Why The Sony WH-1000XM3 Are Better

I’ve had the luxury of sampling lots of headphones over the last 4-5 years because of my YouTube channel. Over this time I’ve gone through TONS of low-end budget bluetooth headphones all the wat up to the higher-end cans such the Sony WH-1000XM4, Drop Panda THX, Apple AirPods Max and Bose 700.

When I first heard the Sony XM2 I was really satisfied with the sound quality, but one feature stood out to me above everything else… Surround VPT. It’s sort of a virtualized sound environment replicated within the headphone software in the companion app. It has modes such as Arena, Club, Outdoor Stage and concert hall. My favorite two are Arena and Club. Both modes breath a life into my music that can only be described as “immersive.” When listening to live music such as blues, old school soul, classic rock, country, jazz, and even Dirty Heads & Katasro the soundstage seems to widen, and you get a feeling as if you’re actually there in a live concert!

I loved the XM2, but the lack of USB-C killed the deal for me back then so I opted to return them. For a much cheaper price I ended up getting the Parrot Zik 2 which still had used micro USB, but I couldn’t past them up at $100 vs the $350 XM2. The Zik 2 has a similar sound setting that I managed to tweak to my liking, so I was still riding on my cloud when I listened to them. My main gripe about them was the absurdly short 6-8 hr battery life, so when the Sony WH-1000XM3 was released, I ordered them as fast as I could. At last, I had everything I wanted (at the time) in a set of headphones, great ANC, ambient sound, great battery life, and app with customizations, touch controls and that sweet Surround VPT! Since then, tons of active noise cancelling headphones have been released with the same features and some even sound better as far as details and other aspects of sound quality. Some have even tried to implement their own version of Surround VPT, bone in my opinion, they just don’t get it quite as right as the XM2 and XM3.

When Sony released the XM4, I was super excited to know they would add in multipoint connectivity so the headphones could be connected to two devices at the same time. They would also throw in comforts like auto-pause so when you move them away from your ears they pause the music, and when you put them back on they resume playback. However, when Sony gaveth… Sony tooketh away. For some reason the Surround VPT was removed from the app! I was devastated when I discovered this in initial video of them. Was faced with the decision to live without Surround VPT an keep them, return them or give them to my wife. I chose to give the new $350 cans to my wife and keep jammin’ my XM3. I would love to have all of the extra new features of the newer headphones, but my listening experience would be compromised if I did. Every once in a while, I check my wife’s XM4 for an update that brings back my beloved feature, but no success as of writing this blog.

I’m guessing Surround VPT was a feature a lot of people either never bothered to explore or simply didn’t like it, so Sony decided to do away with it. Hopefully whenever the Sony WH-1000XM5 come out they will have come to their senses and put it back in. Be sure to check out the video I’ve done on this to get an Idea of what the experience is like!