Sony quotes thirty hours of playback with noise cancellation switched on, and that is the number every listing repeats. The help guide is more precise: thirty hours applies to SBC, AAC and LC3, and twenty-six to LDAC. LDAC is also the codec Sony leads with in its own marketing, so the two headline claims on this product cannot both be true at once. Four hours is not a scandal — it is the ordinary cost of a higher bitrate — but you should know which figure applies to the way you will actually listen.
The same care is worth taking with the quick charge. Three minutes for three hours of playback is real, and it requires a USB Power Delivery adapter of 9V/2.3A or more, which Sony does not include. With an ordinary 5V/1.5A charger the same three minutes buys about one hour. If you are the sort of person who charges in the gap before leaving the house, that difference decides whether the feature exists for you.
On weight this is 254 grams, which is the same as the Bose to the gram and 58 grams lighter than the Sonos. The comparison most reviews make — that the Sony is the light one — does not survive contact with the published figures. Where it genuinely leads is codec support: LDAC and LC3 in the same headphone is the widest set here, and LC3 is the part that will still matter in three years.
It folds flat, which the XM5 did not, and Sony rebuilt the hinge in metal to do it. That was the most requested change between those two generations. It is worth noting that both rivals fold flat too, so this is a fix rather than an advantage.
Twelve microphones is the largest array of the three, and microphone count is one of the few specifications that maps directly onto a capability: more inputs give the processor more to work with when it separates your voice from the room. Whether that beats the Bose on a call is not something the specification can settle, and neither can we — we have not put them side by side in a noisy room, and nobody publishes a comparable figure for it.
What the specification does not tell you is how cancellation behaves against a human voice rather than a jet engine. No manufacturer publishes that, and a single decibel figure for it is a curve compressed into a number. Read the guide on how active cancellation actually works before letting a marketing figure decide this purchase.