The Sony MDR-1000X are wireless, over-ear headphones with support for active noise cancelling. I’ve owned them for a few weeks now and want to share some of my first impressions. This won’t be a formal review; I’ll just talk about my own, subjective experiences with these headphones.
Active Noise Cancelling
The reason I bought these headphones is for their Active Noise Cancelling (ANC). In case you don’t know what this is: ANC means the headphones actively work to cancel out any ambient noise around you. Microphones on the headphones pick up the ambient noise. An inverse of this noise (or anti-noise) is then computed, and played over the headphone’s speakers. The net result, in theory, is that you hear only silence. On headphones, ANC generally works only on lower sound frequencies, while higher frequencies are passively cancelled (i.e. through soundproofing).
The ANC on the 1000X is fantastic. Things like traffic, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners are no match for it. Though personally, the place I use it most is at work. Our office can get quite noisy, but the 1000X eliminates pretty much everything except for loud conversations that take place in the same room. And even then, it takes the edge completely off and pushes the unwanted noise all the way to the background. It’s still audible, but not intrusive on my music. Which, incidentally, doesn’t have to be playing very loud. I can listen to minimalistic electronica in a noisy environment, and still enjoy my music at a reasonably volume. That’s pretty great to me.
Sound quality
This is where we get into the controversial and subjective field of talking ‘bout sound quality. I honestly won’t be of much use here. I’m not an audiophile. The only relevant comparison I can make is with my Audio Technica ATH-M50x. Reviewers say those are some “great cans”, and I agree: they sound excellent. The 1000X, also, sound excellent. I use them wirelessly with my FiiO X7. Both the 1000X and the X7 support aptX, so I’m getting high-resolution audio even over Bluetooth.
The sound coming from the 1000X is clean and nicely balanced. I listen mostly to heavy metal and hard rock, as well as electronica and ambient. These are two very different types of music, and both sound great on the 1000X. That’s really all I can say about this: they just sound excellent.
Comfort
The 1000X are pretty comfortable to wear. I like them better than the ATH-M50x in that regard. They fit snugly around my ears without too much pressure. On the other hand, they are not the lightest headphones in the universe. The headband does put some pressure on your skull which can get uncomfortable after a few hours. Simply adjusting the headphones by tilting them slightly forward or backward can solve this problem.
Other things
Couple of other minor points I want to mention:
- The ANC can be turned on and off, which is nice.
- There’s a few different ANC modes, for letting through only certain types of ambient noise (like conversations, or traffic). I don’t use those so I won’t comment on them.
- Battery life is advertised as 20 hours. With a few hours of listening a day, this easily gets me through a full work week.
- The right earpad is touch-sensitive. You can use gestures to play/pause, control volume, and cycle through tracks. It works, but I’m not a fan of this and would have just preferred buttons.
- You can cup the right earpad with your hand to interrupt your music and let all ambient noise through the speakers. Handy for if you want to quickly listen to something without taking your headphones off.
- The 1000X neatly folds up and comes with a solid travel case.
- Charging is done through microUSB, and takes about 4 hours. Easily done overnight.
- The 1000X comes with a 3,5mm headphone cable for wired listening. I don’t use it.
Competition
The main competitor for the 1000X is the Bose QuietComfort 35, which is evident by the amount of reviews comparing the two. These reviews were not unanimous. Overall though, the 1000X seemed to have the edge in both ANC and sound quality, while the QC35 was deemed the more comfortable of the two. I have not personally tried the QC35, nor do I intend to. The 1000X works great for me so that’s what I’m sticking with.
Recommendation
In my opinion, the ANC is really the reason to get these headphones. If you plan to listen to music in a noisy environment, and you want to be able to just close yourself off from the world and enjoy some high-resolution audio, you can’t go wrong with the MDR-1000X.
On the other hand, if you don’t need the ANC, then you shouldn’t get these headphones. They’re pretty expensive, and you’d be wasting a good deal of money on a feature you don’t use. Get some other (wireless) headphones without ANC instead, there’s plenty of them out there.