Sennheiser’s Momentum 4 is Sennheiser on top of its game. But it’s not without its caveats.
Build Quality – That Fabric Feeling
Starting with the superficial, the Momentum 4’s are primarily a plastic build, with faux leather on the ear cups and the inside of the headband. There’s a textile finish on the top and some metal in the headband but overall they’re very flexible with no creaking. A solid pair that you would expect from a flagship. The hardshell case also feels protective and matches the material on top of the headband. Very much in keeping with the design language of the Momentum True Wireless series.
And you might also see a lot of overlap with the Sony WH-1000 XM5; fewer buttons, more touch, no folding up headphones and a sliding headband adjustment mechanism, unfortunately Sennheiser did copy a flaw of the Sony’s. As we’ve noted about the black XM5, this black Momentum 4 is very much a case of “once you go black, it’s going to go back”. The oils and all those liquid emissions are all very much visible on the earcups. We’re not sure if the white one is any better but the lighter version of the Sony XM5 definitely didn’t have this problem. So if anyone has the white Momentum 4, let us know in the comments if you have this problem or not.
Microphones and Vakman controls
Ok – moving from emissions of the hands to emissions of the mouth. Voice, we mean voice. Let’s go take a walk and a bike ride!
For microphone samples check out the video above.
So we can’t fault any of these in quiet conditions, in this day and age there’s very few that fail THAT test. But in noisy and windy conditions we really see the Bose showing its age. It does a lot of harsh noise cancelling which in turn gets applied to the voice making it sound unnatural and sometimes even hollow. Sennheiser takes another approach. Lets in a bit of the background noise and wind, but still maintains a respectable amount of clarity in the voice. So definitely a good option and something we wouldn’t hesitate to pick up for calls. But but but, Sony has really gone out and done something with their mics. They are the best of the lot. They balance noise and wind reduction with voice clarity and volume in the best way possible, relative to the others.
What kind of controls do you get when on calls? Sony is the most basic with answer/hang up and volume. The Bose gives you that and also the ability to adjust how much of your own voice you hear which they call self-voice. Along with that you can also use a button to mute and unmute your microphone. The Sennheiser on top of all of that also has auto muting. So say you take off your headphones in the middle of a call, the mic will get muted. And once it detects you have it on, it’ll unmute. You also have an adjustable Sidetone slider in the app which pipes in environmental noises. Handy stuff!
Unfortunately even though you can do everything, the vakman controls are a bit confusing. I hung up on Kevin a bunch of times because I didn’t know how to answer the call. Every other headphones we’ve tried use a single or double tap to answer. After much digging around, we realised that we had to swipe forward to answer a call. And swipe backwards to end it. Muchos misterioso.
There’s also a mysteriously named ‘comfort call’ setting in the app with no additional explanation. What we found was that there was a slight EQ applied on incoming calls – more bass with comfort call on and more ‘voice focused’ with it off. Might be good when you have to listen to some very shrill calls, but didn’t really make a big difference in our testing.
Sound Quality
Overall signature and codecs
So we’re going to address two kinds of people when we talk about sound. Those of you who enjoy music. And those of you who enjoy your gear. Maybe a little too much. So for the first group – these are great. Sennheiser’s going for punchy and pleasant. Bassy, full and rich. This is not Beats we’re talking about, but Sennheiser!! Boom boom in the room. The bass and sub-bass is extremely satisfying to get your groove on. Also the soundstage and imaging were quite good for this category. Listening to John Mayer’s ‘Stop this train’, the acoustic guitar strum in the beginning has a clear position to the left and slightly at the back. There’s reasonable instrument separation and APTX Adaptive delivers great resolution. In our view though, Sennheiser has gone down the route of the Sony XM series by leaning towards a very bass-heavy sound signature. There are some weird dips in this frequency response chart, so take it with a grain of salt but it does give you an approximate idea of the tuning.
Sound Check
A bonus is that the Sennheiser Sound Check is an excellent feature. And it doesn’t do anything mysterious – it 1. Plays some music YOU like using YOUR favourite music service or player 2. Lets you choose YOUR preferred sound and 3. Spits out an EQ. And you know what? The feature works great! The best part is you can tweak the output after the fact. And any changes you make stay on the headphones and are carried over to other devices you switch to. Great stuff.
Volume
A weird thing that affects both newbie and enthusiast alike is that the volume on the headphones are independent of the volume on your source device. Sometimes. Sometimes they’re the same. This just feels… so 2018. So you can max out the volume on the headphones but have half way to go on the phone. Weird. Also the volume jumps are… jumpy. They went up in increments of 6 on Windows, for example and also pretty much the same on Android. Much higher than any other headphones.
Tuning and Bass
Now for you – intense audio gear lovers, you. Yes you – We see you. Man, you look especially good today. Ok – if you want something more refined, subtle and flat, this ain’t it. I’m shocked to see reviews calling this neutral sounding. These are not the Bose 700! What are they smoking? At least not on the default settings. Overall it’s a warmly tuned set of cans out of the box. But the bass is my favourite on ANC headphones so far. Very well rounded. It has a nice deep sub-bass rumble. If you want to reduce the level of the bass, the 3 band EQ does help open up the clarity. These are the settings we used to start with.
Timbre
What I’ve always really enjoyed with Sennheiser products is their very natural timbre characteristics. Whether it’s vocals, drums, acoustic guitars – despite the weight of the bass, all natural instruments still retain their natural characteristics.
EQ
So – after tweaking the EQ, which is to say dropping the bass and slightly boosting the mids and treble, I found that I quite enjoyed these headphones. They take EQ pretty well and that EQ is retained across devices. But if you really wanna tweak tweak tweak, you’re gonna have to use a third party tool like Wavelet and all the risks that come with that. The Sennheiser Smart Control app only has a 3 band EQ. Having said that – these sound fine. They sound pretty good, but almost no wireless headphones are worth this price. Purely for sound, you gotta go back to the stone age and use cables, amplifiers and DACs.
Treble performance
The one thing I particularly enjoyed was the relatively smoothened out treble. I’m a bit treble sensitive and I felt that Sennheiser’s done well with treble never getting harsh – even when recordings meant to be harsh – so that can be a positive or a negative depending on your hearing preferences.
Wired Experience
And for those of you who want to use this thing wired – firstly why and secondly – yes you can use these one of two different ways – as a USB wired connection, which to put it lightly was extremely buggy with my Macbook Pro. Maybe it was the dongle, because the other end of the USB cable is a USB A connector that couldn’t directly go into the Macbook. It caused my Chrome to freeze up, and Apple Music to crash – doing to Apple and Google what world governments have struggled to do. But good ol’ Microsoft – the USB C worked wonderfully with a Windows laptop. Again – something the Sony’s and Boses of this world don’t have. And of course if you don’t want that USB action, there’s always the good ol’ audio jack that companies don’t have space for in their phones anymore.
Overall an extremely fun set of headphones!
But if you want to know how much fun exactly, then we’ll leave full binaural sound samples at the end of this video comparing the Momentum 4 with the Sony XM5, Bose 700, AirPods Max and Technics A800.
Solid ANC and Transparency
From listening to sound to cancelling it out. Let’s listen to some samples comparing the Momentum 4 with three other top tier ANC headphones. See you on the other side.
Check out the video above for ANC and transparency samples compared to the Airpods Max, the Bose 700 and the Sony WH-1000 XM5.
We’re talking about the heavy hitters in the ANC world – and true to form, ANC on all four was amazing! The Sony is ever so slightly better than the Bose. And the Sennheiser similar to the AirPods Max feels like it does great for lower end sounds but lets in a bit more high end like voices. But let’s be fair – you won’t be complaining with any of these four, that’s for sure. There’s also a wind reduction setting in the app for Sennheiser. Worked pretty well when we were on the bike.
In terms of Transparency – the king is still the king. The AirPods Max is till date unbeaten. It’s the closest to not wearing anything at all. Headphones, we mean headphones! Next we have the Sony then the Sennheiser and finally the Bose. The Bose feels a bit muffled compared to the Sony. There is a bit of muffle on the Sennheiser but not as much as the Bose.
On the Sennheiser you get the ability to change ANC level in the app with a slider. But that’s not all – you can actually use the pinch and zoom gesture on the right cup to adjust the intensity of the noise cancelling or transparency. In our testing this worked quite effectively and there are certainly cases where we see ourselves using this. No other headphones offer this, so that’s a differentiator right there. Of course you can double tap to go to any of the extremes. A nice touch which is kinda practical is if you switch to transparency, the music pauses. Which makes sense.
There’s also an adaptive ANC mode, which in our testing did fine. But there’s just something about keeping the ANC controls in our hands, so we like to use it without. It’s either full on, or fully off.
Design – From Retro to Safe
The Momentum 4 has broken free of those retro design elements found on its predecessor, and that’s alright. Sure, you’re not going to be turning any heads but nor did Sennheiser need to turn the heads of animals to make the Momentum 4 with its faux leather pads as opposed to the genuine leather on the Momentum 3. So a win in the sustainability department for sure. While phones might be going foldable, headphones seem to be going in the opposite direction. First Bose, then Apple, then Sony’s latest flagship and now Sennheiser. I mean – WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? Why are companies taking away useful features! What that means is that the case is slightly larger. BUT there’s good news for people like MKBHD who didn’t like the Sony XM5 because the headphones folded the ‘wrong’ way. The Momentum 4 can fold either way.
The headband now has clothy textile on the top and faux leather on the bottom. And a silver logo stitched on either side. We’ll talk about how comfortable they are in a bit, but the more and more we look at the Momentum 4, the more it resembles the love child of the PXC 550 and the HD 450 BT. Especially the earcups which are oval shaped, with hinges holding the cups and with the right earcup sporting a touch pad. That touch pad is alright, reasonably responsive but definitely not as satisfying as the super responsive Sony XM5. What was strange and needed some getting used to was the gesture for changing noise cancelling. That’s a double tap on the touchpad. Something you generally see on earbuds rather than headphones. But it didn’t take too long to get used to it. It is a bit finicky since a double tap sometimes gets interpreted as a single tap.
That same touchpad does your basics for controlling music, nothing crazy there. Apart from all that touching, swiping and pinching, there’s only a tiny bit of pushing. There’s a single button. That single button does have multiple functions. Pressing it down for 3 seconds is to power it on and off. That lasts one or two seconds too long in our opinion. That’s not what she said. Hold that button down a bit longer and you’ll put the headphones into pairing mode. Works well. Clicking it once calls up your voice assistant and a double click and you’ll have Miss Sennheiser tell you the battery life on your headphones. And speaking of battery life – we absolutely love the 5 dot LED indicator on the headphones itself. Nice touch. Not that kind of touch, we’re done talking about touching ok?
So let’s touch upon the actual battery life – probably one of the most talked about features and we get why. Sennheiser claims a MASSIVE 60 hours on a full charge with ANC on – 60 hours! If you’re someone who needs that kind of battery life – there’s very little else on the market with noise cancelling that can beat that. But – we’ve always praised Sony for their 30 hours and that being more than plenty. 60 hours is nice but let’s be honest, we’re all pretty much used to charging devices on the daily. So headphones with even a half or a third of the battery life is plenty for most. It does take 2 hours to fully charge it up but the quick charge on the Momentum is pretty solid. 5 mins of charge gets you 4 hours of playback! The Sony XM5 is the only other one that does a similar trick with 3 mins of charge giving you 3 hours of playback. Batteries and charging speeds – what an interesting market that is eh?
Anyway where were we? Oh yeah the box. So in the case you get a Type-C charging cable, a 2.5 to 3.5mm audio cable, and an airplane adapter. You know – because airplanes are SOOO SPECIAL. They need their dinky little special pluggy wuggies because they can’t do one plug, so they need 2…
Momentous Comfort
But guys – if there’s one more thing we love about these headphones, it’s the comfort! The earpads are plush and don’t get too hot in use. We used this for about an hour in a 27 degree celsius room and these were 3 degrees hotter after about an hour of use. Pretty much par for the course. The headband feels light on the crown. Overall a good set for long sittings. If there’s one thing we can nitpick on then it’s adjusting the sliding headband. It’s a two handed job and so you can’t change it easily with one hand while the headphones are on your head. And the adjustment is something you will be doing every time since you’ll need to reset the headband if you want to fit it back into the case. And speaking of putting it back in the case. A nifty feature is that if you forget to turn off the headphones and place it in the case the headphones turn off immediately. And if you take them out of the case and put them on they automatically turn on as well. Momentum Mimics Max’s Magnets? Either way it’s a nice little attention to detail.
Not everything is as it should be
Apart from all that, is there anything else worth mentioning? Obviously, you get a few of the basics you expect from headphones of this calibre like a smart pause sensor. Automatically pause and play depending on whether you’re wearing the headphones or not. Works well, no complaints. Auto power off meaning the headphones can automatically turn off when they’re not used for a certain period of time that you set.
There are things that are not perfect though – the app connection is a bit iffy, especially when on phone calls. We had difficulty connecting to the app, even though the headphones were connected to the phone. And there were times that the app started guzzling our phone’s battery life.
And as any flagship headphones should have these days – these have multipoint. In our limited testing with Android and Mac it worked well. Sennheiser also has a handy list of connections in the app that you can use to switch between devices you’ve previously paired.
Should you buy the Sennheiser Momentum 4 Headphones?
Overall – we’re VERY impressed with the Sennheiser Momentum 4. After Sony’s fantastic WH 1000 XM5 came out, we thought it would be pretty difficult to beat. But Sennheiser has made clear strides on all fronts – sound, calls, ANC, transparency, comfort, touch controls. And they’ve leapfrogged their competition with their crazy battery life numbers. It’s been an amazing couple of months for ANC over-ear headphones and this is a legit good product. We’d pick this over the Sony XM4 quite easily, for example. Bose 700 has a much flatter sound than these so that may be a reason to reach for those. The XM5 has a bunch of other things going for it like a more advanced app, overall lighter build, better microphones and slightly more refined ANC.
But all in all, if you’re dead set on Sennheiser then let us summarise the reasons you should or shouldn’t buy them.
Here are the reasons to gain Momentum:
- 60 hours battery life with crazy quick charge
- That Bass! And overall sound quality – excellent timbre and sound over USB as well as a very well performing sound check feature
- Top tier fully adjustable ANC with adjustment on the earcups
- Reliable phone calls in all environments with superior vakman controls
- Comfortable for long periods of time
- Support for multipoint – two devices at a time and the ability to see all devices in the app
And here are the reasons you may want to lose this Momentum
- Price. These are new and not discounted yet. For a little less there are still some premium options out there. Bose 700, for example, still packs a punch for a 3 year old device. And you have the older Sony’s as well.
- Sound: As we said, it has a very warm and bass focussed sound out of the box. It also has a relatively limited 3 band EQ. But who doesn’t like bass?
- And that slightly finicky touch pad is slightly finicky
- Like most premium headphones these days – these are not foldable leading to an overall larger footprint
You’ve been here 4 the Momentum, and we’ve been DHRME. Namaste!
Sound samples vs Airpods Max, Sony WH-1000 XM5 and Bose 700 in the video above.