Sony WF-1000XM4 - AAC artefacts with iOS? (Patreon)
Content
The main reason I didn’t keep the Sony were the AAC artefacts hearable when streamed from iOS. The JBL Club Pro+ I reviewed recently had even stronger issues.
I heard exactly the same problems from the Earfun Free Pro before I started to work on the OE version. My premise was that AAC was disabled for the final version as it was unlistenable to me and I was sure that there must have been some bug in the AAC implementation of the Bluetooth chip inside the Earfun. But now hearing these artefacts from other IEMs as well I rather suppose Apple has some problem here although I haven’t noticed any issues when I was testing the AirPods Max, thus maybe just 2nd party products are affected.
Apart from that I would have kept the Sony despite the high price, although I personally still perceive the Earfun as more true sounding at least to my ear.
Here are my EQ settings for the Sony, which brings its response quite close to the response of the Earfun Free Pro OE:
Clearbass -1
400 -1
1K 0
2.5K +4
6.3K 0
16K -4
The setting to bring the response closer to the Harman Target is here, although it sounds way too harsh for me:
400 -2
1K 0
2.5K +3
6.3K +4
16K -3