Sony WH-CH720N: Comfortable and affordable ANC headphones

The Sony WH-CH720N are wireless headphones with active noise cancellation that cover the mid-range segment, specifically the space between the entry-level range and the Japanese manufacturer’s H900 series.

Of these we can praise its comfortable design, excellent effectiveness in canceling external noise, 35-hour battery life and its affordable price, but we can criticize the lack of touch gestures and less than stellar sound.

Design

The Sony WHC720N have a look that will be familiar to those already familiar with Sony headsets in this series. Going into details, this new model is protected by a smooth urethane cover , while the previous model had a sand texture finish. Similarly, Sony has added a few tweaks to the WH-CH720N, starting with the headband, which has a matching strip that protects the metal.

Said headband is adjustable and has a double joint for the headphones. The latter can be rotated 90° degrees to store them more easily or carry them by hand.

Naturally, there are markings on the inside to distinguish the left and right earcups, but there’s also a raised braille dot on the left earcup for blind recognition. The external noise canceling microphones are protected by a nice coded metal mesh.

When it comes to controls, the Sony WH-CH720N relies on physical buttons , so it’s obvious that they don’t have touch gestures. That said, we find 4 keys on the right earpiece, these are volume up, volume down, play/pause and NC. It should be noted that holding down the Play button serves to activate your mobile’s voice assistant, while NC’s activates/deactivates noise cancellation, as well as environmental awareness mode.

In terms of comfort they are excellent, the padding is comfortable both on the headband and on the headphones . Additionally, the ear muffs are larger than on the previous version and overall they are lightweight helmets, weighing just 192 grams.

Sound and noise cancellation

In terms of sound, these headphones are equipped with 30mm dynamic drivers and Sony’s V1 chip . Using the default equalizer, the Sony WH-CH720N sound good for the money; the sound profile is good in the high frequency range and the bass output is quite substantial, the mids are figuratively speaking middle ground.

Through Sony’s companion application for these headphones, we can play with different equalization settings that allow us to tune the sound to our liking and that is something that is appreciated. In the same way, the app is used to make many other adjustments, including noise cancellation and ambient mode, which brings us to the next point.

In this order of ideas, noise cancellation has an effectiveness that borders on perfection, so we can easily recommend it to isolate ourselves from the outside world and use them in noisy environments. From the app we can access 20 configuration levels for noise cancellation, so we can’t complain. There’s ambient mode for when we need to pay attention to what’s going on around us, and that’s great.

Finally, the voice quality during calls is acceptable, but it does not get rid of that metallic sound caused by the integrated microphones.

Battery

The battery life is without a doubt one of the main selling points of these headphones, since we are talking about that they can provide 30-35 hours of use on a single charge and active noise cancellation . If we choose to disable the latter feature and use more conservative volume settings, we can theoretically get 50 hours of use out of these headphones.

To put the icing on the cake, these headsets charge up pretty quickly. In a matter of 25 minutes or half an hour they are already half charged and, according to Sony, a quick charge of 3 minutes will give us up to 60 minutes of playback time. With that said, a 0-100% charge does take a bit longer, almost 2 hours to be precise, but it’s acceptable when the reward is more than a day of use.

Connectivity

Finally, we have the issue of connectivity, and in this section we can say with full confidence that the Sony WH-CH720N meet all the requirements for this class of headphones. For starters, they have Bluetooth 5.2 and support quick pairing . To make the bet even more attractive, they have multipoint connectivity to pair with two devices at the same time.

Nerds will be interested to know that these headphones support AAC and SBC. In the same way, they can play content with spatial sound 360 Reality Audio. However, they lack LDAC, but we saw it coming by not getting the Hi-Res Audio label anywhere.

As you might expect, they also feature a USB Type-C port for charging purposes.

PROS

• Design and comfort of use
• Excellent autonomy
• Decent sound quality at a good price
• They have noise cancellation

CONS

• They do not have touch gestures
• Lack of proximity sensor

Sony WH-CH720N Specifications: