All products featured are independently chosen by us. However, SoundGuys may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links. See our ethics statement.
The Sony WH-1000XM6 fixes Reddit's biggest complaint about the XM5
May 18, 2025
The WH-1000XM6 is here, and while it doesn’t look wildly different from its predecessor, Sony quietly made one crucial change that headphone forums and Reddit threads have been howling about for years: the notoriously fragile hinge.
A reinforced response
If you were one of the many burned by the brittle hinges on the WH-1000XM5, take a sigh of relief. The XM6 introduces a redesigned folding mechanism with a metal hinge embedded in the plastic housing. This change directly addresses the widespread structural failures I covered in my earlier piece—failures repeatedly seen in user reports and teardown threads.
And it wasn’t just anecdotal. In a SoundGuys poll with over 2,200 responses, 25% of users said their XM5’s hinge broke, while another 12% reported multiple issues, including hinge failure. That means more than a third of respondents had firsthand experience with this design flaw.
Sony added a metal hinge between the plastic housing. But by reintroducing foldability, the XM6 also adds more potential points of failure.
On paper, the XM6’s reworked structure offers a promising solution: better support where the earcups swivel and fold, a notorious breaking point on the XM5s. And after two weeks of heavy daily use—tossing them in bags and handling them carelessly on purpose—the XM6 has held up very well.
The XM6 also reintroduces the fold-in design that was last seen on the XM4. Unlike the XM5, which could only rotate flat, the XM6 collapses inward for more compact storage. That’s great for portability, but it also introduces more moving parts and, potentially, new points of failure. It’s a trade-off that only time will judge. Still, my early impressions suggest the hinge reinforcement balances the risk.
The comfort caveat
While Sony gave the hinge a makeover, the earcups remain stubbornly shallow with disappointingly thin padding. In fact, our brand-new XM6s look nearly identical in cushion thickness to our three-year-old XM5s. If your ears are on the larger side, don’t expect much wiggle room. And to make matters worse, the ANC driver inside the cup protrudes from the mesh fabric, so you might brush up against that.
This is the same comfort complaint that plagued the XM5—and for long listening sessions, it’s still a sore spot (literally). Sony’s reluctance to improve long-term wearability for a $450 pair of headphones is puzzling. Competitors like Bose still have the edge when it comes to plushness and fit.
We’ll need more time—and more broken pairs—to say definitively whether the XM6 has finally buried the hinge curse. But based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s clear Sony listened to the backlash and responded with a meaningful design tweak. That alone makes the XM6 a better long-term bet than the XM5.
