Sony Inzone H9 review – TrustedReviews

The Sony Inzone H9 is a good gaming headset, albeit quite expensive. Its sound is pretty good, but not as crisp as the mid-range Inzone H7. The addition of ANC does a good job of blocking out most noise, although it doesn’t do so as powerfully as similarly priced headphones. They look sleek, which is a plus, and the battery life lasts for days.

Introduction

Sony’s all-new Inzone line of headphones is arguably one of the most exciting releases of peripherals in 2022, and the Sony Inzone H9 is the brand’s new top-of-the-line model.

Priced at £269/$299, they’re not cheap, but feature a sleek design, great sound and the ANC powers that usually adorn headphones more than a gaming headset.

Is all of this enough to propel the Inzone H9 to the top of our list of best gaming headsets? Here are my thoughts.

Design and features

• Sleek PlayStation-inspired design
• Ridiculously comfortable
• Excellent compatibility and connectivity

The design isn’t too different from the Inzone H7 headphones I’ve reviewed before. The H9 is particularly sleek with a PS5-inspired aesthetic with smooth plastic ear cups that notably feature tiny cutouts for ANC-enabled microphones. The earcups themselves don’t feel hollow and provide a durable frame.

Comparisons to Sony’s flagship WH-1000XM5 are inevitable, especially given the similarity in price between the two devices, and there’s a bit of crossover between the pair given the clickable headband adjustment slider and the design of the headband that they both seek to present.

There is a noticeable difference between this more premium Inzone headset and the middle child H7 when it comes to the material used on the ear cups. Instead of sticking with the ultra-comfortable cloth finish, the H9 uses smooth leather instead, which I found comfortable around the head and ears, especially on the ear cups.

There is a good level of padding to provide support and a cushiony feel, but I found the fabric ones to be a bit more comfortable. The leather ear cups also offer a good level of passive noise isolation, and it’s up there with some of the best I’ve felt on a gaming headset.

Weighing in at 330g, the Inzone H9 didn’t feel too heavy on my head and, unlike Turtle Beach’s Stealth 700 Gen 2 Max, didn’t feel restrictive or offer a ridiculous level of clamping force. around my skull.

The media controls offer thoughtful placement on both earbuds, instead of loading everything to one side. On the right side there are buttons for the game/chat mixer, Bluetooth and power, while on the left you’ll find a tactile volume dial, as well as a button to switch between ANC and Ambient modes. All the buttons are tactile and it’s nice to feel something so simple and effective unlike the range of indistinguishable buttons and dials that appear all over the competition.

The Sony Inzone H9 works with both PS5 and PC and can connect via Bluetooth or the included 2.4GHz receiver. You can even connect them to a phone if you want, or any other Bluetooth-enabled device. Connectivity was solid both ways, although Bluetooth offered slightly better audio quality for the price of higher latency. The lack of any means of wired connectivity is a bit of a shame though, especially given the high markup these cans have.

The 32 hours of battery life is roughly equivalent to high-end gaming headsets these days, and in testing the Inzone H9 managed between 30 and 32 hours before I needed power. reach for a USB-C cable to charge it again. That’s not as good of endurance as the H7’s 40 hours, but still more than serviceable, especially considering the added drain of active noise cancellation.

Audio and microphone quality

• Pleasant audio with a decent soundstage
• ANC does a decent job of blocking out noise
• Software is as tricky as before

On the audio front with the H9, the mix is ​​heaviest in the mids and high-ends, and at times the low-end can feel a bit drowned out, as evidenced by a listen to Rush’s Roll The Bones. That being said, the low end is definitely there and the H9 can actually deliver lower frequencies than most other headphones, going as low as 5KHz. While it’s not something humans can necessarily hear, it’s nice to have so the H9 can show off its lower end a bit more. Nevertheless, they allow a pleasant listening.

There’s also a good sense of placement and a fairly decent soundstage with the Sony Inzone H9, although in some tracks there was some overlap between instruments and vocals. The vocals themselves, like on James Taylor’s Line ‘Em Up, were delivered clearly with good precision, which was also a big help in a few passages of Sniper Elite V, where locating the enemies for a smooth withdrawal.

ANC is nice to have and does a decent job of blocking out noise, although it’s not up to par with similarly priced headphones with the dedicated feature, like my own personal Bose Noise Canceling 700, which did a much better job of dulling the sound of my fan breaking down, for example.

At blocking out most noise the Sony did a good job and with the music down to half volume, keyboard and fan sounds, as well as people talking in the garden, were mostly blocked out. Ambient mode, which can be activated via a small button on the left earcup, sounds relatively clear and natural, if a bit compressed at times.

Just like with the Inzone H7, the high-end H9 uses Sony’s Inzone hub, which turned out to suffer from the same problematic ailment of refusing to work on my Windows 11 home PC. After much fiddling, it worked in Windows 10, and I was greeted with a relatively clean user interface that offers the ability to play with the headset until my heart is content.

There are options to play around with the EQ, as well as turn ANC on and off and change the strength of Ambient Mode, as well as enable 360 ​​Spatial Audio on PC, which itself also helped improve placement and immersion while listening. There’s also a handy feature that lets you set up an auto-shutdown feature after a period of inactivity if you happen to lift the sticks and leave your desk while the H9 is still on.

The microphone on offer sounds like the H7, offering reasonable clarity, although it lacks a bit of body compared to some other boom mics I’ve recently tested in headsets. Much like the headset itself, the Inzone H9’s cleverly designed flip-to-mute mic does a good job of blocking out at least some of the ambient noise presented to it.

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