After a year at home with screaming toddlers and inconsiderate roommates, noise-canceling earbuds are a hot commodity in 2021. And if you could get a single pair for working, exercising, taking Zoom calls, and listening to Taylor Swift’s “Cardigan,” you’d want it, right?

The AirPods Pro (8/10, WIRED Recommends) and Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro (9/10, WIRED Recommends) have filled this niche pretty nicely for the past year. But the team at Sony—which makes some of our favorite over-ear noise-canceling headphones—has finally updated its two-year-old WF-1000XM3 earbuds to the M4 (“Mark 4”) version.

The new buds are a total redesign of the Mark 3, and they sound better, cancel noise better, and pick up your voice better than the last pair. They’re exceptionally good. I’d say they were the best for everyone if it weren’t for one glaring problem: They’re too big for many ears.

Sony recently updated its design. The new buds come in a compact charging case and are rounded to fit entirely inside your ear, rather than using the “mostly in, but with a bit hanging out” style that it used on the Mark 3 version.

The new model looks sleeker and more like buds from Jabra, Samsung, and others, but it means that all the bells and whistles inside the buds have to fit into your ears too. Sony’s team didn’t have the best shrink ray. These are the biggest in-ear buds I’ve tested in a long time.

They barely fit in my medium-size ears. That said, they didn’t cause as much fatigue as I thought they would. But getting them to properly seal in my ears took longer than with other buds. Fellow product reviewer Adrienne So never could get them to fit well, and neither could my fiancée. I imagine many others will struggle.

They’re also heavy—nearly 2 grams heavier per bud than the AirPods Pro. However, the larger size and weight does mean that they have an AirPods Pro-doubling eight hours of battery life with noise canceling on, and 12 with it off. Qi wireless charging is built into the case, which also quick-charges via USB-C.

If you have medium or large ears, many of my critiques don’t apply. They barely apply to me; I’m routinely able to get a good seal after 30 seconds or so of maneuvering the foam ear tips. That's longer than most competitors, but not annoyingly so. They also come in three sizes, if you’ve got big ears but a different-sized ear canal.

The noise canceling itself is second to none, thanks to Sony’s excellent signal processing and the included foam ear tips, which mold to your ears for a perfect fit as soon as you put them in. The silence is deafening; this is one of the first times that I actually had to turn on hear-through functionality (which pipes in sound from outside, via the headphones’ mics) to hear people talk when music wasn’t even playing.

They’re basically earplugs on 21st-century steroids. Put them in and turn on tunes, and the entire world disappears. My hair covers up the headphones when I'm wearing them, and frequently my fiancée would talk to me while I was wandering around the house, only to have me brush past her and miss every word.

Lower-frequency sounds like HVAC and jet engines still bleed through, as they do to some extent on all noise-canceling headphones. But those sounds are significantly reduced in volume, transformed to a whisper when music or a podcast is playing.

The headphones are extremely easy to pair and set up to your liking, thanks to quick pairing functionality for both Android and Windows, and normal (that is to say: very fast, but not instant) pairing with iOS. The Sony Headphones app allows you to adjust EQ, change from noise canceling to ambient sound mode, and to turn on the headphones’ talk-to-pause feature, which listens to your voice and pauses the music so you can hear what the person you’re talking to is saying.

It’s all very simple and easy in the app, but I dislike the touch controls. A long touch on the outside of each earbud is supposed to turn ambient sound mode on or off, but half the time I tried to do this it just paused my music. Longer hair (especially if it’s wet from a workout) has a tendency to trigger the touch controls too. I wish they’d just used a physical button.

The vocal mics are serviceable for calls and Zoom meetings, but I wouldn’t call them insane quality. They do feature IPX4 water resistance, but they’re too bulky for me on runs. I used them when lifting weights at home, and they worked just fine.

The WF-1000XM4 actually bear a striking sonic resemblance to their over-ear brothers, the WH-1000XM4 (yes, Sony product naming is this horrific). The earbuds have a robust low end but actually not much sub-bass to overwhelm the drivers, a peak in the high mids, and then a dip in the highs.

I actually like adding back a little high end to the headphones in the EQ section of the app, especially for already dark jazz recordings like Ahmad Jamal’s Live at the Pershing. When applied to pop vocals like Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” the natural dip in the high end helps with that early-2000s harshness you sometimes hear in her voice at higher volumes.

Regardless what you’re listening to, the XM4 are remarkably clean and flat in-ears, like many of Sony's audio products. These rank among the best-sounding wireless earbuds today, easily as good as models from more bespoke brands like Bowers & Wilkins and Cambridge Audio.

Sony’s new flagship wireless earbuds sound fantastic. They cut outside noise better than all competitors, and they have enough battery life for a cross-country flight. But at the end of the day, they just don’t work well for anyone with smaller ears. That’s a shockingly large number of people who ask me about earbuds, and enough that I can't justify a higher rating.

For bigger ears, the WF-1000XM4 are the best noise-canceling option on the market. But for others, the AirPods Pro or Galaxy Buds will probably be a better fit.