Sony WF-1000XM6 Earbuds Review

Introduction:

For the past couple of weeks, we’ve had Sony’s chunky but catchily titled WF-1000XM6 wireless earbuds stuffed into our heads. And terrifyingly, it’s been two and a half years since Sony last released a pair of WF-1000 buds, and so the Mk6 boasts some significant updates, including design improvements as well as upgraded noise cancellation, audio quality, and call quality. Although aye, but are they actually worth that sky-high price? Well, here’s our full WF-1000XM6 Sony earbud review.

Cheers! Now, first up, you can grab these earbuds either in the regular black color or in a bit of platinum silver. Personally, we’d veer more towards platinum silver, mostly because they don’t show up gunk that’s come out of your ears quite as easily.

Design:

Now, something we really appreciate about Sony’s design is that they’ve given these buds a slightly more textured finish now it just really aids with grip so we haven’t fumbled these buds a single time this past fortnight whereas despite being a decrepit old booze hound nice and easy to pluck from the case as you can see there and then as usual just kind of stuff them into your lug holes give them a little twist just to make sure they’re nice and secure and you’re good to go you’ve actually got a feature hidden away inside of Sony’s app just to check that you’re fit is ideal as well and if some adjustment is needed well no worries at all you’ve got three other sets of earbuds stuffed in that box there all conveniently colour-coded and this generation probably a wee bit.

Thinner than the previous generation but as you can see still proper chonksters that jut right out of your head and they could certainly never be described as subtle that’s for sure and we was a little bit skeptical that we could actually get a stable comfortable fit because of the size of these things but we’ve got to say we found myself pleasantly impressed by these things they never came loose not once. Despite some severe mastication, we tried a wee bit of jogging, and that did absolutely nothing to stir them. They even sat perfectly happy during an intense cardio HIIT workout. All 20 minutes of it, including the bit with the projectile vomiting. And to prove just how stable they are, let’s have the usual patented Uncle’s spurt mosh test.

And the good news as well they’re also comfortable to wear for absolutely hours at a stretch helped along by the soft spongy earbuds that just sit neatly nestled inside of your lugs and yeah we’ve literally worn these things for the entire trip back from brussels for the actual sony launch and then pretty much for at least half a day every day since then absolutely bugger all earache or other issues and they’re also ipx4 splash resistant as well so they’re okay if you’ve got a bit of a pitter patter of light rain but don’t go getting them absolutely drenched just in case.

Sound Connect App:

Now to actually get the best from your Sony earbuds you’ll want to download that Sound Connect app and this also comes in handy widget form so you can check on the battery life remaining in your earbuds you can also tweak the sound settings and we will run through most of these features in this review but as you can see you’ve got fast access to all the major features and quickly toggle between the likes of noise cancelling and ambient sound, piddle about with the equaliser, you’ve got the adaptive sound control as usual and what we love about SoundConnect is it’s fully customisable so if there’s any features you don’t really use you can just.

Scrap them from your dashboard. It’s certainly quite a dense app; there’s a lot to sort of get your head around in here, especially once you start diving into those device settings. Discover, which has some handy tips and tricks on getting the most out of your buds, etc. As for the actual connectivity, where you can connect up to two devices simultaneously as usual, and flip them on the fly, and we like how you’re given the option of prioritizing either sound quality, good bit of LDAC action, or a stable connection depending on how busy your environment is.

Although, to be fair, we just left it on prioritized sound quality the entire time we were testing these buds, just to see how they would cope, and even in Brussels Airport and London Bridge train station, that connection was absolutely fine. The only problem we’ve had was the right buds suddenly just completely cut connection for around 20 seconds one time when we was on a bus with absolutely zero explanation and just popped back into life again absolutely fine and then the left one did the same thing a couple of days later just when we was mashing our spuds no double entendre or anything no idea what was going on there but this was over a week ago and the problem hasn’t replicated itself so hopefully just early jitters now to.

Audio Quality:

pump the best possible sound into your head, Sony has slapped its fresh new 32-bit V2 processor into these earbuds, along with its latest Airpoint 4mm drivers with a soft edge and a rigid dome and certainly on paper it all sounds splendid the audio has been fine-tuned by grammy award-winning mastering engineers no less you’ve got all usual codec support ldac etc support for high-res audio streaming and also a bit of 360 reality audio if you’re into all of that and naturally if you dive back into that sound connect app you’ve got yourself an equalizer you can play around with it’s a 10 band e you can fiddle with that as much as you like and get a very specific kind of sound.

Otherwise, Sony has also slept on a bunch of preset EQs just to suit a variety of different music. You’ve also got a specific game setting just to help the likes of footsteps and things like that really stand out, quite handy if you’re shooting people in the face online.

And we found that on the default regular audio settings the WF-1000XM6 buds spaffed out a reasonably well-balanced bit of audio as you’d expect from a premium pair of earbuds like these you can pick out finer details across more complex tracks but we wouldn’t say that we loved the sound until we dove back into that Sound Connect app and jumped on into the device settings went to sound quality slash volume and then in there you’ll find the find our equalizer and how this works is pretty simple just play some of your favorite music through the earbuds and you’ll see you’ve got the numbers one through five just give each of those a tap in turn and it’ll just slightly tweak the audio playback.

Either boost in the bass or the treble or whatnot so decide which one is your favorite and then tap next and we’ll just perform a wee bit more fine tuning so again just decide which one sounds best to your ears and then you’re done now then save these settings to the custom 2 EQ sadly you can’t change the name of this for some reason and it’ll just override custom 2 every time you don’t have the option of saving to a different preset but hey how it works?

Beautifully, we found that with these EQ settings, we really enjoyed the audio, especially as we love a bit of bass. So when it comes to the higher end of the range, you definitely need a little bit of help there. So it’s good to be able to boost that too. And absolutely bugger all complaints when it comes to watching a bit of video on Netflix or YouTube or doing a good bit of gaming on your smartphone as well. Even when we couldn’t be bothered to switch on the proper gaming mode, we found that there was absolutely sod all lag.
Although if you want to play something like Call of Duty or PUBG, where it’s all about those split-second reactions, you’ll probably want to get the gaming modes on the go.

Features:

Now you’ve got a handful of other unique features here on the Sony WF-1000XM6, including a background listening mode, and this background music effect does exactly what you would expect it to do, basically makes it sound like your music is being played in the background rather than stuffed directly into your lugs.
There are three different levels in total. First level doesn’t really have much of an impact at all, but by the third level, it certainly does sound like your music is just playing ambiently on a nearby stereo or TV or something.

And there’s certainly an interesting feature, and it works well, it’s just not particularly one for us. We do prefer to have angry death metal screaming directly into our heads at all times. Just keep the old demons quiet. But it’s also worth noting you can’t actually turn on the background music feature if you’ve got the digital assistant switched on. Speaking of which, this is the same Sony digital assistant as before. And this can basically announce when you receive a notification from a rather small number of apps.

It does include text messages and WhatsApp, but sadly, no support for the likes of Gmail or most other email applications by the looks of it. And this seems to work occasionally absolutely fine, you know, you’ve got your phone in your pocket, it’ll just pop up a little announcement, or you’ve got a message from whoever. You can decide if you actually like that person enough to go through all the effort of yanking your phone out and replying to them. But other times it just didn’t seem to work. At all, we would get messages and just zero announcements whatsoever, so again, hopefully just early jitters.

Active Noise Cancelling:

Now, as for the actual noise cancellation, well, Sony’s fresh new faster QN3e processor handles all of that. Helped along by a total of eight mics. You’ve got four microphones stuffed into each of these admittedly rather chonky buds. Whereas the previous generation had just three per bud for a total of six.

It’s adaptive noise cancellation, so it will actually adapt to your environment depending on how noisy or how quiet it is. And we’ve got to say Sony always knocks it out of the park when it comes to the noise cancellation, and they’ve done it again here for the Mark 6s. Easily the best noise cancellation we’ve heard on any pair of earbuds we’ve had stuffed inside of our greasy heads. We thought it didn’t matter whether we were sitting on a train, a bus, or one of those horrendous places.

Screechy London tubes. We could stick an audiobook or a podcast on at a sort of low to moderate sort of volume and hear every word absolutely crystal clear. And we can muffle the sound that’s pumped out by coffee machines, hoovers, just anything that makes awful noise, just leaving you in your own delightful little peace bubble. And the ambient sound mode has also been improved as well. So, for instance, you’ve got voice pass-through.

Now, if you tick this, it has just helped to cut down on rumbles like traffic trains, etc., but also allows voices to clearly come through, which is quite handy if you’re trying to have a conversation with someone or perhaps you’re listening out for an announcement in a train station, an airport, or something.

Like that definitely a very handy feature and it works well there is also an auto ambient sound mode as well which can raise or lower the amount of ambient sound that trickles in depending on how noisy your environment is but we found that was a little bit more hit and miss sometimes it was just a little bit too quiet we couldn’t quite hear what people were saying but it’s dead easy to swap between noise cancelling and ambient mode at any point just give your left buds a quick tap and within about a second, second and a half, you’re flicking between the two.

Otherwise, if you’re in noise cancellation mode, you can actually just press and hold your finger to that left bud, and it’ll immediately enter the ambient mode until you pull your finger away.

But again, like pretty much everything on these Sony wireless earbuds the touch controls are customizable as well so you can tweak them to your liking and just set them up slightly different so a double tap of the left bud would send us back to the previous track whereas a double tap of the right bud would skip us forward a track And you’ve got full volume controls and everything on here as well, so fully supported.

Mic Test:

And these are the best Sony buds yet for phone calls as well, thanks to the AI beamformant mics and a bit of bone conduction sensor action, which helps to isolate your voice from any background bollockery. And it’s this tech, assisted by an AI background and noise reduction, which ensures that you come through loud and clear, even when you’re wandering by a bit of roadworks as we are right now.

Battery Life:

Now battery life, and Sony reckons you’ll get eight hours of audio action from the WH-1000XM6 if they’re fully charged, and that is with noise cancellation active. We find that the battery life varied quite considerably depending on whether you were using the noise cancellation mode, the ambient mode or just had it knocked off and as we were swapping a lot between noise cancelling and ambient mode, sometimes we found we would get around sort of seven-ish hours, sometimes it was closer to 10 hours also seemed to depend an awful lot on what we were actually listening to be it just like a quiet podcast or shouty angry black metal but either way the battery life was excellent we mean again they’re not the most compact subtle pair of earbuds in the world so you’d expect pretty decent battery life out of these things and seven hours of playback with noise cancellation action is certainly one of the better efforts out there.

And then when you are all done with the buds, or they do need a bit of a top-up, just chuck them back in the German We Carry case, and very much like the buds themselves, not the most compact of cases, not quite as fully rounded as we would have liked either, but not awful. The main surprise for us was that you’ll only get a couple of full recharges of these buds from the case before the case itself is also depleted, and considering the size of this thing, we were hoping for at least three full recharges, so the box.

Does drain pretty quickly, but at least you’ve got full wireless charging support for this case as well, and you can just plug a USB Type-C cable in it if you want to power it back up again. The buds do support fast charging as well, so just about five to six minutes in the case will give you a full hour of audio.

Verdict:

And there you have it, our lovelies, that in a tasty wee nutshell is what we reckon of the Sony WF-1000XM6, and certainly a premium price but for a proper premium pair of earbuds. Hands down, they’re among our absolute favourites right now in 2026, helped along massively by the excellent noise cancellation, the fully customisable EQ settings, and a bit of the find your equaliser. It’s definitely an excellent feature and plenty more unique tools bunged in these things which really do help to set them apart from the rest of their rivals.

You know battery life is good, the call quality is excellent, so it’s hard to really find much to complain about. If you want the best of the best, we’d say you’re properly bloody sorted, but that’s what we reckon anyway. It’d be great to hear your thoughts on the Sony WF-1000X Mark.
On the latest and greatest tech, wonderful rest of the week, cheers everybody, love you.