[Brando]

Just got these last night after reading some good things about their predecessor the xm4. I'm new to bluetooth/wireless but really enjoying the freedom of wireless though not really trying to replace wired on the sound quality side. I wasn't expecting too much from a normie best buy product and at first I wanted to send them back because they had the expected small consumer grade headphone effect of muddy bass creeping into other frequencies and making the tuning sound weird with certain parts of certain songs. Female vocals sounded too breathy and loud for lack of better words and busy parts of rock music sounded congested/like @$$.

Then I remembered there was an app I could download on my phone to tweak and update the headphones. I went through the process of updating and played around with settings a bit then started up some more music. I'm not 100% sure if the update changed the sound signature or if my brain adapted but I liked the phones more the longer I listened. It seemed like the things that bugged me were less noticeable and I started to wonder if I just got unlucky and happened to listen to some unfavorable recordings in the beginning. Before I knew it I was really enjoying myself listening to a ton of tracks until later at night than I meant to.

After playing with EQ a bit I got them just about right but was bummed that they would only sound how I wanted on my phone with the app EQ'ing the sound. Fortunately the XM5 seems to save the EQ to the phones themselves so when I switch over to bluetooth from my pc the phone app is unnecessary. After all is said and done I think I'll hang onto them. They won't replace my ah-d7000 obviously but they're pretty good for portable. The fact that the EQ settings from the app follow the phones to other sources sealed the deal. FIN.

EDIT: Forgot to mention the noise cancelling works great. I never thought I would care about it but it's really nice. I forgot my window ac was running 7 feet away until I took the phones off.

 

[Brando]

After spending some time with these phones my opinion is the same as far as the sound being pretty good after updating and tweaking. I just can't justify having $400 tied up in them when the jabra elite 7 pro sounds almost as good for $120 and are much better for using when active due to the tiny size and water resistance/durability. Without durability and moisture resistance the usefulness goes down and they end up being good for in the house use or maybe going outside if you know it's not going to rain and you definitely won't sweat. At that point you may as well use your best wired headphones for hanging at the house and something durable for outside use. I could see paying 200 bucks for these if they were my only set of phones that I use for everything and didn't plan on exercising or working hard in them but for my situation I'd rather get my money back to put towards a new high end wired set. Now it's going to be he1000 v2 in the house and jabra elite 7 pro on the go as god intended.