Sony WF-SP800N Truly Wireless Sports in-Ear Noise Canceling Headphones with mic for Phone Call – One Size, White (WFSP800N/W)

They did everything right from a sound standpoint, but the fitting and call quality is where these need work. No matter how much i tried they wouldn’t fit in secure as they were intended. The call mic also isn’t good when trying to cancel ambient noise during phone calls. It picked up running water and wind.
Music quality and features are great however.

Never got to use them. No where in the Amazon description did it say “ALEXA BUILT IN”. It’s made to listen to you. No thanks. The interconnectivity of Alexa makes me uncomfortable generally. The fact that it’s constantly collecting data on me to profit from later. That’s a massive deal breaker for me personally. Returning it as soon as I saw the box.

Waiting to compare to WF-1000XM3 (Sony’s top-end NC earbuds). Watch for my review in 1-2 weeks.

Update: I discovered accidentally that I was positioning these wrong. The hook rests concave to the back of the ear rather than the point catching on the front of the ear, i.e. they lie diagonally with the bottom forward not aft. No wonder the sound was muffled! To make things stranger, Sony’s own step-by-step illustrated how-to instructions show them being used the *incorrect* way (straight up and down). But third-party photos show them either way.

Why did I buy – to get very portable noise cancelling while listening to audiobooks (which I play at moderate volume). I don’t like hearing crying babies on planes, loud announcements and squealing brakes on city trains and sirens in traffic. I expect to spend many months in South Asia and the honking cars in urban centers everywhere but Gangtok drive me nuts.

Primary purpose success: miserable failure. All it does is help a little bit, maximum 30-40% reduction, and it seems to me to be more by just raising volume of music or voice recording. What’s more it is marginally useful only for steady low-pitched sounds. It is completely useless for everything else that is sudden, intermittent and high-pitched. Maybe it doesn’t work even for medium pitch.

My on-ear Plantronics Pro 2 might actually be better at NC. These are of course a lot more portable. And pretty.

BTW, I even tried Bose on the ear QC25. They were almost as useless. Noise cancelling is hype. *It does not work anything near my expectations*

In addition, while listening with these 800Ns to an audiobook, as I toggle through NC and two alternatives (e.g. ‘ambient’) the device’s female voice is sooo weak I can’t make out what the computer is telling me, w/o straining. If there is an adjustment to raise the alert volume I do not know it. I couldn’t find any such control in the app settings. Only if the audiobook is at a moderately low level of volume can I hear the alerts.

Other negatives…

At 70% charge and with my Motorola G7 Power also charged, even though my phone was in my jacket pocket, BT was working sporadically for a few minutes (passing under some highwires?) Once I even heard a delay in one ear so the stereo was out of synch! These oddities passed. Is this a problem with my phone? Maybe, but when I listened to audio on my phone’s built-in speakers (disconnected) no issue.

Same day playing an audiobook there was no sound. Disconnecting and connecting again solved this. But is this going to be a periodic problem?

Maybe just not using correct eartips, so not a good seal? So I troubleshot with different sizes and manufacturers ear tips. This device came with a package of matching orange silicone tips (X2 XL, X2 L, X2 XS) plus the X2 M on the device. All sounded about the same, though apparently I am a medium.

Real problem arose not being able to hearing much of anything for half an hour, but this could have been due to diluted mururic acid ear canal cleaning last night (kept inside with earplugs). This was really weird because it took moving my jaw unnaturally forward plus opening my mouth to hear anything clear. Chewing gum gave me a bizarre on-almost off like effect.

Not only am I not convinced that NC ever works except in very narrow circumstances, I am skeptical whether any off-the-rack earphone can work in my ears. I wear a hearing aid for tinnitus masking, which of course I remove while using these or any earphone. But even the hearing aid used solo, with its tiny speaker in an open dome, pushed far in my canal via a very narrow cable, I can always improve volume by pulling my ears back or pushing the bottom of the device down, as up changing the angle. So, it seems no earphones or hearing aids actually maneuver my ear canals well.

Positives…

All irrelevant to NC BTW.

COLOUR – case and earphones themselves, easy to identify across the room, construction worker orange!

CASE – magnets keep buds inside

FIT, exterior ear – anchors in ear. Very stable

PRICE – Bought them for half-price used (which presumably means someone opened the box and changed their mind – two flaps were broken. Oh, the horror!)

VOLUME – Adequate. No complaints.

WATER & DUST RESISTANT – not a key feature for me, but even if the 1000XM3 earbuds NC are very much superior, I might keep these for travelling. Another week of field tests will tell. I fear the best model will actually fall out of my ears due to no fins.

Excelente dispositivo, no podría esperar menos de Sony , duración de la batería más que notable, vengo de unos Samsung galaxy buds 1g, y la duración de batería es brutal. Yo busco en los audífonos que pueda utilizar solo 1 lado , y estos si puedo ,solo usar el izquierdo o el derecho ambos cuentan con micrófono . La calidad de audio también es muy buena , cuenta con la certificación EXTRA BASS de Sony. Al igual la certificación IP 55. Tiene notificacion de voz en muchos idiomas, español incluído. Lo que pudiera ser un punto negativo es el tamaño del estuche y los audífonos , son muy grandes , pero no se podría tener mucha batería si fueran pequeños. En conclusión, valen mucho la pena , yo los conseguí en $3200 mxp en el buen fin 2020.

I ordered a first pair that worked out good, my sister wanted earbuds and really enjoyed using them to workout. I decided to order a second one for myself and they had issues with connectivity from the start, they force you to download a Sony app that is super wonky and doesnt provide any help and one of the earbuds just stopped working. I requested a refund to return the earbuds and they accepted but they want me to pay for the shipping cost and also have a charge of “restocking fee” that is anywhere from 5-40% according to the email I got. Don’t waste your money here. What is the point of having prime if you have no guarantees of a safe and easy return?

I’m an earbud geek, probably a product of both working out frequently (running + cycling) and from working at home while wrangling small kids. I’ve primarily used a pair of truly wireless Jaybird Vista earbuds as my favorite blend of good for workouts plus ‘good enough’ for phone calls for the last year… though I also have a pair of Bose wired earbuds (SoundSport), Bowers & Wilkins P13 wired earbuds, plus a few much cheaper off brand pairs that I’ll sometimes grab for phone calls. These Sony WF-SP800N are my new favorite earbuds across the board.

SETUP & SONY APP: Fine — but nothing to write home about. I initially followed the instructions which tells you to open the Sony Headphone app and pair the earbuds there, but while the app saw the earbuds, it gave an error trying to pair them to my phone. Ignoring the instructions and just pairing them the normal way through my phone’s bluetooth setting worked immediately and the connection since has been very strong (no drops, and good consistent connection even when I leave my phone downstairs and go upstairs to grab something). Overall the Sony app is ok; it allows for some sound mix customization and has more features than the Jaybird earbud app, but that’s a low bar (the Jaybird app is truly bad). The one feature in the Sony app is that’s particularly cool is that you can set a baseline amount of ambient noise for different activities: sitting, walking, running, and commute. Since I have young (read: noisy) kids at home, I put the ambient sound control level higher than the usual default for sitting. You do have to enable location detection in order for the earbuds to decide whether you’re sitting/running/etc — or at a location like the gym where you can also specify custom setting by location — so for those with privacy concerns, you might turn off location detection and thus lose those features. One slight knock on these earbuds is that you can pair bluetooth to multiple devices, but you have to manually switch connections so there isn’t a multi-point connection option.

CONTROLS: Mostly very good. I love that the left and right earbuds can be independently set to cover different areas of control, i.e. as an example you can set one earbud to switch between Ambient Sound Control on/off and Noise Cancelling on/off while the other earbud controls music (pause, forward, back, etc). Besides being able to choose separate controls for each earbud, there are also a lot of types of controls you can assign through the app: Ambient Sound Control, Playback Control, Volume Control, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, or none. The only thing that keeps these from being excellent is a personal preference, but it annoys me a bit that the controls are activated by brushing your finger on the earbud’s control area, you don’t actually push a button in. Once in awhile if I adjust my long hair to be out of my face or to pull it back, or am sweaty during exercise and towel off my face, my hands will brush the earbuds and trigger the controls. Not a deal breaker for me since it doesn’t happen often, but it’s one area where I prefer my Jaybird Vistas since they have an actual button you depress to trigger the controls. There are also a couple default controls that I found a little annoying and turned off in the app: example, if you remove an earbud it pauses the music automatically. All of those features are easy to turn on/off in the app though, so overall the flexibility of controls is excellent, with the control sensitivity being the only “un-fixable” annoyance.

SOUND: The sound on these Sony earbuds is excellent overall and fantastic when compared to other truly wireless earbuds. They’re nearly as good as a pair of over-ear Master & Dynamic MW65 earphones we have that are much more expensive ($499). I don’t think any wireless earbuds can truly best over-ear headphones, but these come close. I thought the sound on my Jaybird Vistas was very good, but the Sonys have a better sound blend and also enable you to simply hear better because of the Ambient & Noise Cancelling features (neither of which the Jaybird Vistas have). The Noise Cancelling is excellent for earbuds, but it isn’t perfect; if you’re frequently on an airplane and want super strong noise cancelling, then I’d recommend some other options for over-ear headphones (or some of the wired earbuds like Bowers & Wilkins PI3 which is a similar price point to these Sonys; the noise cancelling is better on the B&W, but they have heavy cord controls and don’t work at all for exercise). For wireless earbuds that pair functionality with overall excellent sound, the Sonys are the best I’ve come across. Phone calls also have very good sound, and I’ve had zero issues with dropped calls so far.

COMFORT & BATTERY: I love the fit of these. My ears do best with earfins, which Jaybird Vista also has. This might not be for everyone, but it’s the only type I’ve found that will stay flawlessly in my ears during sweaty workouts. These are a bit bigger in size than my Jaybirds but feel light and comfortable in my ears, and stayed in fine even during intense workouts running outside and on our Peloton. The battery is also very good. In theory the earbuds have 9 hours of playback with noise cancelling on and 13 without — mine didn’t last quite that long, which is understandable since I was frequently using the music controls, but I got close to 8 hours with noise cancelling on. The case provides another full charge worth of battery life. The case itself is frankly not amazing. It’s bulky, considerably larger than the jaybird vista case, and is a weird oblong shape that doesn’t fit comfortably in any sort of pocket.

OVERALL: In any one category (noise cancelling, sound, battery life) you could probably find another brand that performs a bit better in that single category. But for truly wireless earbuds that are utility players across all the categories, these are my favorite by far. I find myself reaching for these for multi-hour Zoom work sessions as well as tough workouts or just around the house while I do chores. Great overall functionality and a nice value at the price point.