While the audio quality is massively impressive, Sony's touch sensor for music control is a mixed bag.
You use the right earcup for all your music playback control. Drag your finger up and it increases the volume; drag it down and it decreases the volume. Dragging forward skips a track, and dragging backward goes back a track.
That all seems fairly straightforward and mostly works. It's the tap to play/pause that posed significant problems during our review. In order to actually start or stop playback, I would need to tap the headphones three to four times, with increasing levels of frustration.
Regardless of where I tapped, or the strength with which I pressed the touch panel, problem persisted. Overall, the performance of the touch controls was a bit disappointing.
What's more, if you do decide to plug in the headphone cable for a wired experience, the touch controls stop working completely, meaning you have to use your phone or laptop to control all aspects of your music experience. There are no in-line remote buttons on the supplied cable, and the touch panel just seems a bit unnecessary for such a high-end device.
It's not all bad though. Sony's "Quick Attention" mode, which lets you quickly mute music and hear your surroundings clearly by placing a flat palm across the right earcup, works incredibly well and is useful for those moments when you need to make an order on a flight or want to hear what the train guard is saying about your delayed train.
The other area where the Sony headphones didn't really deliver was in call quality. While the active noise cancellation is fantastic for music playback; for voice calls, the results were disappointing for people on the other end of the line.
People I spoke to on the phone using the 1000XM2 repeatedly struggled to hear me, with my voice seemingly mixed in with all the ambient noise equally. Given the strength in noise isolation for music, this seems like an oversight.
From a full charge, you can get about 30 hours of music playback from the 1000XM2 headphones, which is going to be good enough for almost any international flight schedule. It does take about four hours to get that full charge though, which can feel like an age when you just want to listen to music.
The upside is that 10 minutes on the charger will give you a little bit more than an hour's worth of music playback, so you can get the fix you need in an emergency.
You do need to be careful though because unlike the Plantronics BackBeat 505 and other Bluetooth headphones, the Sony headphones won't turn off if you take them off and leave them on your desk when they're paired to a device.