Sony WH-1000XM5

The Sony WH-1000XM5 was Sony’s flagship wireless noise-cancelling headphone from 2022 until the WH-1000XM6 replaced it, and that succession is the most important fact about it today. The hardware did not get any worse the day the new model launched — what changed is the price bracket it competes in. For commuters and frequent flyers who want near-flagship silence and all-day comfort without paying current-flagship money, the discounted XM5 has quietly become the smartest buy in Sony’s lineup.

That is the position this review works from: not whether the XM5 is good — it demonstrably is, and it spent three years as the default recommendation in its class — but whether it is still the right one to buy now that it has a successor. For most people, it is. The rest of this review is about the exceptions, and about what three years of owners have learned that a launch-week spec sheet could not tell you.

The redesign, and its one real cost

With the XM5, Sony abandoned the folding design it had used for generations in favor of a slimmer profile, a stepless headband slider, and cleaner lines with no visible screws or seams to speak of. The look has aged well; next to the utilitarian WH-1000XM4, the XM5 still reads as the modern object. The stepless slider is a quiet upgrade in itself — no clicks, no hunting for “the third notch,” just a smooth glide that stays exactly where you leave it, and holds that position through months of daily stretching. The flat-swivel earcups earn one daily convenience of their own: hung around your neck between listening sessions, the cups sit flush against your chest instead of jutting outward, which matters more than it sounds across a commuter’s day.

The cost is storage. The earcups swivel flat but do not fold inward, so the case is a wide, flat slab that eats noticeably more bag space than the XM4’s ever did. In a slim laptop bag it competes directly with a charger and a paperback, and you feel the difference every day you pack. The case itself is a zippered clamshell with a decent cable pocket, and it protects well — the complaint is purely its footprint. If your bag is already full, this single design decision is the strongest argument for looking at the newer model or the older one, both of which fold.

Comfort across a full workday

At roughly 250 grams, with soft synthetic-leather pads and a deliberately gentle clamp, the XM5 is one of the easiest full-size headphones to wear for genuinely long stretches. Long-term owners consistently describe full workdays and long-haul flights without hot spots — the wide headband pad spreads the load so evenly that the usual crown pressure point never really develops, and the light clamp means glasses wearers get less of the arm-pressing ache that firmer rivals cause. The earcup openings are deep and roomy enough for most; only notably large ears brush the inner lining, a complaint that surfaces occasionally in owner threads without ever becoming a theme. Three video calls into the morning, it is still just there, which is the entire job.

The gentle clamp has a flip side: shake your head vigorously and the fit shifts, so this is not a gym headphone — and with no water-resistance rating of any kind, it is not meant to be. The synthetic leather also warms up in summer the way every closed leatherette design does; on a July platform you will lift an earcup now and then. Neither is unusual for the class, but both are part of the honest picture.

How quiet it really gets

Eight microphones feed a two-processor noise-cancelling system that continuously adapts to your fit and surroundings — it even accounts for cabin-pressure changes on a flight — and its low-frequency performance remains near the top of the class years after launch. Engine drone, HVAC hum, train rumble: these collapse to a distant murmur the moment the headphones seal, and the first time you take them off mid-flight the cabin roar comes back as a small shock. That low-end dominance was the XM line’s founding trick, and the XM5 still performs it about as well as anything you can buy.

Where its age shows is the midrange. Voices, keyboard clatter, and office chatter leak through more than they do on the WH-1000XM6, which concentrated its improvements exactly there. In an open office you will still hear the outline of a nearby conversation between tracks; on the newer model it fades further toward nothing. The ambient mode, meanwhile, is natural-sounding and quick to toggle by cupping the right earcup — a gesture that matters more than it seems for airport announcements, baristas, and colleagues who appear at your shoulder. One overnight-flight note from the owner consensus: the slim earcups let you lean against the fuselage without grinding the headphone into your ear the way bulkier designs do, though side-sleeping proper is still asking too much of any full-size headphone.

The sound, and how far the EQ moves it

The 30mm drivers are smaller than the XM4’s 40mm units, which reads like a downgrade on paper and does not behave like one in practice. The default tuning is warm and smooth with a modest bass lift — easy to listen to for hours, forgiving of thin or harshly mastered recordings, and less incisive than analytical rivals. Acoustic music keeps its body, podcasts sound full rather than nasal, and nothing ever bites. The consensus among independent reviews has been consistent from launch: this is a pleasant, competent tuning rather than an exciting one.

The equalizer in Sony’s Headphones Connect app has enough range to change that verdict. Pull the bass shelf down and lift the upper mids and the XM5 turns noticeably clearer and more open — it will not become a Bowers & Wilkins PX7 S2e, which trades ANC depth for a more vivid, engaging presentation, but the gap narrows more than the default sound suggests. DSEE Extreme upscaling works on compressed streams in the background, and 360 Reality Audio is supported through compatible services; both are fine, neither is a reason to buy.

Codecs, calls, and the fine print

Android users get LDAC for high-bitrate wireless; iPhones fall back to AAC; there is no aptX of any flavor, which is worth knowing if your laptop or player leans that way. The fine print that catches people: enabling multipoint drops the connection quality to the plainer codecs, so you choose between LDAC at its best and the convenience of two simultaneous devices. Most owners choose multipoint on workdays and LDAC on flights, and the app makes switching tolerable rather than pleasant. LDAC carries its own practical caveat: at its highest-quality setting it is sensitive to crowded radio environments, so a packed station concourse can force stutters — the app’s connection-priority mode trades bitrate for stability, and most owners quietly leave it there.

Multipoint itself works dependably — laptop and phone paired at once, with the headphones jumping to whichever rings. Wear detection pauses music when the cups leave your ears and resumes when they return, and it behaves; false triggers are rare. If you keep a dedicated player such as the NW-A306 as an LDAC source, the XM5 receives the best stream that hardware can send, which is the pairing Sony clearly designed for.

For calls, beamforming microphones and AI-trained noise reduction hold up well on the street and in open offices, and the XM5 is consistently ranked among the better full-size options for meetings. Colleagues stop asking whether you are on headphones, which is the only benchmark that matters. Wind is the residual weakness of every mic array mounted on an earcup, and this one is no exception — on a blustery corner your voice stays intelligible but the polish drops.

There is a second, quieter call-quality virtue: the comfort. A headset you forget you are wearing changes the character of a long meeting day, and the XM5’s light clamp is a genuine advantage over heavier rivals like the AirPods Max for people whose calendar is wall-to-wall.

Setup, the app, and the first week

Out of the box, pairing is quick — Android surfaces a connection prompt, everything else pairs the ordinary way — and the first launch of Headphones Connect will almost certainly want to install a firmware update. Let it finish before forming opinions; Sony has shipped real behavioral refinements this way for years, and the headphones you unbox are rarely quite the headphones you end up with. The app then presents the full feature thicket: speak-to-chat, wear detection, adaptive sound, the equalizer, button behavior.

Adaptive Sound Control is the feature to decide about early. It learns the places you frequent and switches noise-cancelling profiles automatically — full quiet at the office, ambient awareness at your usual platform — and when it guesses right it feels like service. When it guesses wrong, it swaps modes mid-song because you walked past a saved location, and a sizeable share of owners end up switching it off in favor of the manual button. Either choice is fine. The point is that the first week is a pruning exercise, cutting the defaults down to the three or four behaviors you actually want; budget one evening for it, after which the XM5 becomes appliance-simple and stays that way.

Battery life and the charging routine

Sony’s headline figure is 30 hours with noise cancelling on, and in normal use charging becomes a weekly chore rather than a daily one. The failure mode is predictable and mild: you forget for a week and a half, get the low-battery warning on a Tuesday commute, and a short USB-C top-up on a power-delivery charger buys several hours before the morning’s first call. Standby drain is modest, and the auto-power-off timer in the app catches the times you toss them on the desk still switched on.

The one genuine annoyance is that you cannot listen while charging — plug in the USB-C cable and the headphones shut off, full stop. On a long travel day where the battery finally runs dry, that design decision stings, and it is one of the specific complaints the XM6 fixed. The included 3.5mm cable is the workaround for seat-back systems and dead-battery emergencies.

The daily irritations, honestly listed

The touch controls on the right earcup handle volume, transport, and calls with swipes and taps, and they work well indoors. In cold weather they misread taps, gusty wind can register as gestures, and gloves defeat them entirely — a winter commuter learns to use the phone instead. Speak-to-chat, which pauses music when it hears your voice, will also pause for humming and singing along; most owners disable it within the first month and never look back. And that missing water-resistance rating means a proper rain shower is a gamble the price of the headphones should talk you out of.

None of this is disqualifying, and most of it is shared with rivals. It is simply the texture of ownership that a spec sheet never shows: two settings toggled off, one gesture relearned, one case that is slightly too big for the bag you wanted to carry.

Long-term ownership

Three years of owners give the XM5 a mostly reassuring durability record. The pads compress and the synthetic leather eventually wears with heavy use, as it does on every headphone in this class, and replacements are easy to find and fit. The stepless slider keeps its tension. The recurring sore spot is a minority of reports of stress cracks where the slider stems meet the earcups — not the majority experience, but common enough in owner forums to be worth knowing, and an argument for keeping the case in use rather than tossing the headphones loose into a bag.

Sony’s software support for the line has been solid: firmware updates continued well after launch, the app is actively maintained, and features have been refined rather than abandoned. Batteries age the way lithium batteries age — expect the 30-hour figure to soften over years of daily cycles, gently rather than suddenly.

The accessories hold up too. The zippered case scuffs at the corners long before anything fails, and the short USB-C and 3.5mm cables in its pocket are generic enough to replace from any drawer. Swapping worn pads is a few minutes of careful prying, with third-party replacements plentiful — though owners note aftermarket foam changes the seal, and with it the bass response and the cancellation, more than you might expect. Stick close to original-spec pads if the silence is why you bought them.

The generational math

Within the family, the WH-1000XM4 remains the value pick: it folds, its cancellation is a clear step behind, its multipoint is clumsier, and it usually costs the least of the three. The WH-1000XM6 brings back the hinge, ships a genuinely better case, cancels voices more effectively, tunes the sound a touch more evenly, and lets you listen while charging — real improvements, none of them transformative, all of them priced accordingly.

Outside Sony, the Bose QuietComfort Ultra matches or beats the XM5 on cancellation and plushness but gives back battery life; the AirPods Max makes sense only inside an all-Apple household and weighs dramatically more on the head. The XM5 sits in the middle of all of this: no longer the best at anything, still close to the best at everything, and usually the cheapest of the front-runners.

Where the value lands

Buy the XM5 when the gap to the XM6 is substantial, which it usually is now. You give up the folding case, a step of voice-band cancellation, charge-while-listening, and the newest tuning — and you keep roughly everything else that made this line the default recommendation for a decade: the low-frequency silence, the all-day comfort, the dependable multipoint, the 30-hour battery.

Skip it in two cases. If bag space is genuinely tight, the flat case will annoy you every single day, and either sibling serves you better. And if you plan to keep your next headphone for five-plus years, the XM6’s improvements compound over that lifespan — pay up once. For everyone else, this is the sensible choice in the lineup, exactly as the summary below has said all along; the only variable worth checking is the size of today’s discount.

Our take

Verdict: Still one of the best travel headphones going, and now usually a smarter buy than the newer flagship on price.

The problem. You want flagship-grade quiet and comfort without paying brand-new flagship money. Why it matters. Last-gen flagships often deliver the better value once the successor lands and prices fall. What it is. Sony’s previous flagship: excellent adaptive ANC, a smooth and slightly warm tuning, ~30h battery, multipoint and a light, comfortable fit.

Pros

• Noise cancellation that’s still near the top of the class
• Very comfortable for long sessions; lightweight clamp
• Frequently discounted now that the XM6 exists

Cons

• Case is bulky because the earcups don’t fold flat
• Touch controls can be finicky in cold or with gloves
• No aptX (AAC/LDAC only), a niggle for some Android users

Who should buy it

• Travellers and commuters who want ~95% of the flagship for a better price

Who should skip it

• Anyone who needs the smallest possible travel case, or wants the absolute latest ANC

Bottom line. A safe, comfortable, well-priced pick — buy it if the saving over the XM6 is meaningful when you check today’s price.