Sony WH-CH400 Wireless Headphones Review

The Sony WH-CH400 are flimsy-looking on-ear headphones that come in a few bright monochromatic color schemes (red, blue, and grey) but also a more low-profile black design. The cups are very small with poor padding, and the headband is thin but quite wide. The headphones rest on your ears without covering them. They look plasticky and feel like cheaply-made headphones.

The Sony WH-CH400 are passably comfortable. The padding on the ear cups seems fairly thick, but in reality, there's barely any padding between your ears and the driver itself. The cups sit at an angle on your ears which may feel weird for some. The headband is made out of plastic and doesn’t have any padding, which isn’t comfortable during long listening sessions. On the upside, the headphones are very lightweight and aren’t too tight.

The Sony CH-400 have a pretty straightforward control scheme with common functionalities. You get a volume rocker that also serves as a track skipper, and the power button acts as a play/pause button on top of being used for call management. You can enter their pairing mode by holding the power button, but you’ll need to hold it for 7 seconds, which is quite long. You don’t have any voice prompts, but you can trigger your device’s voice assistant for voice-enabled commands.

The Sony WH-CH400 are decently breathable. They trap some heat under the ear cups, but this shouldn’t be an issue during casual listening sessions. You might sweat a bit more than usual if you work out with these, but it won’t be as drastic as with some over-ear headphones.

The Sony WH-CH400 headphones aren’t very portable because you can't fold them in a more compact format, and their cups don’t swivel, which would have made them easier to slide into a bag. The headband is quite flexible, but it might break if you squeeze them into a more portable format.

The Sony WH-CH400 don’t come with a case or a pouch.

These headphones don't feel very durable or well-built. The whole build is made from thin plastic that feels cheap and easily breakable. On the upside, the cups are decently dense, and the headband is flexible, but the plastic used is cheap, and the one-piece design doesn’t help with durability, especially that you can’t fold them. It feels like putting the headband under a bit of stress could easily cause it to snap.

The Sony WH-CH400 aren’t the most stable as they simply rest on your ears. They aren’t very tight, so a bit of head movement makes them sway around easily. They won’t be ideal for sports as they could easily fall off your head, but on the upside, since they are wireless, you don’t have any wires in your way that could get stuck on something and yank the headphones off your head. This shouldn’t be an issue during casual listening sessions, and you can use them for a casual jog.

• Sony WH-CH400 headphones
• Micro-USB to USB charging cable
• Manuals

The Sony WH-CH400's frequency response consistency is pretty bad in the bass range, but they perform consistently in the treble range between reseats. In the bass range, the graph shows major variations at 20Hz, reaching more than 20dB of difference between our human test subjects. This will be very noticeable and means that people’s listening experiences will differ greatly from one another.

The Sony WH-CH400 have great bass accuracy. Their LFE (low-frequency extension) is down to 26Hz, which is very good. However, their low-bass is slightly lacking, which results in a bass that may be a bit light on thump and rumble common to bass-heavy genres like EDM and dubstep. There’s a small 2dB bump in mid-bass, responsible for the punch of bass guitars and kick of drums. Since the high-bass is accurate and follows our curve well, this will result in a fairly good bass, but it may feel a bit light on thump.

However, their bass delivery varies significantly across users and is sensitive to the quality of fit, seal, and whether you wear glasses. The response here represents the average bass response, and your experience may vary.

This Sony WH-CH400's mid-range is impressive. The response throughout the range is fairly even and well-balanced, which results in an accurate reproduction of vocals and instrumentals. However, there’s a small bump around 500Hz, which could bring them forward in the mix. However, the effect is fairly subtle and should barely be noticeable.

Their treble accuracy is good. The response is flat and even throughout the response, with a small dip around 6kHz that hurts vocals, leads, and cymbals but should be barely noticeable. There also seems to be a small mismatch in our unit's drivers in the treble range, resulting in the right driver sounding a bit sharper.

These headphones have impressive stereo imaging. Weighted group delay is at 0.35, which is good. The GD graph also shows that, except for the area around 70Hz, which could sound a tad loose, the response is below the audibility threshold. This suggests a bass that's tight for the most part and a transparent treble. In terms of driver matching, our test unit was very well-matched, which is important for accurate localization and placement of objects (voice, instruments, video game effects) in the stereo image, but there's a slight frequency mismatch between the L/R drivers. However, these results are only valid for our unit, and yours may not perform the same way.

The Sony WH-CH400's soundstage is poor. These on-ear headphones' PRTF graph shows a small amount of pinna interaction, with mediocre accuracy. This results in a soundstage that's perceived to be small and unnatural. There's also no deep notch around the 10kHz region, and with their closed-back design, the soundstage will be perceived as being inside the listener’s head rather than in front.

The noise isolation performance of these headphones is bad. Their on-ear design doesn’t isolate against the deep rumble of a plane or bus engines, which means they aren't suitable for commuting. In the mid-range, important for blocking out speech, they achieve about 7dB of isolation, which is fairly negligible. In the treble range, important for blocking out S and T sounds and A/C noise, they block out about 16dB of ambient noise, which is sub-par.

The Sony WH-CH400 have an okay leakage performance. A significant portion of their leakage is spread from 1kHz to 10kHz, which is a relatively broad range and will mostly consist of the high-mid and the whole treble ranges. The overall level of the leakage isn't very loud either. With the music at 100dB SPL, the leakage at 1 foot away will average around 41dB SPL and peaks at 54dB SPL, which is about the same as the noise floor of most offices.

The integrated microphone's recording quality is adequate. LFE (low-frequency extension) is at 236Hz, meaning transmitted/recorded speech with this mic will sound slightly thin. The HFE (high-frequency extension) of 3.4kHz indicates speech that lacks detail and is noticeably muffled. This will hurt the understandability of speech, but it should still be understandable in quiet environments.

The integrated mic is mediocre at noise handling. In our SpNR test, it achieved a speech-to-noise ratio of 15dB, indicating it's best suited for quiet environments and struggles to separate speech from ambient noise in moderate and loud situations.

The Sony WH-CH400 will allow you to listen to audio content for more than 16 continuous hours on a single charge, which should be more than enough for a normal workday. Unfortunately, they take more than 3 hours to charge fully, which is slow. They automatically turn off if they're disconnected from their source but won’t do so if you’re still connected to your phone. You also can't use them while charging, which is especially disappointing considering you can't use them passively with an audio cable either.

There's no companion app for the Sony WH-CH400.

These headphones are Bluetooth-compatible but can only be connected to a single device at a time. On the upside, they support NFC for a quicker and easier pairing procedure, which is nice since it takes 7 seconds to put them into pairing mode.

Their latency with PCs is very high. Even if some apps and devices offer some delay compensation, they won’t be ideal for watching video content and playing games. Most people should see a noticeable delay between audio and video content. On the plus side, they have very low latency with Android devices.

You can't use the Sony WH-CH400 wired. There is no jack for an audio cable on the headphones, and they don’t support audio over their USB charging cable.

These headphones don’t have a dock.