Sony 1000X The Collexion review

Stop what you’re doing – there’s a new pair of Sony wireless headphones in town.

The 1000X range has been Sony’s flagship wireless series for a whole decade, and the brand has decided to mark this anniversary with a completely new addition to its established line-up: the Sony 1000X The Collexion over-ears.

These may be ‘celebratory’ headphones, but think of The Collexion as a fully fledged product in their own right, rather than a limited edition one-off designed for the sake of novelty or sentimentality. These are headphones which exist separately from Sony's WH-1000XM6 – with their own unique sound, design philosophy and materials – and sit comfortably above their stablemates in price.

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In fact, Sony has focused on sound above all else for The Collexion cans, for what it has dubbed “the best sounding headphones we’ve ever made”. When you consider some of the absolute gems the Japanese brand has produced in the past few years, that’s a mouthwatering claim. We’d be letting you down if we didn’t give them a listen…

Price

While the 1000X series has always remained a decidedly premium line, Sony had always resisted the urge to move up into the sort of ‘high-end’ territory occupied by the likes of the the Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2 (£629 / $799) and the Focal Bathys (£699 / $799), but with the 1000X The Collexion clocking in at £550 / $650, these are the closest Sony has ever come to operating within that more rarefied area of the market.

With the B&W and Focal rivals above them, the new Sonys have the likes of the Apple AirPods Max 2 (£499 / $549) and Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones (2nd Gen) (£449 / $449 / AU$700) sitting just below.

If you need reminding, the What Hi-Fi? Award-winning Sony WH-1000XM6 are priced at around £400 / $450 / AU$699, even if discounts are now knocking a few pounds or dollars off that RRP, while the five-star rival Sennheiser HDB 630 will set you back around £400 / $500 / AU$1000.

Build & comfort

Get hold of a pair of Sony’s latest and, if you squint your eyes a little, you might be fooled into thinking that you’d picked up a pair of Sonos Ace instead. The Sonys have the same clean, minimalist exterior as the Ace, as well as similarly designed oval earcups adorned with a few metallic physical buttons on the left earcup.

Sony’s engineers describe 1000X The Collexion as a pair of cans that should both look good and make you feel good when you wear them, and for the most part, that aim has been achieved. Everything on The Collexion is made either from metal or faux leather, with a nicely padded headband designed to spread pressure evenly for extended user comfort and slightly firmer ear padding than found on the WH-1000XM6.

We don’t have an issue with the look or feel of the faux leather, though our test pair are more susceptible to marks and stains than the smooth plastic of most of Sony’s other headphones. That faux material adorns pretty much the whole exterior of the earcup, so grubby fingers, not to mention the rigours of everyday use, do end up making their mark after a time.

A slimmer profile does help to add lightness, though, with the width of the earcups measuring around 40mm from inside to out, compared with the 45.4mm of the WH-1000XM6.

That does make for an appreciably lightweight and unobtrusive wearing experience, and though The Collexion actually weigh more than their XM6 counterparts – 312g against 254g – rarely do we feel that extra weight.

Some of our testers did experience some rocking and instability from the earcups when walking from place to place, but if you’re stationary, the new Sonys often simply melt away into obscurity as you forget you’ve got a pair plonked on your head at all.

While there are a few physical buttons to be found, touch controls are the main way of controlling your Sony over-ears. They work as well as you’d expect, responding quickly and effectively to our various commands, with ample levels of control customisation available via the useful Sony SoundConnect app.

Unlike the XM6 over-ears or the Bose QC Ultra Headphones (2nd Gen), these aren’t headphones which fold up into a ball, but their flattened profile and accompanying carry case – with its hollowed-out handle putting us in mind of a small handbag – mean they’re still relatively portable.

Features

Sony has very much positioned its new premium cans as sound-first headphones, but the 1000X The Collexion’s feature set matches the same generous level as that found on the do-it-all WH-1000XM6.

Battery life clocks in at around 32 hours with ANC off and roughly 24 hours with noise cancelling switched on, and while that’s down from the 30-or-so hours of the WH-1000XM6, it’s still a reasonable lifespan. The AirPods Max 2 only manage around 20 hours, although the Sennheiser HDB 630 are streets ahead with a whopping 60 hours with noise cancelling in play.

If you’re a fan of spatial audio, you get three versions of Sony’s ‘360 Reality Audio Upmix’ tech – ‘Music’, ‘Cinema’ and ‘Game’ – each of which add varying degrees of spatial processing depending on the media content. They’re fun modes to play around with, and we particularly enjoy the more immersive ‘Cinema’ setting which just about lives up to its billing by providing a more open, cinematic experience when watching movies.

On the subject of signal processing, these are the first Sony headphones to make use of its DSEE Ultimate tech for improving lower-quality digital audio files. In the app, you also get access to a 10-band equaliser for tweaking the sound alongside several simple presets, or you can deploy ‘Background Music’ mode to make it seem as though your tunes were playing in the distance to better aid your concentration.

The 1000X The Collexion support standard SBC and AAC codecs alongside higher-quality LDAC – which lets you stream hi-res music at higher data rates over Bluetooth from a compatible source device, such as Sony’s latest smartphones. Bluetooth LE Audio is also on board for lower power consumption and better-quality sound. You can also listen to the Sony headphones wired, thanks to the included 3.5mm to 3.5mm audio cable, though note that the headphones will have to be powered on when listening through a physical connection.

Sony’s Speak-To-Chat feature, which drops the volume level when you start talking, also returns, though we’d caution that the headphones can often confuse human speech with other sounds, particularly wind. If you don’t want your cans to keep cutting out every few minutes, we’d suggest switching Speak-to-Chat off when you’re outdoors and it’s a bit blustery.

ANC & call quality

While Sony has warned that noise cancelling wasn’t as much of a focus for The Collexion as it was for the WH-1000XM6, it’s still operating at a decidedly high level. Much of the same tech from the XM6 is on-hand here, including the QN3 chip and a total of 12 mics to capture and monitor surrounding noise.

When working in full noise-cancelling mode, Sony’s latest over-ears do an excellent job of suppressing noise throughout the frequencies, and while you might get the slightest hint of a shrill bird tweet just about breaking through that barrier, middle and lower range frequencies are filtered out expertly. The ANC quality on the WH-1000XM6 is still Sony’s best, but it’s very unlikely that you’ll feel short-changed by the noise cancelling on offer with The Collexion.

Call quality is excellent, too. The Collexion house six beamforming mics complemented by a wind noise reduction structure for enhanced vocal clarity and reduced external sonic intrusions, and it really pays off. Voices are clear, articulate and emotive, while background sounds rarely, if ever, intrude on our conversation as we stand next to a busy motorway on a decidedly blustery day.

Sound

Let’s reiterate what we mentioned in our introduction – the 1000X The Collexion are distinct headphones in their own right, with a sound, says Sony, which prioritises refinement, detail and maturity over the punchier, more flavoured personality of the WH-1000XM6.

To achieve this, The Collexion headphones feature a bespoke carbon composite 30mm drive unit, constructed using soft edging and a hard centre in pursuit of an “exceptional frequency response”. Sound has been optimised using a low-phase noise crystal oscillator, while premium components and circuitry, including advanced gold-containing solder, aim for an improved signal to noise ratio to reveal finer musical details and offer a wider soundstage.

That’s a lot of tech under hood, but how does that translate to the real-life listening experience?

Well, in many ways, the Sony 1000X The Collexion do live up to their billing. Just as described by Sony, they’re headphones that deal primarily in spaciousness and clarity, qualities which suffuse nigh-on every track as we bounce from Max Richter’s Never Goodbye to Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place.

That latter track sounds particularly good – The Collexion’s wide, open presentation grants the track a broad canvas on which to play, like an epic drama unfolding on a lovely big widescreen TV.

Detail levels are excellent, and when you have a pair of over-ears that offer clarity, textural insight and spaciousness to this extent, it’s hard not to be impressed. The elegiac strings on Never Goodbye are rich and mournful, while the piano on Debussy’s austere Sarabande strikes a wonderful balance between rich intent and subtle delicacy.

For all of their openness and delicacy, the Sonys don’t lack musical muscle. Think of them as being like a pro ballerina – nimble and graceful, yes, but strong and immensely robust when the time calls for it. It’s a nice balance to have, all aided by a deep, powerful yet controlled lower-end reproduction.

Bass tones are expertly handled, something that really comes across when we load up Massive Attack’s Atlas Air and feel the full force and punch of the tune’s full-blooded drum hits. That bass is nicely separated from the overlaid synth sounds working away above, yet not to the extent that the composition starts to lack any sense of cohesion between frequencies.

These premium Sony headphones really are impressive performers in so many aspects, but they appeal more to the head than to the heart. They certainly trade off some of that signature expressiveness we’ve heard in other Sony headphones for greater openness and detail, something that reduces the extent to which we feel truly involved with our music. Talented as they are, there’s something slightly removed, almost standoffish, about their reproduction.

That’s not something of which we’d accuse the outstanding, and cheaper, Sennheiser HDB 630. The Sennheisers have a more natural fluidity, especially with how they handle dynamic shifts, which makes them a more engaging listen. For us, the Sennheisers seem to strike that balance between naturalness, entertainment and analysis a touch more acutely than the Sonys.

Their rather aloof personality also robs the Sony cans of some of their intimacy. Listen to the first 30 seconds of Black Veil Brides’ Saviour II, and there’s a greater feeling of closeness to the opening guitar and vocal lead when listening via the costlier Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2. When the track opens up as the chorus hits, however, The Collexion show their hand, allowing it to blossom and reveal its gothic grandeur with more scale than the rival B&W cans.

Verdict

There’s much to admire about Sony’s 1000X The Collexion over-ears. It’s impossible to ignore their poised, detail-rich performance, while that ample feature set and classy construction make them tough to resist.

There is a ‘but’, however. In pursuing a particular sonic signature – namely, one that goes after scale, detail and clarity – it’s hard not to feel as though Sony has slightly thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

Yes, these are seriously talented performers, but deep down, they feel like headphones which were built to impress rather than entertain. As a result, we find ourselves admiring them rather than completely falling in love.

Review published: 19th May 2026

SCORES

• Sound 4
• Build 4
• Features 5

MORE:

Read our review of the Sony WH-1000XM6

Also consider the Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2

Read our Sennheiser HDB 630 review

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