EUR146,95
Sony ULT Wear
Sony ULT Wear – testing a bass monster
11/4/2024
Translation: Patrik Stainbrook
Sony’s ULT Wear headphones aim to appeal to a younger audience with a bass-heavy sound signature and modern design. They’re positioned in the upper mid-range segment. Read on to find out whether the attempt is a success.
Sony’s new device series is called ULT. In addition to speakers in three different sizes, Sony has developed the ULT Wear over-ear headphones. The Japanese company borrowed the term ULT – an unusually simple name by Sony standards – from K-pop youth slang. It stands for Ultimate, symbolising perfection and the final, greatest achievement. Sony wants to live up to this motto with the ULT Wear, targeting younger customers with a new, very bass-heavy audio signature.
Additional focus on bass: how does it change music?
Sony is known for its warm, epic audio across a wide sound spectrum. And of course «industry-leading noise cancellation», as they like to emphasise. The Japanese company wants to hold on to this. Still, with the new ULT Mode, they’re entering bass spheres where Beats By Dre or Skullcandy headphones usually reside. They’ve installed a 40 mm driver, responsible for this ULT mode. It can be switched on or off at the touch of a button. I’ll start with the balance and the mids. I want to know what to expect for 199 francs or euros – without ULT Mode. That setting will have its own section.
Balance: an equilibrium of sound isn’t its strong point
My first test track is called Wilderness by Explosions in the Sky. It covers a very wide section of the frequency range, everything from low bass to treble is present.
You can hear the percussion in the lower sound range, while the guitars swing into higher realms. There are no vocals. I notice that the low-end is dominant. The guitars can separate themselves well from it, and the overall reproduction is very clean. But the ULT Wear makes no secret of what it’s intended for.
Mids: warm and harmonious
In the mid-range, the ULT Wear Sony is characterised by a lot of warmth.
The clear, distinctive vocal line stands out in Helplessly Hoping, adding harmony to the track. Low frequencies also play their part here – they give the vocals more space. If you listen to the same song with the current Sennheiser Accentum, however, you realise that the dominant bass range robs a lot of clarity.
Bass and ULT mode: not for me
I test the bass with Tokyo Drift by Teriyaki Boyz.
The headphones are generally too bass heavy for me. When you press the ULT button – placed separately and clearly visible on the headphones – a kind of tornado sound is emitted as a signal tone. This gives an extra boost to less multifaceted electro. BASS, right into the pit of your stomach. The lowest sound range booms and thuds. Only one problem: the boom and roar of the bass pretty much suppresses all finesse in the mid-range. As a result, the entire sound spectrum suffers. And it doesn’t just emphasise individual passages. In ULT mode, I perceive a basic drone noticeable across several frequency levels.
In some cases, low-frequency sounds are amplified even though they aren’t bass tones at all. For example, low voices in a podcast – these are then accompanied by an effect that makes them harder to understand. If, on the other hand, there’s little or no bass, ULT mode doesn’t make a sound. Even with simple, bass-heavy arrangements lacking instruments or vocals, the «WOW effect» bothers me after half a minute. I can imagine that the effect works better with a speaker like the Field 7. With headphones, it only lasts for a short time and only when I’m listening to a very specific genre of music.
In short: not my cup of tea.
Phone calls: weaknesses evident in the microphones
It’s clear the ULT Wear isn’t in the same league as the WH-1000 XM5 when making calls. While the sound is still just intelligible in quiet surroundings – albeit somewhat distorted and tinny – it’s no longer really audible in a lively environment.
This was also evident in my practical test. So you can judge the level of intelligibility for yourself, I’ve linked two listening tests.
The upper one in a quiet environment, the lower one in a noisy one.
Haptics and handling: Sony relies on the tried and true – and does everything right
You can tell straight out of the box that the ULT Wear is going in a different direction to the classic WH-1000 series. It’s dark all over. The headphones stay in the shadows, while the colourful ULT Power Sound logo comes to the fore. The sturdy, attractive fabric case is also included again. Sony also includes a USB-C to USB-A charging cable and a 3.5-millimetre jack.
Source: Florian Bodoky
The headphones themselves are very reminiscent of the WH-1000 XM4. The ear cups, the arrangement of the buttons and – drum roll – the foldability. Sony faced quite a bit of scrutiny when its last flagship headphones, the WH-1000 XM5, launched without the feature. Another positive – the aluminium headband is again adjustable in several steps.
Sony has also covered the head section and the ear cups with soft artificial leather. Nevertheless, the material of the ear cups feels somewhat thinner and lighter than on my XM4s. As if an additional, higher-quality layer was missing. The fabric cover is also thinner – hard elements can be clearly felt. However, a kitchen scales test shows hardly any difference. The ULT Wear is only around seven grammes lighter than the XM4 – keep in mind, my kitchen scales aren’t calibrated.
Source: Florian Bodoky
For everyday use, you can rely on the usual Sony quality. It stays in place, firm without pinching. The ear cups are very comfortable. I personally find it very convenient that the headband is (again) adjustable in steps. Like its big brothers in the WH-1000 series, you can control the ULT Wear with touch gestures on the right ear cup. Volume, skip/search, play/pause, Google Assistant or phone calls – everything is possible and can also be configured in the app according to your own preferences. There’s also a power button, a button for switching between ambient mode and noise cancellation on the fly and, of course, the large, round ULT button.
Thanks to its lightness, you can also use the ULT Wear during physically strenuous activities. But be careful: Sony doesn’t provide any information on the IPX rating, i.e. water and dust resistance. Even though the WH-1000 headphones all have an IPX4 rating, better to assume the ULT Wear doesn’t like water.
When it comes to noise cancellation, Sony obviously doesn’t want to be left out. Ambient mode brings noise from your surroundings to your ear without the usual, unpleasant microphone amplification. Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), on the other hand, muffles pretty much everything that could disturb you in a busy environment. The ULT Wear does this well. Many other headphones are particularly weak when it comes to very high-pitched noises – such as crying babies or train brakes. Nothing slipped through in my test. Fantastic.
Sony is hard at work with the app
The Sony Connect App offers a lot of exciting features for fine-tuning the ULT Wear. Ambient Sound Control, for example. It not only automatically adapts the sound to your environment – by turning up the volume in noisy surroundings, for example – but also remembers your habits. When do you use ANC, when not, and so on.
Source: Florian Bodoky
There’s also DSEE, short for Digital Sound Enhancement Engine. This technology is designed to make highly compressed formats sound better.
The equaliser has various presets – for voice, party mode and so on – but also a manual five-band EQ to individualise sounds between 400 hertz and 16 kilohertz. There are also two controls for the ULT mode: one to adjust the bass up and down and a second to emphasise the lower low-pass range.
Source: Florian Bodoky
A low-pass filter blocks or at least attenuates frequencies above a certain limit. If you make it particularly strong, mids and highs disappear even more than they already do with Ultra mode. If you want, there’s also a setup called Find my Equalizer, which checks what you like then makes individual settings for you.
Source: Florian Bodoky
Last but not least, there are some minor settings. Activate multipoint, deactivate or individualise touch controls on the headphones or control wearing detection. The headphones will then pause when you put them down.
Long-lasting battery: lovely
Sony makes no compromises when it comes to battery life. The headphones last up to 50 hours if you turn active noise cancellation off. If you really want to get as much runtime as possible out of your ULT Wear, I’d also recommend deactivating DSEE in the Sony Connect app. If you want to use both, you can still count on around 30 hours of battery life. This is the manufacturer’s specification – in my case, it was 30 hours and 17 minutes before the ULT Wear finally stopped motoring on. However, the device also has a Quickcharge function – something Sony has really taken to the extreme. With ten minutes of charging time, you can get up to five hours of listening fun. With a charging time of three (!) minutes, you can enjoy for 90 minutes – in case you really need to get going quickly.
In a nutshell
If you want bass – a lot of bass
My feelings about the ULT Wear are somewhat mixed. The sound quality is good, no doubt about that. Expect quality similar to other headphones in the upper mid-range segment here. It works quite well for audio streaming. However, the idea behind ULT Mode isn’t entirely clear to me. I wasn’t convinced by the uncontrolled bass.
Noise cancellation, on the other hand, is strong, a Sony hallmark. Even if it doesn’t help much when making calls with the rather weak microphones. The person on the other end might struggle. The battery also makes me happy. Still, actually recommending it is tricky – even if you’re a Sony enthusiast. So, here’s my tip: try them out in a store. You’ll know within a few minutes whether the ULT Wear is what you are looking for.
Pro
- good design
- great battery performance
- superb noise cancelling
Contra
- quite bass heavy
- weak mic
Header image: Florian Bodoky
I've been tinkering with digital networks ever since I found out how to activate both telephone channels on the ISDN card for greater bandwidth. As for the analogue variety, I've been doing that since I learned to talk. Though Winterthur is my adoptive home city, my heart still bleeds red and blue.
