback so you can hear conversations. The specifics of how this works will be very important, I don’t want my headphones to lower their level just because someone is having a conversation near me.
Additionally it looks like the new headphones will integrate with the Google Maps API to provide location specific settings. We imagine this would change settings live such as the level of ANC. eg. at home you may want it low or off so you can hear what’s happening around you, on a train you’d want it dialled fully up.
Physically the XM4s are looking very similar to the XM3s, which is a good thing, the original XM3 were widely considered to be very comfortable and stylish (or as stylish as huge headphones can be). Battery life might also be getting a small improving up to 40 hours from 36 hours on the last model.
We still don’t have a release date for the updated headphones, but with them passing through several international regulatory bodies in the previous months we suspect it’s not to far away.
