Sony WF-C500 review: If on a budget, these are music to your ears

There is no stem and Sony has opted for physical buttons that need to be pressed to initiate commands. While some might like this over gesture-based inputs, I am not a fan. Pressing the buttons pushes the earbuds further inside, causing discomfort. 

You also need to get used to the controls that are exclusive to each earbud. Despite using the earbuds for a week, I did mess up and pressed the wrong button for various commands. For instance, you can increase the volume or receive a call by pressing the button once on the left earbud. To lower the volume or reject a call, keep it pressed for a couple of seconds. The right earbud’s button can be used to play or pause music or answer a call. Pressing it twice will switch to the next song. To go back to the previous song, you need to press the right earbud’s button thrice. The earbuds do support invoking voice assistants, which can be done by long-pressing the right earbud’s button for a few seconds.

Awkwardly, Sony is not giving users the choice to customise the inputs, despite having app support. Users can download the Sony Headphones app from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. The app lets you switch between 8 sound presets like Bass Boost, Speech, Treble Boost, Vocal, Relaxed, Excited, Mellow, etc. In addition to this, users also get the option to customise the sound in the app, which as per my knowledge, others in the price range do not offer. I found myself using the Bass Boost and Excited presets, which provided that slightly extra oomph over other presets.

While we are at the sound bit, listening to music on the Sony WF-C500 was a nice experience. The audio quality is sharp and clear and as mentioned, there’s enough bass to enjoy tracks like Dynamite by Taio Cruz, You by Regard, Troy Sivan and Tae MacRae, or Hairat by Lucky Ali. Compared to Nothing Ear 1 (Review), the bass is slightly lower. However, the vocals sounded better on the Sony TWS. I also used the earbuds while binge-watching All of Us Dead for my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra first impressions. The earbuds also come with Sony’s DSEE (Digital Sound Enhancement Engine) technology which restores high-frequency sound that was compressed by an app. In addition to this, there’s support for 360 Reality Audio that aims to offer a surround sound experience. However, the feature is currently available on a limited number of apps.

Coming to the battery life, the Sony WF-C500 is claimed to offer up to 20 hours of battery life with the charging case. The earbuds themselves run up to 4 hours straight on a full charge. You can also quickly charge the earbuds for 10 minutes to get an hour's worth of playtime. The charging case shows an orange light when the earbuds are being charged. Oh, before I forget, the charging case too is made out of plastic. The lid has this translucent design that lets you see the charging light. I could not open the case single-handedly and even if you manage to do that, removing the earbuds will certainly require you to use both your hands. That’s because the earbuds are snuggly placed inside the case. This one time when the case slipped out of my hand while trying to open it single-handedly, the earbuds did not come out of the case. Surprisingly, the case did not break or scratch either. 

There are a few downsides though. There Is no Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) or Transparency mode support on the earbuds. The in-ear fit could help in cancelling out ambient noise but having something like a Transparency mode could have helped. As an alternative, the Sony WF-C500 does offer single earbud usage, which means that you can simply remove one earbud from your ear and listen to someone. There is no automatic wear detection either, which means that the earbuds will continue playing music even after you have removed them. Therefore, if you think that the missing features, although minor but convenient do not hamper your use case, the Sony WF-C500 can certainly be considered for purchase.