The Sony WF-C710N truly wireless earbuds are one of the best pairs around at $120, offering all of the best features, such as noise canceling.

Released last year as the sequel to the Sony WF-C700N, despite their poor name, the WF-C710N offer a similar design, but with refined performance at a mid-range price.

Unboxing & design

The all paper and card packaging houses the earbuds case, with the earbuds inside, a very short USB-A to USB-C cable, large and small ear tips (medium tips are already installed on the earbuds), manuals and other documents.

Our review unit is Glass Blue, which with its semi-transparent case and earbuds design, offers a stand-out, unique looks. The earbuds also come in black, pink and white, but none of these pairs are transparent, like the blue.

Image Credit: Sony

The earbuds themselves are a circular design, as opposed to the popular stem-design seen on the likes of Apple AirPods. I personally use the non-Pro AirPods 4, as I find the in-ear tips can become uncomfortable after a while. This slight discomfort remains true with these earbuds, but your mileage may vary.

The color-matched charging case has a USB-C port and Bluetooth pairing button on the back. The case is significantly larger than my AirPods 4 case in two dimensions, but its cylindrical pill shape and light weight form factor enables the case to be slipped discreetly into a pocket alongside a wallet or phone.

The WF-C710N are IPX4 rated, which will protect the earbuds from water splashes from any direction. The charging case is not water resistant.

Pairing, setup & features

The WF-C710N were quick to pair and setup with both my iPhone and MacBook. They use Bluetooth 5.3 and support a bunch of smart features to ease connection, including Multipoint Connection. I paired to my second device via Sony’s Sound Connect app, which put the earbuds back into pairing mode and connected with my laptop right away as expected. With Multipoint, the earbuds automatically switch to the device actively playing media. Each earbud is independently connected to your device, which means you can use either one earbud on its own.

The earbuds also support Google Fast Pair and Microsoft Swift Pair, for one-touch Bluetooth pairing with compatible Android and Windows devices. The addition of Fast Pair also enables Android users to quickly find missing earbuds, by showing the last connected location.

Additionally, the WF-C710N feature Quick Access, with support for Spotify Tap and Amazon Music Play Now. These features enable one-touch music from your preferred streaming service, enabling you to quickly play what the platform thinks you’ll want.

Finally, the earbuds also feature 360 Reality Audio and 360 Spatial Sound Personalizer. This feature scans your unique ear shape to bring you immersive audio on supported apps and devices, such as Sony BRAVIA TVs.

Image Credit: Sony

Sony Sound Connect app

Shortly after pairing and opening Sony Sound Connect, the app instantly recognized the earbuds and identified an update. The firmware update just took a couple of minutes to download and install to the earbuds.

Once fully up and running, the top of the app displays the battery percentage of each bud and the case. Next up is the ‘Ambient Sound Control’ (more on that later) and the equalizer. There are dozens of presets or a custom 5-band EQ to dial in the exact sound you’re after. There’s ‘Adaptive Sound Control’, which switches listening modes automatically, based on your actions and location.

‘Adaptive Sound Control’ is followed by multipoint controls and ‘Bluetooth Connection Quality’, which lets you switch between a prioritization on sound quality or a stable connection. The rest of the controls are buried away under ‘Device settings’, including Find Your Equalizer, DSEE, 360 Reality Audio Setup, Quick Access setup, touch controls customization, auto play/pause/power settings, and more.

Sound quality & noise canceling

Sound on the WF-C710N is powered by the internal 5mm drivers and, when enabled, Sony’s Digital Sound Enhancement Engine (DSEE) which processes and enhances compressed audio.

Thanks to their in-ear design, the Sony WF-C710N get louder and overall sound better than my AirPods. At full volume, they are plenty loud enough and suffer with no distortion, but are perhaps a little lacking in the low-end. This can be more than made up for using the app’s equalizer and Clear Bass feature.

The earbuds feature Advance Noise Canceling and Dual Noise Sensor technology. You can quickly and easily switch between ‘Noise Canceling’, ‘Ambient Sound’ and ‘Off’ in the app, plus customize the sound further. Noise canceling is very effective in an office environment or while walking along a busy street.

Image Credit: Sony

Ambient sounds mode uses the dual microphones to pick up surroundings and help you stay aware of your environment. In the app, you can dial in noise canceling between 1 and 20. Additionally, ‘Voice passthrough’ mode filters in voices. The feature is okay to use when necessary, but at full whack (level 20) sounds a little too amplified and unnatural.

The in-ear tips provide a decent amount of passive noise cancellation on their own. Meaning you can happily switch the noise canceling off entirely to preserve battery life, while still shutting out most of the world around you, especially in quieter environments.

The earbuds also support Sony’s voice pickup technology, which uses AI to enhance your voice during calls.

Touch & voice controls

The earbuds feature tap controls, which can be customized in the app. The left or right earbud can be toggled between ‘Ambient Sound Control/Quick Access’, ‘Playback Control’ or nothing. By default, the left is toggled to control ambient sound and quick access, while the right is toggled to playback control. With playback control, a single tap, double tap, triple tap and long press will play/pause, next track, previous track, or launch the voice assistant (Siri on Apple devices or Gemini on Android) respectively. ‘Continous Volume Control’ uses four or more taps on either side to raise or lower the volume.

It can take a while to remember which bud does what, but after a bit of practice, it becomes fairly intuitive. Personally I prefer the method of control popular on stem-style earbuds, where squeezing the stalk is used for control.

Battery life

Battery life is another win for the WF-C710N! With noise canceling enabled, they last 8.5 hours of music playback on a single charge, with 21.5 additional hours in the case for a total of 30 hours of playback. Switching off noise canceling will give you a whopping 12 hours on a single charge, 28 hours in the case, for a total of 40 hours of listening. The earbuds also feature quicking charging, which will top them up by one hour in just five minutes.

Pricing & availability

The Sony WF-C710N in black are currently $119.99 on Amazon, but now that they’ve been out a little while, they can frequently be found on sale for under $100, with their lowest ever price on Amazon seen at $78, so keep an eye out for these on the next big sale.

Please note, these earbuds were sent to us for review. No money has exchanged hands for our opinions on the headphones, but we may earn a commission for sales generated via the Amazon links above.