 The Sony WH-1000XM3s are one of the most popular active noise cancelling headphones on the market and have been for quite some time. But why did it take so long for this technology to make its way to earphones? Well Sony reached out to us to sponsor this showcase of their WF-1000XM3 wireless noise cancelling in-ears and tell us all about the challenges of getting great sounding IEMs with noise cancelling into a form factor that is easier than ever to take on to an airplane. Now obviously the biggest challenge for Sony to bring their flagship sense engine noise cancelling technology to IEMs is size. But not necessarily for the reason you might think. The WH-1000XM3s are only 14 grams each, but they both need to contain a sufficiently large battery they're advertised at six continuous hours of music with ANC or eight hours with it off while also accommodating an HD noise cancelling processor in each ear to handle the data stream from two ambient noise microphones in each ear. The biggest task to bring these puppies into existence then was to take their existing QN1 processor from their over-ear models and create a new version that's not just smaller but critically much more energy efficient so it doesn't strain the earphones small battery. Hence the name of the new chip the QN1E for energy efficient. So at this point I could pretend that I'm like trying them right now but realistically I already did that. The noise cancellation is surprisingly good. I would say compared to other in-ears that I've tried it is very competitive in terms of how much noise it blocks out and how uncomfortable it is. A lot of people find that active noise cancellation has this kind of pressure effect. It's not bad at all. Now the WF-1000XM3 is used the same design language as their over-ear cousins. Matte black or silver with copper highlights. They come with a 700 milliamp hour charging case that weighs 80 grams and holds three full additional charges before you'll need to juice it back up using the USB type-C port. And quick charging is supported between the case and the earphones so snapping the headphones into their magnetized slots is as simple as find the little handy color code, plop it in there and boom. You get 90 minutes of playback after just 10 minutes of charging. One of my biggest pet peeves with the AirPods Pro after using them for a while was actually the lack of obvious labels causing me to... Oh no, it doesn't have one. Now there are zero buttons on the earphones just like there are zero buttons on this hoodie. LTT store.com Instead each earphone is equipped with a tiny touchpad whose controls you can customize to your liking. Options range from assigning nothing at all to playback controls, volume control, hailing Amazon ALEXA or the Google Assistant, and cycling through your noise cancelling options where you've got your fully on, fully off and ambient sound control. That one uses the earphones microphones to pick up the sound around you so you can avoid getting, you know, hit by a bus for example when you're out in the real world. I've been there. It's nice. You can adjust how aggressive this feature is in Sony's Kinect companion app and this is actually context specific thanks to what Sony calls adaptive sound control. Basically the headphones use the accelerometers inside your smartphone to tell if you're sitting at your desk, walking down the street, going for a run or ripping around in a vehicle and then adjust the ambient sound level accordingly. They even let you specify how long it takes for the system to automatically switch modes. That way it won't keep switching between transport mode and desk mode every time your car stops at a red light for example. And there's even more stuff that they crammed into these. There's proximity sensors so that playback pauses when you take one earphone out. Yet another setting that you can toggle in with the app. And if you prefer to just leave them in your ears, quick attention mode lets you temporarily turn down the volume and deactivate noise cancelling simply by placing your hand over the left earbud so that you can listen to the in-flight safety demonstration or to whatever your boss has to say or... Nah, I'm just kidding. No one cares about either of those things. Another piece of built-in software is DSEE-HX, Sony's proprietary audio upscaler. Yes, audio can be upscaled too. Which takes low to medium resolution audio sources that typically lose a bunch of detail in the high frequencies and interpolates the missing sound to create a fuller near high res experience under some conditions. Now I didn't actually have a ton of low quality tracks to listen to unfortunately, but on everything that was on Google Play Music as well as any downloaded music that I had on my phone, these things actually sound really, really good for fully wireless in-ears and I was really happy with them. In the box, you get a 20 centimeter USB type A to type C charging cable, as well as seven pairs of silicone ear sleeves in four sizes and two styles. This is really key guys because combining the correct ear tips with the earphones ergonomic tri-hold structure here and the grippy rubberized finish helps achieve and keep a good seal with your ear, increasing base response and providing passive noise blocking even before you turn on the active noise cancellation. So thanks to Sony for sponsoring this showcase. If you guys are interested in a pair, you can learn more about the WF-1000XM2 noise canceling earphones at the link below. If you're more interested in the over-ear version, you can check out our video where we actually put it head-to-head against some of its toughest competitors. We're going to have that link below as well. So thanks for watching guys. See you next time.