WH-1000XM3. Image by Franz Lopez/Rappler
What’s so good about the M3’s noise-cancelling is that it blocks out all the ambient sounds you don’t want to hear when you’re listening to a song or watching a movie. It can turn the loud buzzing from air conditioners to a soft hum. In busy places, such as a mall, for instance, it can completely drown out the noise of a large crowd. The noise-cancelling is so effective that when I remove the headphones, it surprises me how noisy some places can actually be.
Even more impressive is that it does all this without compromising audio performance, which Sony credits to its new QN1 chip. The audio quality is excellent and incredibly immersive with crisp clear mids and highs and a punchy bass. It more than delivers in this department and is arguably hard to match in this price range.
The headphones feature a USB-Type C port for charging, allowing it to juice up really fast. You can probably get it fully charged from 10% battery in less than two hours. And according to Sony, you can get up to a whopping 30 hours of use at full battery. This sounds about right from my time using it wirelessly as I was able to go about a day and half of heavy use without needing to charge.
Top3 noise-cancelling headphones -