Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless Review: A Silent Hit

You see the same suspects whenever there’s a discussion of over-ear wireless headphones with noise canceling. People mention Sony WH-1000XM5 (orthodox want XM4), AirPods Max, and Bose QuietComfort (Ultra). 

If you face the same dilemma, I recommend you try Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless. It’s an underrated pair of headphones that deserves to be on the same list. And it usually costs just $250, which is extremely competitive with other options.

What’s great about them? Sound, comfort and battery life, more or less in that order. 

The sound is fantastic. It’d be fair to say they helped me reignite my love of music (along with a more conscious approach to using Spotify). I truly enjoy listening to music in Momentum 4.

Previously, I used Bose QC 35ii in airplanes or when it’s cold outside, but I never loved how they sounded too much. Sennheiser, on the other hand, knows how to tune their products. 

Momentum 4 are very comfortable and made of good-quality plastic. They are much lighter than AirPods Max and feel sturdier than Sony. There’s a power and Bluetooth button, and the rest you control through a flat touch-sensitive panel on the right. 

Noise-canceling is OK. Is it mind-blowing? No. You can get better results from Bose, AirPods Max, and maybe even Sony. But to me, it’s more than enough. What’s the point of best-in-class noise canceling if you don’t want to wear your headphones? And these I actually want to wear. 

On a related note, their transparency mode is worse than AirPods Pro or Max could do, but it doesn’t sound too artificial or metallic. For some reason, it can pick up and slightly amplify sounds you wouldn’t notice ordinarily, like running water or rustling plastic bags. You can adjust the headphones between full noise canceling and full transparency on a linear scale. I find them to sound the most natural exactly in the middle of it. 

But the microphones on Momentum 4 are great for phone calls. They reliably pick up your voice and isolate external noises, particularly wind, very well. 

Bluetooth Multipoint has come a long way, so they can reliably connect to two devices simultaneously. Stop podcast on your phone and click Play on that YouTube video on your laptop and it will just start without issues. My only gripe is that Bose could remember more devices, and you’d switch them in the app and tell it which ones should be active. Momentum 4 may jump connections between all the devices in the range they remember, so it is better to unpair them altogether if you don’t want them to suddenly engage your iPad.

Except for that thing, their iOS app is very good. You can adjust the equalizer and they remember the transparency setting. My old Bose QC 35 had an extremely bad app and software in general, for instance, turning them on required three button presses, because they’d always start with NC at max be default.

Momentum 4 Wireless can last up to 60 hours on a single charge, beating all the competitors we’ve been talking about. You don’t even think about charging them; one day, you just notice a low battery level and reluctantly connect a cable. 

They have autopause, which is nice when you want to quickly take them off when meeting somebody. On several occasions, I’d notice that they continued playing, but it seems to be a rare miss. 

There are a few things I dislike about Momentum 4.

First, I sometimes don’t understand if they’re on or off. Even the quick chirps they produce when you power them sound too similar. To turn them on or off, you have to push that button for a few seconds; I wish it happened faster. 

Second, I don’t have a problem with the touch-sensitive panel per se, but I wish there was a way to disable certain gestures. There are so many of them, and I don’t need most. There’s one to adjust transparency that I somehow trigger from time to time and only notice that it shifted a bit later. 

If you want to learn more, here’s the video that convinced me.