Sony WH-1000XM6 headphones review: Pitch perfect, not a perfect pitch

Every review of the Sony WH-1000XM6 headphones is a glowing monologue about the sound quality. It is true of course, the XM range has long been hailed as the best over-ear headphones, and just like its predecessors the WXM6s blazed through our audio testing. Wonderfully balanced highs, lows, and mids, brilliant clarity, and a moderately wide sound stage - if you’re looking for the gold standard of consumer grade audio quality for music, then you can click away from this review right now. But if you plan on using these headphones at the gym, or to watch videos on your phone, or to make good use of its multi-point, you should probably keep reading.

Let me get the praise out of the way. Across our testing playlist which assesses the balance of bass, treble, clarity, and the sound stage, the WXM6s nailed every test. The deep bass in "I Didn’t Just Come Here to Dance" by Carly Rae Jepsen, and "3005" by Childish Gambino is clear, but not overpowering. At its deepest the sound resonates through your head, while still allowing space for the other musical elements.

Similarly the treble register is just as clear, with high flying notes soaring without causing any fatigue in the ear. Across the board the clarity is excellent. I found I was able to focus on instruments and sounds I hadn’t been able to pick up before in "Do It Again" by Steely Dan. Did you know there are bar chimes in that song?

The only slightly lacklustre aspect is the sound stage. As far as they go, this one is a bit thinner than I would expect, especially when the companion app has you set up a listening profile to get 360 sound. Rather than the opening synths in "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd wrapping from one ear around to the other, I found these shifted only slightly across from my left eye, to my right. I had the same experience when the roaming synths kick in in "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd. Sound stage isn’t the most important audio aspect, but still something to be wary of if you’re after fully immersive sound.

While technically speaking the WXM6s sound great there are a host of user experience issues that become annoyances over time. The most frustrating for me personally is the touchpad controls. To each their own, but arbitrarily swiping and tapping on my headphones hoping they will do what I want is frustrating. This is especially difficult if you happen to be walking in the rain. Any condensation negatively affects the responsiveness of the touchpad, and it ended up being easier to default back to my phone 90% of the time.

Further to the navigation element, the touchpad also has a hold-to-pause function where applying gentle pressure to the right headphone pauses your music, and switches from ANC to Ambient mode. A solid feature in theory, but the function is too sensitive which led to some drawbacks. Wearing the headphones at the gym, if I was performing any motion that brought my arms by my ears (tricep extensions, shoulder presses, etc), as my arm grazed the headphone my music would pause. Throughout a set my music would fade-in and fade-out with each rep, which is just flat out annoying.

A similar feature with similarly middling results is Speak to Chat. Rather than touching the headphones, the device will automatically pause when someone is speaking to you, but it isn’t reliable. People need to be quite close to you, or need to be speaking quite loudly for it to kick in. Naturally the function doesn’t actually know when someone is addressing you, so any loud enough noise near you causes it to kick in, and there is no way to trigger your music to start again if it is a false alarm. You just need to wait it out. This would be particularly finicky in an office environment, or any public space, but fortunately you can toggle it on and off in the companion app.

The multipoint has some comparable awkward quirks. While setting up and pairing multipoint is simple, the device can get confused if the two points are too close together. Sitting at my work laptop with my phone by my side, the headphones would routinely swap between the two devices. My music was constantly stopping as the focus shifted back and forth which ultimately defeated the purpose of using multipoint at all.

None of these issues are necessarily deal breakers, but the final one is probably the most salient quirk. While music through streaming apps sounds great, other content doesn’t. Scrolling through short form video apps the audio is all off. Across both TikTok and Instagram the music is overly loud, while the voices are low and warbly. YouTube isn’t as bad, but it makes for a poor experience overall. It is a strange peculiarity that is unique to the WXM6s. I’ve reviewed a few over ear headphones recently and haven’t had the same issue, even on much cheaper sets.