Sony WH-CH710N Review

Welcome to the review of the Sony WH-CH710 wireless, over the ear, noise cancelling headphones. For the rest of this post, I’ll simply refer to them as the 710 for simplicity.

Accessories

Now, there is another bummer with this price tag, aside from the multi-point feature missing, its lack of accessories. Now in the box you get a USB-A to USB-C charging cable. The cable is measuring about 7 inches. Sony expects you to charge it by directly connecting it to a computer or to a power adaptor outlet of your own.

There is no travellers case included. That’s right, not a hard travellers case, not a soft travellers case, I mean nothing. You get a charging cable and that’s it. At this price point that is a big letdown.

Design & Comfort

When it comes to its physical design and how it looks they’re just plain and simple. They’re not horrible, they’re just you know meh, they’re like ok. Most of this is due to it being constructed with very simple looking plastic. There are no refined edges or anything outstanding or unique about them, which makes them look kind of mediocre, but again not bad.

Regarding attraction and uniqueness, it only comes in black colour, there’s no other colour options available.

As I just mentioned the body is constructed mainly of plastic, however the swivel bar is a metal slider for the headband extension. The strange thing about these headphones is they weigh about 223 grams, which is kind of the weight range for more premium headphones with almost double the price tag, except the 710 don’t feel that heavy in the hand. It’s probably because the plastic just feels so simple, I just get the illusion that it’s lighter than it is.

Although don’t let the simple plastic fool you, it doesn’t feel like if you drop it a couple of times it’s going to break, I don’t have that concern with this. It can be stretched and bent in various odd ways and still feels firm in the hands. I think that’s thanks to the fact that the ear cups do not fold in for more portability in travelling but that’s a good thing because if they were to fold in that usually means a weaker body in the frame.

There’s no information if these are dust and water resistant, so my advice is don’t try to get them too dirty and especially do not get them wet or you may risk damaging the unit. In that regard, there are no official replacement ear cups from Sony so if you get the ear cups damaged or torn you might be out of luck unless you can get third party ones and then you have replace them on your own.

Now when it comes to comfort, in my testing I’ve worn them for multiple sessions, sometimes 3 or 4 hours straight. They’re very comfortable, they feel very lightweight on the head, again despite the heavier weight. Probably because the flex on the headband isn’t too tight, it’s very comfortable, feels phenomenal. My ears never get sweaty or hot.

For anyone that’s interested if you want to work out in them, if you want to do cardio sessions like running or elliptical, they’ll feel fine they won’t move around anywhere. If you’re someone who wants to do like multiple sets of dumbbell rows, where you keep having to keep looking down and shifting up a little bit during your sets, they will slide forward ever so slightly but nothing too concerning. Although I don’t recommend them for workout sessions because they are over the ear headphones, your ears will get very hot and sweaty during your intense workout session of course.

There’s a couple of key components to helping with the comfort level. One is that the ear cushions are thick and soft, they’re very much a pleasure on the head. The interior head band cushion is thin I will admit that much, however if you have next to no hair or no hair at all, it shouldn’t be a bother because there’s still some padding which is an adequate amount.

The headband extension when extending it or decreasing the size is done in notches, it’s not just a smooth slider and the ear cups can rotate up, down, forward and back to accommodate most head shapes.

Now if you’re travelling and say waiting at an airport, train station, bus station, whatever it may be and you want to rest them on your neck, when it comes to looking left and right it’s not too bad- it just barely grazes against my chin, but if your neck is shorter of course it might be a bit of an annoyance. When it comes to looking down, again it rubs against my cheeks, but nothing too bothersome as I can look down. If you turn the ear cups in, looking left to right is super easy and looking down is even easier. Although depending on the thickness of your neck, they might rub into your neck.

Controls

Switching over to controls, on the left ear cup there’s a power button for on/off. Also holding the same button will allow for Bluetooth sync mode.

Now switching over to the bottom of the right ear cup, that’s where most of the controls are. The top button of the 3 that are set together, the top one will go volume up, the bottom will lower volume. The middle button has the majority of the controls on its own because if you tap it, it will simply play/pause music or answer/hang up a call. Double tapping it will go to the next track, triple tapping will go to the previous track.

If the headphones are connected to your smartphone, pressing, and holding the middle button for about 2 seconds will activate the smart assistant. It depends on whether you’re using Android or an iOS device it’ll kick in Google assistant or Siri. In my testing I used Google Assistant, and it works just fine.

But here’s the problem, why is there so many functionalities centralized into a single middle button control, why can’t I have it more simplified like other Sony headphones? For example, pressing and holding volume up should go to the next track, pressing and holding volume down should go to the previous track. Having too many controls in a single button can be annoying and confusing.

Continuing with the right ear cup, the button near the bottom front is for controlling how noise isolation works. That basically means that one mode is for ANC (active noise cancelling). ANC is as you expect, technology kicks in to try to suppress exterior noise so that you’re more in tune with what you’re listening to as if in a quiet environment. The next mode is ambient mode, which forces the microphones on the headphones to turn on, and project exterior noise into the 710 so that you can hear your surroundings easily. And the last mode is simply regular headphone mode. It turns off all additional technology, just like using plain old simple headphones. So that one button will allow you to cycle through the 3 modes and use which one is appropriate to your comfort.

Now at this mid-tier pricing it’s not truly an expected feature but more of a nice to have, passive play/pause mode, which is not available. What the passive play/pause mode basically means is that if you’re listening to your media content while the headphones are on, when you take them off they’ll automatically pause the content on your computer or cell phone. When you put them back on, the headphones will automatically kick-in and resume and will play your music or movie automatically again for you. It’s not available on these headphones which is not truly expected at this mid-tier price point but something I just wanted to mention.

Noise Cancelling

We’re going to focus on the noise cancelling modes and we’re going to start with ANC mode first and I’m going to break down ANC as if you’re talking about music because I think it’s just easier to describe. When it comes to lows, so really low humming noises like let’s say the dishwasher running in the kitchen, you know it’s churning water and you can hear it easily but when you put ANC mode on it will suppress that noise out quite a bit. It does a pretty good job. When it comes to mid-tier noises, if you were to talk about vocals, so maybe people are having a conversation 5 feet away from you, heck even 10 feet away from you, you can kind of hear some muffles coming through rather easily. It doesn’t really do that good of a job suppressing that noise. When it comes to high pitched noises, this is where things get even worse. You can hear almost everything come through. In fact, in some odd cases for some reason the volume amps up. It’s like the headphones get confused and forces the high-pitched noises to come through louder than they should.

Just using regular head phone mode, so just putting them on your ears, since it’s an over the ear headphone will suppress a lot of that noise at the same level as ANC – so mids and high level noises.

When it comes to ambient mode, if someone is within 5 feet or 10 feet having a conversation with you, you can kind of make out what they’re saying. It’s a little muffled, not the best experience but you can just barely make out what they’re saying. Anything beyond 10 feet is a kind of muffled noise that’s just a bit louder than not having ambient mode on.

Battery

When it comes to the battery, Sony claims it’ll last about 35 hours, with ANC mode on. In my testing I was able to blow it away with 58 hours of usage, which is pretty nuts. With ambient mode on I was able to average close to 53 hours, which is still very impressive. When it comes to regular headphone mode I got about 55 hours, which is still great, but I find that kind of weird. It’s odd because with regular headphone mode, ambient and ANC mode is off so there’s less technology being used, typically headphones should last longer but in this case it didn’t. It still averaged close to having ANC mode or ambient mode on. Not a big deal but just wanted to mention that I found it kind of strange.

One thing to keep in mind is that when the headphones are charging you cannot use them. Although, considering how long the battery lasts, you’re not going to have to charge them that often, so I don’t think that’s too much of a bummer.

For charging, the charging port itself is located on the bottom of the left ear cup and it’s a USB-C port.

When it comes to recharging, get this, I had to check this several times to make sure I’m getting it right, Sony claims it takes 7 hours to recharge these headphones. I’m not kidding. In my testing I was able to get much less time- 5 hours! Which is still not that good although hear me out, 1 hour of recharging will get you almost 10 hours of usage in return which honestly the tradeoff is pretty good. Again, as I mentioned you’re probably not going to charge them that often because the battery is just great.

Microphone Quality

Don’t expect anything special from the microphone. Even while using it in a quiet environment, it sounds as if you’re on a laptop microphone. Your voice will sound a bit distant and not the sharpest audio. It does a well enough job for phone call purposes but it’s easy for people to tell you’re not using a great microphone.

When replicating a noisy restaurant, it suppresses most of the background noise. While talking, the background noise on the microphone audio is almost non-existent, but when you pause to let the person on the other end talk, the background noise will come through your audio is slight muffled noise.

Lastly, when in a windy environment, it doesn’t do well. Audio from wind noise comes through rather strong and can overpower what you’re saying.

Audio Quality

Let’s talk about audio quality. It’s a bit of a mixed bag here. Some good and some not so great. So out of the box with a flat profile is just sub-par. You can tell there’s a bit more emphasis on bass from Sony compared to mids and highs. Nothing that’ll ruin the song for someone who’s not a major bass enthusiast like I am but you will notice a slight more punch so just something to keep in mind. Mid and highs are a little flat for this price point. At mid-tier pricing headphones, I expect a little bit more quality, they’re a little bit flatter than they should be.

There’s no official equalizer from Sony available for these. You have to use a third-party app on your computer or your smart phone unfortunately. When you do use a third-party equaliser, I noticed that when increasing the bass, it can throw out a ton of lows at you, like it has a big boom to it, even at higher volume it does not get distorted so bass performance can get good. Highs can also excel, it can get some really sharp, crisp sounds depending on how much you adjust the highs. Vocals can get better performance out of them if you really want to, except they feel kind of isolated. It’s hard to explain as you increase mids even further up in an equalizer they kind of leave bass and highs too far back.

The other problem is at this mid-tier price point, you’re forced to download a third party equalizer app. I know I might be nit picking on this but the fact that at this price point some competing headphones even at cheaper price points come with an official supported equalizer but Sony kind of ignored it for these headphones. They are not supported by the headphone connect app which is a big bummer.

When it comes to kodak support I just want to quickly mention that they do support SBC and AAC.

Software

And now discussing the software you kind of know what the answer is, I already kind of mentioned it. There is no official supported software for these headphones which again at this price point is rather disappointing and unexpected from Sony, I expected better from them.

In my opinion the biggest bummer here is no firmware updates. What you get out of the box, that’s it you’re stuck with it and there’s no upgrades available.

Conclusion

I think these headphones could’ve had a lot of potential. They’re mid-tier pricing, but they just have all these short comings that are just bizarre to me, it’s like Sony wanted to make this rush product to get it out to market but they kind of dropped the ball with some things that are considered somewhat basic at this price point.

The thing to mention here is that they’re not horrible it’s just that they don’t seem worth the price. But for now, you’re probably best to save your money unless you find them on sale because they’ve been out for so long, honestly sometimes you can find them for like 30 to 50 percent off, I kid you not.