Another excellent budget true wireless

Verdict

Another excellent budget true wireless pair from Sony that ticks most of the boxes. They’re comfortable to wear, the battery lasts for a long time, they sound mature and well-balanced for the price, and the Ambient Sound feature works well. For the price, there’s not much I’d criticise aside from the call quality.

Introduction

Whatever your budget, Sony has headphones for you. If you’re after a premium true wireless, there’s the WF-1000XM5, but if you’re on a smaller budget, there’s the WF-C510 to consider.

These headphones swerve noise-cancellation but for the price that’s probably a good thing as cheap noise-cancelling buds often lack the performance required for true ANC.

And so Sony WF-C510 puts its focus on value, packing features into its tiny form for the reasonable price of £55. Given the success of the award-winning WF-C500, along with Sony’s less expensive WH-CH520 and WH-CH720N, it’s not too unreasonable to expect Sony to knock this one out of the park too.

Design

• Physical controls
• IPX4 rated
• Multiple colour options

There’s nothing fancy about the WF-C510 when it comes to looks. Simple and functional, the WF-C510 feature tactile physical controls which I much prefer over touch controls for cheaper true wireless.

They’re easy to operate – the right earbud is for control over music and native voice assistant, while the left is for activating the Ambient Sound function. I especially like the function where by pressing the button repeatedly, you raise or lower the volume. It’s a smart way of integrating a feature often left out of the default buttons and, like the other presses, responds well to touch.

The headphones are undeniably plastic but they’re smart-looking enough, smarter than I’d say the WF-C500 looked. They come in a range of colours – blue, yellow, white, black –matching the colours of Sony’s Xperia 10 VI smartphone.

They’re lightweight and fit comfortably into my ears, the seal is a very snug one that stops the majority of external noises from filtering through. The quality of the fit and its noise-isolating properties is another reason why noise-cancelling isn’t needed for these earbuds.

If you do find the fit not to your liking, then there are small and large ear-tips to switch to, but I haven’t found the need to change. They sit comfortably without fatigue setting in.

An IPX4 rating protects them from splashes of water and sweat, so they could double up as a pair of workouts. The charging case is compact and slim, and should easily fit into even a tight jeans pocket. There’s an LED to show how much charge is left in the case on the front, while around the back is a USB-C input and a button for activating Bluetooth pairing.

Features

• Ambient Sound mode
• Bluetooth multi-point
• Sound Connect app

There’s no noise-cancelling which some may fault as an omission but I don’t think it’s a big miss. What is new is the Ambient Sound mode and I think this has the biggest impact.

The noise isolating design is almost as good as noise cancelling when I used the WF-C510 on the Underground, blocking out most sounds, and making it easy to hear music over the din of the Tube. The Ambient Sound mode offers the means to hear what’s around you, and I found its performance loud and clear. It’s easy to catch announcements and get a better sense of what’s around you, and for the most part, it avoids sounding noisy, putting in a natural-sounding performance. It’s very good for what you’re paying for.

The rest of the features come thick and fast. Bluetooth support is the 5.3 specification, which has proved itself reliable aside from a few jitters walking through Paddington and Victoria stations. Codec support is SBC and AAC – there’s no high quality LDAC version supported but that’s no big miss here. If you wanted to listen to Tidal and Qobuz in higher quality, you’d trade up for one of Sony’s more premium earbuds.

Bluetooth multi-point support means you can connect the WF-C510 to two devices simultaneously. Google Fast Pair and Microsoft Swift Pair are also onboard to make quick connections with Android and Windows devices respectively.

There’s 360 Reality Audio support that provides three-dimensional sound with supported streaming services such as Amazon Music. Sony’s 360 Sound Spatial Personalizer customises the sound to your ears, and when the C510 is paired with a Bravia TV, you can experience your own personal soundfield. Sony’s DSEE is supported, restoring detail to audio from compressed sources, in particular the high frequencies.

There’s a new companion app – or really the same app with a new look – as the Headphones Connect has been replaced by Sound Connect, which now covers not just headphones but Sony’s wireless speakers.

The feature set remains the same from checking battery life levels to EQ adjustments, control over music playback to customising button functions and controlling the levels of environmental sound with the Ambient Sound Control feature – but the app has a neater look with features nestled away in tabs and the main features available on the home page.

It hasn’t made updates quicker (which still seem to fail for no reason) and arguably it’d have been interesting if Sony considered adding music streaming services to the app like Sonos, JBL, and Bowers & Wilkins have done with theirs.

Sony claims 11 hours per charge, and 22 in total with the charging case, which is slightly longer in both cases than the WF-C500. In my tests the battery life was around the same as the previous model. The C510 were still 100% after three hours of listening at 50% volume, but putting them in the charging case saw them recover 30% charge, so 10 hours appears to be the standard.

You’ve got fast charging that provides an extra 60 minutes from a five-minute charge, but if you’re looking for wireless charging (and to be honest, I don’t think you should be), the WF-C510 doesn’t support it.

The worst aspect of the Sony WF-C510’s performance? The call quality. These earphones do a bad job of protecting your voice with microphones that let all the sounds around me in. The person on the other complained it never sounded as loud with other earphones, and on my side, the headphones picked up wind noise, which is distracting in its own way.

Sound Quality

• Balanced sound
• Spacious soundstage
• Good bass performance

In Henry St Leger’s review of the WF-C500 for this site, he described the headphones as doing a great job within their limitations and that’s a great way to describe the performance of the WF-C510.

You’d never expect the levels of detail and fidelity as the WF-1000XM5, but in a way they share some similarities. They both take a balanced approach to music, and both favour a naturalistic tone. They’re rich and crisp with a slight sense of warmth, but no one part of the frequency range encroaches on the other. There are areas where they could be better, but the WF-C510 are a mature-sounding true wireless pair for what they cost.

They’re not the most dynamic-sounding pair, it should be said, nor do they provide much energy to tracks. Tracks like Overseer’s Supermoves have a slightly relaxed performance where they need more punch and drive. The WF-C510 aren’t in a hurry to get anywhere particularly fast.

But Sony has taken on criticism about the low frequencies, which – at least to me – seem much more evident than on the WF-C500. Ludovico Einaudi’s Twice Reimagined and Julian Lage’s Echo are underpinned by a firm, weighty sense of bass; while The Smiths’ How Soon Is Now has a decent sense of punch in the low frequencies.

If you’re a bass hound this performance won’t be enough but there’s now more than just a hint of bass, there’s actual presence in tracks.

Midrange detail and clarity is good, and vocals are faithfully and naturally reproduced for a pair of true wireless at this price point; enclosed in a space of their own in the middle of the soundstage. Instruments aren’t the sharpest or most defined, but you can tell one from another, the tone of instruments comes through clearly.

High frequencies also come through clearly enough but they lack brightness in a tracks such as GoGo Penguin’s Erased by Sunlight or Shuggie Otis Strawberry Letter 23. There also lack much variation in tone but that’s a shortfall that I can accept for the money.

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