Sony MDR-ZX770BN: A Bluetooth headphone with noise cancelling gets a lot right

[MUSIC] I'm David Carnoy from cnet.com and this is the Sony MDR-ZX770BN. A $230 full sized Bluetooth headphone. It has active noise cancelling and it's geared towards frequent travelers, means it can also be used as a wired headphone. And flights that prohibit the use of bluetooth. Sony also seems to be targeting consumers who can't quite afford the Beats Studio Wireless, but want a quality wireless headphone that shares many of its features, including that aforementioned noise cancelling. And this is a quality bluetooth headphone, though not quite as good as the Beats. It's comfortable, with memory foam in the ear pads, and seems pretty sturdily built. But it's not quite as comfortable as the beats isn't as sturdy and doesn't sound as good although it's very good for Bluetooth. One thing you have to make sure of when you first put on the headphones is that you have them in the right listening mode. Turns out the headphones have three levels of sound quality which I didn't realize at first. There's a standard quality mode that puts the priority on a stable Bluetooth connection. That cuts down on the sound quality. And it appears the headphones might ship in this mode. What you want is one of the two higher quality modes. One of which includes app deck support for smartphones that offer this alleged enhanced bluetooth streaming option. As I said, you can use this as a wired headphone. But you can't turn off the noise canceling in wired mode. The headphones sound slightly better in wired mode, but it doesn't sound fantastic. The noise cancelling works pretty well and has three different modes to choose from depending on your environment, but it's not quite on the level of Bose's QuietComfort 25, which is a dedicated noise cancelling headphone and has no bluetooth. As far as other extras go, you do get NFC tap to pair technology, and the aforementioned Aptech support. Battery life is rated a decent 13 hours with noise cancelling and bluetooth turned on. Color options include black and the blue finish you see here, and the headphones ship with a simple protective pouch, plus a headphone cord and a USB charging cable. The $150 MDR-ZX770BT is very similar to this model, but doesn't include noise canceling. If you don't need that feature and are just looking for a wireless headphone, that's the model to get. If you want both noise cancelling and Bluetooth, and don't wanna spend upwards of $300 to get those features The MDR-ZX700BN is certainly worth considering. I'm David Conaway. Thanks for watching. [MUSIC]