Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless vs Sony WH-1000XM4 vs Sony WH-1000XM5 (Review)
Here is another reason to spend your hard earned money: the Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless has up to 60 hours of battery life, with ANC, according to the official product website. That’s about double the battery of both the Sony WH-1000XM5 and WH-1000XM4. Besides having more battery, I will also share what I like about them, their sound, call quality and noise cancelling, and what could be better compared to Sony WH-1000XM4 and WH-1000XM5, being its chief competitors.
Sound Quality
Jumping straight into sound quality, I think the Momentum 4 Wireless sounds a little more on the bright and exciting side in the treble, with great sub-frequency bass extension. So if you like listening to chamber music, you are going to get more sizzle from wind and string instruments. And it also deliver a lot of low frequency gravity without the bloat. They do perform well for vocals, with a focus on clarity and track separation there, but compared to the Sony WH-1000XM4 or WH-1000XM5, you won’t get as much body or fullness in the vocals.
This frequency sweep shows that compared to the XM4, there is a dip in the lower mids between 80hz to 300hz. That is something that you can hear from the following sound samples where I compared the Momentum 4 against both the Sonys. To compare the sound quality of the Sennheiser Momentum 4 to other headphones, head over to loudnwireless.com’s sound samples page here.
The Momentum 4 soundstaging is taller and more airy than the Sonys which adds a bit more immersion, but at the expense of less impact. If you need more bass impact, you can boost that bass in the Sennheiser Smart Control app with a simple graphic EQ, some presets, or a bass boost mode. Somehow the bass boost mode doesn’t quite work for me. I find the manual EQ settings to be much more effective at boosting the bass.
There is something else that I didn’t like about the Momentum 4 sound. When I was testing them, I thought they sounded a little weird, like the soundstage leans to the left. And during my frequency sweep, it shows that the left and right drivers are not balanced. You usually see some variance between earcups with other headphones too, but not this much variance. I don’t think it’s a manufacturing issue and can be fixed through software update, but if this is a widespread thing, it is definitely not a good start for the Momentum 4.
The Sennheiser smartphone app displays battery information, ANC, Transparency, and control settings. It also features sound zones which triggers your preferred ANC level according to locations assigned by you. Overall it is a clean, full featured app. And it’s got its own graphic EQ settings as well as EQ presets, like I said. But I did run into some bugs while using it, which I will share later.
Just like the Sony WH-1000XM5, these also have Adaptive noise cancelling. After using it for a bit, I don’t like it because the switching is a lot more abrupt and frequent than Sony’s Auto NC Optimizer. But the Momentum 4 allows you to turn off Adaptive ANC. For people who own the Sony WH-1000XM5, being able to switch off adaptive ANC is something that everyone’s been requesting. Seems like Sennheiser was paying attention and giving people what they want.
ANC Quality
I think the Momentum 4 ANC performance is quite impressive, very close to what the Sony WH-1000XM4 have to offer. But the WH-1000XM5 simply did better at cancelling mid-range frequencies. This means “more silence” from the sound of human chatter. Listen to the comparison here.
There is something that you should know about the Momentum 4’s noise cancelling. You can’t turn it off. You could reduce the noise cancelling level, or maybe give it a little bit of a transparency. But there is no off button. But I don’t think it’s such a big issue, since the main reason to turn off ANC is to save battery, and this headphones already has phenomenal battery life with ANC.
Transparency Mode
In terms of transparency, I think it emphasizes the lower frequencies a bit more than the WH-1000XM5 or the WH-1000XM4. Generally, it is quite transparent and I can still have a conversation with people when I set the transparency to full strength. But the ambient noise sounds a bit more bloaty.
Call Quality
The call quality of the Momentum 4 is definitely an improvement over the Sony WH-1000XM4. But compared to the WH-1000XM5, in noisy conditions the Sennheisers do let in more background noise and wind noise. However in quiet conditions I think the Sennheiser’s voice quality is similar to the WH-1000XM5. Check out the test samples here.
Conclusion
There are some things that I like about the Momentum 4. Compared to the Momentum 3, it’s smaller, lighter, and it comes in a hard carry case. It also has Multipoint pairing, aptX Adaptive support. Even the way we interact with the headphones is so much simpler than competitors. Only one button is required for power and Bluetooth pairing, and the touch panel handles everything else like playback and volume.
While headphones generally have a dedicated button for toggling noise cancelling and transparency, the Momentum 4 touch panel also lets you toggle ANC by double tapping, and pinching in-out to control the degree of ANC and Transparency.
And of course, its battery life is awesome. I’ve ran tests on it and it was down by just 10% after 5 hours of playing music at 50% volume. This means it will take about 50 hours to completely discharge the battery. So in terms of battery life, these are tops.
Overall, these are one of the most innovative products I’ve seen from Sennheiser. But compared to the WH-1000XM5, the Momentum 4 has a stiffer headband which clamps tighter, so it squeezes my nape a little more if I hang it around my neck. It also feels a little tighter than the Sony WH-1000XM5 and WH-1000XM4. It’s not uncomfortable but I would wish that the cushions had more padding to mitigate the clamp.
The app is great but it could be more bug-free. Sometimes the noise cancelling adjustments do nothing, other times the screen is unresponsive. This app is definitely a lot nicer than Sony’s app, but the bugs kind of cancels out the benefits.
However, the biggest con for me is the unbalanced drivers. There are things that audio brands can get away with such as less battery, which we have seen from the AirPods Max. But unbalanced drivers actually affects soundstaging and that is a huge oversight on Sennheiser’s part. Let’s hope that this can indeed be fixed through software update.
To find out the latest prices of the Sennheiser Momentum 4 or the Sony headphones, visit the Amazon pages through the links below.
Sennheiser Momentum 4 - https://amzn.to/3RX0WDT
Sony WH-1000XM5 - https://amzn.to/3yIrnqr
Sony WH-1000XM4 - https://amzn.to/3a4Vk5E
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