Sennheiser MOMENTUM True Wireless 4 Review – Momentum Name Stays Strong

Welcome to a review of JBL Live 770NC noise-cancelling over the ear headphones. Let’s dive straight into the review.

Design & Comfort

The earbuds’ metallic design is sleek and narrow, which is great. The minimalistic Sennheiser logo isn’t overbearing. They come in various colours: black graphite (which I have), white, silver, black copper, gold, and denim.

The case weighs 66.4g with a premium fabric-like exterior. While attractive, it has its downsides: it’s bulky in pockets and collects dust. Constantly wiping it clean is a hassle, especially considering it’s often stored in pockets or purses filled with lint and fluff. Despite the nice look, this design choice seems flawed. Sennheiser likely aimed to match the Momentum brand’s style, similar to their highly praised Momentum 4 over-ear noise-cancelling headphones. Sennheiser likely designed the case fabric to match the headphone headband, but while dust build-up on the headband is minimal, the case accumulates it faster.

Regarding comfort, out of the box, the earbuds weren’t comfortable, causing irritation after 20 minutes. Switching to a smaller earbud ring fitting resolved the issue, making them comfortable for hours. They also work well with glasses due to their narrow fit, not pushing the ear back onto the glasses frame.

For workouts, they stay put and are IP54-rated for dust, splash, and sweat resistance, making them ideal. However, the IP54 rating applies to the earbuds, not the case. Avoid getting the case dirty or wet. The manual suggests cleaning it with a dry cloth, Q-Tip, or blowing into the USB hole.

Official earbud tips or ring fittings aren’t sold on Sennheiser’s website in Canada or the U.S., but I found replacements on Amazon.

Controls

The earbuds have touch controls, which work excellently. You can customize these through the app. One standout feature is the quick pause for audio content, allowing you to listen to your surroundings. It uses ANC (Active Noise Cancelling) to block out noise and has a transparency mode that lets ambient sound through. Switching to transparency mode pauses your audio and let’s you hear your surroundings and have a conversation. Audio resumes it when you return to ANC—a feature worth other earbuds noise cancelling manufacturers replicating. Just a quick note, that you can resume music while in transparency mode if you wish.

However, the Smart Assistant activation is unreliable, working only about 50% of the time on Android with Google Assistant. On the plus side, passive play/pause works well, pausing content when you remove the earbuds and resuming it when you put them back on.

Noise Cancelling

For noise cancelling, these earbuds are top-notch. They perform exceptionally well for ANC, cancelling out most engine noise on planes or buses, making them great travel companions. While no ANC is perfect, these do a good job with local commuting, though some background noise might come through such as people talking around you or other noise. I can listen to news or podcasts at about 40% volume without much struggle.

The noise cancelling technology works great and gave me an idea of what it was like for my grandfather, who had hearing problems. It made me feel like an old man, though I’m not 40 yet. Since I have a weird looking face, I tend to look older than I am (sigh).

Bose still has better ANC, especially the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds and even the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds (2024 version), which is slightly cheaper than the Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 4. Bose remains the king of ANC, but the Momentum True Wireless 4 still performs well.

Transparency mode is a bit tricky. At high sensitivity, it projects sound too loudly, which hurts my ears. Setting the sensitivity to the middle is the sweet spot. It’s one of the best transparency modes I’ve heard, though Bose still leads by a small margin. You can easily have conversations with it.

Passive noise cancelling just muffles some sound around you. It’s there, but transparency or ANC modes are more effective depending on the situation.

The earbuds have sidetone mode, allowing you to hear your surroundings during calls and adjust your voice volume. You can enable/disable this in the app settings.

Battery

For earbud battery life, Sennheiser claims 7 hours with ANC on and 7.5 hours without. However, my tests showed 8 hours in both modes. This suggests a software-imposed cap to preserve battery longevity when ANC is off (since less technology is working which should increase battery performance). Overall, I got 32.5 hours with the case, exceeding Sennheiser’s claim of 30 hours (even though their numbers don’t align for ANC off and on).

I couldn’t find the exact time on Sennheiser’s website, but in my testing charging the earbuds takes about 1 hour and 20 minutes. Fully charging the case from 0% takes about an hour, which is quick.

Charging the earbuds is easy—just open the case and place the earbuds in; they’ll magnetically connect. The case has a USB-C port on the front and supports wireless charging.

Microphone Quality

In a quiet setting, the earbud microphones have clarity similar to a laptop microphone but sound distant. You might need to speak louder than usual. This isn’t too unexpected since earbuds aren’t close to a person’s mouth.

In a noisy cafe, they block external noise well, causing a slight (hardly noticeable) drop in voice quality due to noise cancellation efforts.

In a windy setting, they perform poorly. The wind noise is loud, making phone calls annoying for the person on the other end. The Bose QuietComfort Earbuds (2024) mentioned earlier, perform better and are $180 CAD/$120 USD cheaper.

Audio Quality

The supported audio codecs are SBC, AAC, aptX Standard, and aptX Lossless.

In terms of audio performance, out of the box, the sound is well-balanced. The bass is levelled with mids and highs. Adjusting bass in the equaliser works well, amplifying the bass without distorting the sound, even at higher volumes.

Audio quality is well-balanced with clear vocals and highs, even with bass boost activated. However, activating bass boost slightly lowers the quality of vocals and highs. Most people might not notice this, but it’s something to be mindful of as I was specifically listening for any issues with the earbuds for the consumer (like you).

Increasing vocals sound splendid with a slight boost and no loss to bass and highs. Increasing the highs too much makes them too sharp, so keeping them in the middle is ideal.

Overall, audio quality is excellent. Switching to aptX Lossless showed little difference from standard technology. Even without a Qualcomm chip, the earbuds sound great.

For glasses wearers, the narrow earbud design ensures comfort without pushing against the ear or glasses.

Software

The app offers sound customization through a sound test to create a custom equalizer based on your preferences. I didn’t like the automatic sound customization, so I preferred using the manual equalizer.

The fit test is useful for adjusting the earbuds correctly. I found this feature to work well to ensure the earbuds were sitting perfectly in my ear to ensure best noise cancelling and audio performance.

Sound zones try to set geographical points based on noise cancelling. For example, at home, it’ll activate transparency mode, and at the mall, it’ll turn on ANC. However, it performed poorly in my experience. It’s more of a bonus feature so I decided not to deduct points on this at the end score.

The Discover tab mainly has Sennheiser ads, so it’s worth ignoring. Lastly in the settings you can do firmware updates, manage battery control, and activate aptX Lossless in the app.

Conclusion

The Momentum True Wireless 4 earbuds stick to Sennheiser’s premium brand. They have some flaws but are worthy contenders, especially when on sale.