Sony’s WF-LS900N earbuds keep up their tradition of audio product names being near impossible to remember. They are also incredibly comfortable, and so light that Sony claims you can just wear them around all day long, and never get tired. Is that actually true? And just how good do they sound?
Design
Design is a particular point of focus for these Sony earbuds. These are extremely lightweight and weigh approximately 4.8 grams each. Couple that with the super comfortable in-ear fit, and you can wear them for hours on end and not get tired.
In fact, these are a lot more comfortable than Sony’s flagship WF-1000XM4s.
In-ear fit is subjective of course, and if the default silicon tips don’t work for you, Sony provides three extra sizes in the packaging.
The buds themselves look really simple and elegant, Sony has not made any crazy design choices here, making the overall look very classy. In contrast to the simple outside, the inner side has magnetic pins, and a coloured markers for left and right sides, in case you get confused.
The charging case is very small in profile as well, keeping with the whole portability theme, and should fit easily in all sorts of pockets. It’s also shaped really nicely and has a flat bottom that lets it stand up easily.
In India, these earbuds are available in black, white and beige colours, all of which stay true to the elegant, simple, and classy theme.
Utility
The earbuds sport 5mm drivers, which work along with Sony’s Integrated Processing V1 chip to produce a really impressive amount of sound for their size. They also support SBC and AAC codecs, which are standard, and the Hi-Res LDAC codec as well. For connectivity, there’s Bluetooth v5.2.
These earbuds do support Active Noise Cancellation, which works well, although it’s not as pronounced as that on Sony’s own WF-1000XM4s. It blocks out most low-end rumbles well enough, which will make it very useful on an airplane, but it only slightly dulls high-pitched ambient noise.
Although very honestly that doesn’t really matter because the passive seal of these earbuds is good enough to block out most sound at even 70% volume or so. In fact, while wearing these in the office I just turned ANC off after a while, and at higher volumes it didn’t make much of a difference at all.
There’s a transparency mode also, of course, which will pipe in ambient sound and can be useful if you’re out walking on the street, or working in an office and want to be able to hear your surroundings.
App and Features
You can connect these earbuds to the Sony Headphones Connect app, available on both iOS and Android. On the app, you can see the battery level of both buds and the case on the home screen, along with playback controls, and a status for the Adaptive Sound Control feature. These earbuds have a very feature-rich package, and it’s great to see that Sony is bringing a lot of features from its flagship XM4s to these earbuds as well.
Adaptive Sound Control is what enables the ‘never off’ listening experience that Sony is trying to sell with these earbuds. What it does is log and learn your behaviour patterns, and then automatically switch between transparency and noise cancelling modes depending on what you need. Pair that with the extreme comfort that these earbuds provide and you never really have to take them off.
While this feature didn't always produce consistent results, it does work from time to time, and really surprised me with how convenient it can be. If you get up from your desk and walk around, for example, it’ll automatically switch on transparency mode, and then switch back to noise cancelling when you sit back down.
You can also pair these earbuds to 2 devices simultaneously, which is a killer feature that I find really useful.
There’s also the Speak-to-Chat feature, which automatically pauses music and turns on the transparency mode when you talk, which is a great feature in theory. In practice, I found it to be a little too trigger happy, often activating when any sort of regular sound is made like keeping a glass on a table. Thankfully, you can switch it off if you so want.
You can also view and configure the touch controls through the app. By default, the left earbud controls ANC mode and the right earbud controls playback, but you can choose to replace any one of these with volume controls. I found the touch controls to be a little finicky, with it being a little hard to activate them sometimes, but when you do manage to trigger them they work well.
There is, of course, support for voice assistants. The earbuds come with in-built support for Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, and can also trigger any other assistant on your phone.
Performance
So much for fancy smart features and in-ear comfort, but all of that’s a bit pointless if these don’t sound good. Well, good news, they sound excellent. The sound profile is really warm and bass-heavy, of course, just what you’d expect from a Sony product. The bass itself is really punchy, and very pleasing to the ears, without getting too boomy.
The mids are excellent, and extremely accurate. Vocals and lead instruments like guitar sound very clear and detailed. There’s some treble roll-off on the higher end, so cymbals, for example, sound a little muted. But there’s excellent imaging, and a pretty wide soundstage, which make these an excellent choice for listening to music.
But if you don’t like the default EQ, you can tune them the way you like through the app, which helps these sound great even to people who are not bassheads. I put a little more emphasis on the treble using this, and it sounded amazing.
I also had a great talking experience with these earbuds, which have mics on both the inner and outer sides, and use a noise reduction algorithm to suppress ambient noise and extract clear voice quality. Conversations were always clear, with little to no disturbance, even in noisy areas.
Battery
Sony rates these earbuds at 6 hours of listening time with ANC on, and in my usage, I found that to be pretty accurate. The case adds another 14 hours, for a total of 20 hours of listening time on a single charge, which is very respectable, and should last you multiple days easily. If you turn off ANC, which as I’ve mentioned you easily can, the buds will last you up to 9 hours on a single charge, which is pretty brilliant.
The charging case takes around 2 hours to charge up from 0 to 100, although there is support for fast charging, so a 5-minute charge can give you 60 minutes of playtime. One miss here is that the case doesn’t support wireless charging, which I think would have been a great addition especially at this price point.
Verdict
The Sony WF-LS900N earbuds are a fantastic and mature product from a brand who really knows how to do audio.
At a listed price of ₹16,990, they don’t come cheap, but you do get real quality for that money. There’s also a special limited time offer, which will let you buy them for an effective price of ₹13,990 with select bank bards.
At either price, the WF-LS900N are among the lightest and most comfortable earbuds I’ve ever worn. They sound absolutely amazing for being so tiny, and the smart features are all pretty useful as well. If you’re an audio enthusiast, I definitely recommend these earbuds.
