Sony ULT WEAR Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones

The Sony ULT WEAR is a £99 over-ear pair from the company behind the WH-1000XM5, and it sits at number 6 in this guide. The listing gives it 4.4 out of 5 from 4,112 ratings and sells it on bass first: 40 mm drivers, an ULT button with Deep Bass and Attack Bass modes, noise cancelling with an Ambient Sound mode, and beam-forming microphones for calls. What none of its six bullets give you is a battery figure at all — that number sits in the title instead, and it is the number this guide exists to check.

Sony's title claims a 30-hour battery. The specification table reads 'Battery Charge Time: 3.5 Hours'. Those two figures agree with each other: charging takes roughly a ninth of the time the headphones give back, which is the way round you would expect it. Put that beside the premium pairs in this guide whose spec field reads 'Battery Charge Time: 30 Hours' against their own 30-hour playback claim, and the ULT WEAR is the listing here where the battery arithmetic survives a second look. The review breakdown is the part to read carefully: it holds 100 entries, 74 of them five-star, while the header above it reports 4,112 ratings, so the breakdown reads as proportions rather than a headcount. What the title still does not tell you is whether the 30 hours apply with noise cancelling on or off — the same gap that catches the £69 pair in this guide. Every price, figure and quotation on this page is taken from the Amazon listing as it stood when we checked; nothing here comes from our own testing.