Sony ULT Wear review: headphones with strong bass, ANC and long autonomy

The new Sony ULT Wear headphones prove to be a very pleasant surprise, being almost faultless. It offers good quality sound, a strong bass, high-performance active noise cancellation, a huge autonomy and a very good construction, all for the price of 1,000 lei.

Sony is almost giving a gift to headphone lovers, as these ULT Wears are sure to attract customers who might otherwise go for the WH-1000XM5, which costs 50% more than usual, but now that they- I could compare, they are only a little better than ULT Wear and only on sound quality. For most people, ULT Wear will be best-buy headphones.

The ULT range is newly launched by Sony and includes these headphones, plus portable speakers of various sizes. ULT are designed for those who want a stronger bass, as it sits well on hip-hop, rap, trap, electronic music and other music genres. The dedicated ULT button on the side of the fixed headphones provides this in two distinct steps. I’ll tell you more below, in the chapter about audio quality.

But let me start by saying that the ULT Wear are very well built headphones, of similar quality to the 1000XM4 and 1000XM5. The package includes a carrying case, covered with fabric and rigid enough to protect the headphones, and inside we also found a jack-to-jack audio cable and a USB charging cable.

The headphones themselves are available in three colors, an off-white, black and this Forest Green that I tested. I’d take the green ones. I find them elegant, they look good in any situation, but they have this tint that makes them stand out a bit.

The headphones are plastic, but seem very well put together. The cups are large, they completely cover my ear, and they are also very soft and comfortable to wear for many hours on the head. The band that joins them, built on a metal structure inside, also has soft material where it sits on the head.

You get Sony logos on both sides, on the band, plus the already classic design of the 1000XM series, ie:

• on/off button and ANC button on the left cup, next to the USB port and the audio jack. On the ULT Wear there is also a large ULT button here as well.
• the right cup has a tactile surface. Swipe up-down changes the volume, front-back changes the song, double tap stops the music.

And ULT Wear include the function by which you put your palm on the right headset and they automatically switch to maximum transparency mode, a very useful function when you want to listen in case the courier knocks on the door or when it seems that your wife is saying something to you for the third time and it would be the case to listen to what.

The headphones fold down to take up less space when carrying, but on the ULT Wear Sony has solved another problem of the other ranges: when you wear the headphones around your neck, the cups rotate towards your chest, with the sponge inwards and the outer surface in front, protecting such dust or blows the area that comes on the ear. Plus, this is how headphones should generally look when they sit around your neck.

The overall quality seems to me closer to 1000XM5 or XM4 than to the WH-CH720N model (which costs 500 lei now). I could compare them all. The CH720s seem a bit looser and overall less thick than the ULT Wear, so the active noise cancellation isn’t as good, even though the processing chip is the same.

Music sounds great on ULT Wear. Let me say directly about the ULT button. Sony has achieved what for some 20 years I see that various companies want to do, a kind of “extra bass” button that actually does its job. Sony’s ULT does exactly that, it boosts the low frequencies in a natural, round, pleasant way. These are the first headphones with powerful bass.

There are two steps when you press ULT, ULT 1 for deep bass and ULT 2 for attack bass. The first step practically changes your musical experience on those songs that have bass from their mother. Without ULT, the low frequencies seem to be missing and the sound is too neutral. Press the ULT button and the headphones come to life, the music sounds different and it happened to me many times to think “huh, is it so lacking in bass that I always listened to on headphones before?”

ULT 1 is what I have always used. ULT 2 is even too strong on the bass. If you turn up the volume and the right song, you can almost feel the headphones vibrating and feel the strong air pressure in your ear. It was too strong for me. Someone from Sony told me at the launch that he thinks so too, but he has office colleagues who say “no, no, ULT 2 is perfect”. What can I say, today’s youth…

In addition to this bass that brings the music to life, when it has something to bring, ULT Wear also stands out for its good overall audio quality, with pleasant, round and distortion-free sound, even at high volume. The maximum volume is very loud and you don’t have to go to the higher levels anyway, I kept it around 35-40%.

But to be clear, ULT Wear are not audiophile headphones. They are headphones for people who listen to music on the street or while working on the computer, for sports, gym, talking on the phone, playing on the phone and so on.

If you want to hear every guitar chord on some Dire Straits, the 1000XM5 are more suitable, if we are talking about this area under 1,500 lei. But the ULT Wear will be enough for 90% of people, at least for the sound quality, especially for their price. I would also say that they are suitable for those musical styles that include bass, not for jazz or quieter styles.

Voice sounds great, by the way, and that goes for phone calls as well. Microphones are also good for calls.

Active noise cancellation is also very good, on par with the 1000XM4 and 1000XM5 and above that of the CH720. The chip inside that does the sound processing for ANC is the same on all of them. ULT Wear also provides natural insulation through fluffy cups that sit well on the head. There is a bit of wind noise, or if there is a loud, sudden noise, the headphones sometimes react with a delay of a few tenths of a second, but overall the Sony maintains its excellent position in the field of noise cancellation.

The Transparency mode, called Ambient Sound here, also works very well. Too good, really. By default it comes set to level 20 in the app, but ambient sounds are amplified too much and I turned it down to level 12 for when I’m walking down the street.

On top of all this, a very long autonomy is added: 30 hours with noise cancellation, 50 hours without it on. Maybe even more, depending on what you listen to. At 5 hours a day, however, that means 10 days of listening without charging, practically an entire vacation.

The control app is still Sony Headphone, which I find has an old-fashioned look, and its options are split into too many menus. The app allows automatic control of the headphones, which will switch between Noise Canceling and Ambient Sound depending on what you’re doing (walking, standing still, taking the subway, etc.), which works ok, but often you don’t want your mode to change of listening just because you stop for 3 seconds instead of walking to let someone else in front of you.

There are other functions there too. Simultaneous connectivity to two devices (works passably), the ability to quickly access Spotify, auto-pause, integration with Endel for relaxing sounds and, perhaps most importantly, an equalizer. There are also secondary modules through which the headphones decide what music to play for you depending on the time of day or your activity, and if you register you can also see all kinds of statistics about what you listened to, what you did, etc.

I personally use this application for many years and always at a minimum. I switch between ANC/Ambient/Off from the dedicated button on the headphones, I don’t use the Auto function for this, nor do I actively use the rest of the functions. I used it for headset initialization and initial setup and that’s it.

So ULT Wear is a very successful product for me. High autonomy, high-performance active noise cancellation, and above all good sound with strong bass. They are well built, look stylish. I wouldn’t recommend them for music listeners without a bit of bass, in which case their main function is lost, but otherwise most people will be happy with them.

The price is good, it costs 1,000 lei at eMAG. The WH-1000XM5 offers a bit better, clearer sound, but it costs 1,500 lei and after testing the ULT Wear for about 2 weeks, I’d say I prefer the higher bass on them because I listen to a lot of electronic music and with these headphones on I feel like dancing more often. The WH-1000XM4, which also usually cost around 1,000-1,100 lei, are now eclipsed by the ULT Wear in many ways.