Fixing the shallow ear pads

It’s my first Sony headphone, so I’m not sure about other of its headphones, but XM4’s ear pads are super duper shallow, basically unusable. You can wear them for at most 1 hour before making your ears hurt like hell.

After complaining on Blind, as there are so many threads hailing Sony XM4 without mentioning this huge shortcoming, someone suggested I look up some DIY videos to make it comfortable. And so I did.

There are apparently two ways to solve the problem. The first way is to remove a pad between the ear pad and the base. To do this, you’ll have to remove the ear pads first … something I was not able to do. Maybe I could do it had I applied more strength? But I was just so afraid of hurting my new expensive headphones.

The second way, as mentioned in this reddit comment, is to fill in something into the ear pads to increase the depth. The reddit comment mentioned a “Neoprene Sponge Cord”, but I was not able to find something like that available in Taiwan’s EC platforms, so I went for … tissue paper instead.

I fold the tissue papers into rows and filled them into my ear pads, and it worked! The discomfort was reduced by a significant amount. After a few hours, you’ll still feel a bit of pain as the tissue paper rolls are not so robust and your ears will still touch the base from time to time, but it’s okáyy.

I left the tissue paper rolls there for 8 months and dealt with the relatively minor pain until a few days ago, I looked up on the Internet for sponge cords again, and found them this time! I bought 3 of this at dirt price, one each for 6mm, 8mm and 10mm, and the 8mm works perfectly! It’s much more robust than the random tissue rolls and my ears no longer touch the back of my headphones. The noise cancelling is also noticeably better now.

Noise Cancelling

The noise cancelling of Sony XM4 is pretty underwhelming tbh. I’ve tried AirPods Max, and it’s significantly better. It’s also 2x the price tho.

Sound Quality

The sound quality is underwhelming as well. When I first used it, I felt like the cheap wired earbuds coming with the phone I bought like 8 years ago has better sound quality.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m pretty disappointed with this headphone. It’s pretty uncomfortable, the noise cancelling is meh, and the sound quality is worse than cheap wired earbuds. However, from the reviews, it’s probably the best you can get with this price point for Bluetooth headphones.