Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Dus, La, Ti… NO. That’s what the best new feature on the otherwise excellent Sony WH-1000XM4 sound-canceling headphones seems to imply every time I rip into song she wears.
Unfortunately, and sure coincidentally, Sony’s headphones do not seem to make me enjoy it that much.
They are the best sound-canceling headphones in the world – that much is certain now, after we just posted our Sony WH-1000XM4 review. Packed with clever feature additions, with excellent audio performance and improved sound attenuation techniques over their predecessors (the Sony WH-1000XM3), they have received a very rare 5-star rating from TechRadar.
But the most useful feature added to the Sony WH-1000XM4s brings an unintended side effect. Speak-to-chat is a new, optional, intelligent mode that can be activated on the headset that uses the microphone to recognize and respond when you have a conversation. Start a conversation and the headphones will pause your music, activate continuous audio transmission, so you can have a kinwag with someone nearby without taking the headphones off your head, or adjust the audio manually or pause the track.
It works phenomenally well. Get a few words in and the Sony headset knows what’s going on and go into their chat mode. I even tried to trick her by sitting close to my flatmate and getting her talking in an attempt to trigger Speak-to-Chat, but Sony is at the game.
The problem is, it almost works too good, in that when I make longer noises outside the conversation, the headphones pause. And that includes singing along to my favorite tunes.
Listen, say
I can not speak for everyone, but I believe that the real pleasure of headphones with sound is interrupted in allowing me to leave a long-winding view of a solid-gold-absolute-banger and not hear the damage. With the WH-1000XM4s I get a beam in and am then roughly interrupted by the sound of silence from the cans, and my own care.
It may be a small grace for my flatmate and neighbors, but it feels like a real tease from Sony to have made such a useful feature, only to overlook this probably very general potential disruption.
Yes, the Speak-to-Chat feature is optional, but it’s one of the major upgrades over the previous model, and really useful when working in the intended scenario. And so I was left in limbo – to sing or not to sing? To be acoustically available, as well as supersonic-social distancing?
There is also an interesting anthropological side effect here. As most of our music lives on personal devices, and is played via personal headphones, the actual act of listening to music becomes increasingly insular.
It’s part of the profession of sound-canceling headphones – keeping the outside world out, and your personal auditorium personal. But with that comes the loss of collective, shared sonic euphoria – all the more so now that it feels like live music events are fighting through the pandemic like the rest of us.
I remember the last time I saw a bus driver in the London Underground Subway – just seeing him, and not hearing him thanks to the noise-canceling headphones I was wearing at the time, and how disappointing that must have been for him had, let alone the diminished loose change that these days is likely to come its way as a result of these technological improvements.
So back to the WH-1000XM4 catch-22 – a product that wants me to be both immersed and available at the same time, a somewhat contradictory position. If I can no longer sing with my friends in public and can not sing with my headphones without being seen as disabled and distant (as implied by the apparent need for the Speak-to-Chat feature), then all that is left is in to sing my head. And that is indeed a very lonely sound.
