For context, LDAC is one of the few wireless audio codecs stamped Hi-Res by the Japan Audio Society and its encoder is open source since Android 8, so you can see just how long Windows is sleeping on this. I’m excited about the incoming next gen called LC3plus, my next pair is definitely gonna have that.
Nice one!
I am distinctly underwhelmed in general by the XM4.
Yeah, I agree.
I bought them for their noise cancelling primarily, and they’re excellent at that, but otherwise they’re not great. The un-EQed frequency response is terrible for headphones in their price range: flabby, wildly over-exaggerated bass and no mids at all. Running without EQ I can barely hear lyrics - every singer sounds like they’re mumbling underwater. I’ve had $20 IEMs with better tonal balance. They respond well to EQ but the on-board EQ doesn’t have enough frequency bands to even come close to fixing them. Wavelet on Android doing EQ duty makes them listenable. Even when you do EQ them properly, they still sound a bit dull and lifeless.
No idea how they got so much praise when they were launched. The power of marketing budgets I guess. For a while I was gaslighting myself thinking I had a faulty pair or maybe there was something going wrong with my hearing, but having heard another pair, and doing comparisons with my other headphones - most of which are far cheaper - I realised that no, they’re just not very good as headphones.