Sony Inzone H9 Review: Noise Cancelling Gaming Headset

Flag-bearer of Sony's Inzone gaming range, the H9 is a wireless PC and PS5 headset that sets out to do everything — noise cancellation, spatial audio and more — even if it does not always do everything perfectly. This review is based on the published test of the INZONE H9, not on a hands-on trial of our own.

The H9 is the spearhead of the headset range Sony introduced in summer 2022 under its then-new Inzone sub-brand. Aimed at PlayStation 5 owners and, above all, at PC players, it shares some family traits with the firm's flagship travel headphones, the WH-1000XM5 — including that model's emblematic feature, active noise cancellation. That ANC is precisely what separates the H9 from its smaller siblings, the H7 and H3, which both go without it. On top of this, the H9 touts Sony's 360 Spatial Sound technology (available only on PC), a virtual-surround treatment that adapts to the specific shape and acoustic behaviour of your own ears to create as natural and precise a sense of envelopment as possible. Its full model name is WH-G900N, and it launched officially on 28 June 2022.

The H9 openly claims to be a Sony Electronics product rather than a PlayStation one, yet it is hard to miss its striking resemblance to the Pulse 3D, the PS5's "official" wireless headset — in its white-and-black colouring, its plastic outer dress and its assembly. The first two prompt no complaint; the last is more troubling, with visible plastic weld lines along the top of the headband that will hopefully not become weak points over the months and years. The earcup and headband cushions make a far better impression, covered in the same seemingly irreproachable synthetic leather used on the WH-1000XM5 — though it is a pity they are not removable. The headset does not fold beyond rotating its earcups flat, and comes with its USB wireless adapter and a 1.5 m USB-A to USB-C charging cable; Sony does not include any case or pouch.

Despite a silhouette reminiscent of bulky ear defenders, the H9's weight is fairly contained: its 330 g is ordinary for a wireless gaming headset, if slightly above the 250-270 g norm of nomad Bluetooth headphones. None of that mass is felt on the top of the head, thanks to a wide headband with generously thick padding. The circumaural cushions are extremely wide and deep and cope effortlessly with large heads and large ears, helped by very generous headband travel — if anything, it is smaller heads that may occasionally find such a colossus a little awkward. Most people could wear it comfortably for many hours, with one small but real caveat: the synthetic leather has a marked tendency to trap heat, which can become genuinely unpleasant in hot weather.

Like many recent wireless gaming headsets, the H9 dispenses entirely with wired connectivity — a regrettable choice that limits its versatility. The good news is a double wireless arrangement: proprietary radio through the USB adapter (compatible with PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, and a docked Nintendo Switch) plus Bluetooth — and the two can run simultaneously, mixing both signals in the headset. You can, for instance, take game audio from a PS5 over the dongle while connected by Bluetooth to a phone for Discord or any other voice-chat app. On paper Bluetooth could also serve a handheld Switch or Steam Deck, but the published test measured over 200 ms of Bluetooth latency — far beyond what is tolerable for gaming — so that use is strongly discouraged.

For all its feature count, the H9 remains simple and intuitive day to day. The headset carries a sensibly restrained set of controls that covers all the essentials, including switching between noise cancelling and ambient modes and adjusting the game/chat balance — the latter working on both PS5 and PC, which is rare enough to deserve a mention. Advanced settings live in the Inzone Hub application, available on PC only, which houses a 10-band equaliser of sadly limited use and the spatial-audio personalisation. That personalisation requires a Sony online account: a smartphone app asks you to photograph your ears, computes your spatialisation profile from their shape, and transfers it via the cloud to the PC application.

Battery life on such a headset varies enormously with volume, ANC use, Bluetooth and the rear lighting effects. Sony's quoted 32 hours is based on use without noise cancellation; measured under a more representative configuration — ANC on, no Bluetooth, no permanent lighting — the headset switched off after 27 hours of continuous running. No record, but enough to place the H9 among the leaders of its category.

Any hope that the H9's distant kinship with the WH-1000XM5 might bring equivalent audio is dispelled within seconds. This is not a hi-fi tuning: the reproduction is heavily coloured, with a pronounced "W-shaped" signature — especially with ANC engaged — that splits the sound into three distinct frequency zones separated by dips around 700 Hz and 4 kHz. It is not faithful, but neither is it uninteresting: the effect artificially yet effectively inflates the sense of spectral scale, in the manner of home-cinema products that put spectacle above authenticity. It will not be to every taste, and the equaliser cannot rescue it — its band-pass filters are far too narrow to apply meaningful corrections without turning the response into a rollercoaster. Less demanding listeners will adapt quickly, and might even find the profile appealing were it not for a slight lack of treble precision: some indiscipline on transients leaves fine detail occasionally confused and dents the overall dynamics. The bass, by contrast, is impressively stable, and harmonic distortion, while not zero, is inaudible across the spectrum.

That treble imprecision unfortunately works against the headset's virtual-surround processing, since high frequencies are precisely what the human brain uses to locate sounds — the processing logically emphasises them, and in doing so exposes their weaknesses. How strongly this is perceived varies from person to person, which is the whole point of the H9's HRTF personalisation: because sound localisation depends on how waves interact with each individual's head and outer ears, the ear photographs are analysed to derive filters that approach your own hearing as closely as possible — a concept Sony already applies in its 360 Reality Audio ecosystem, comparable to Creative's Super X-Fi. Its effectiveness cannot be judged universally, but for everyone who tried it in the published test the effect proved fairly convincing, with a noticeable improvement in distinguishing the front and rear of the soundstage; listeners whose personal HRTF sits far from the average, for whom ordinary virtualisation rarely works, felt a very clear difference in envelopment. Note that this personalised spatial audio works only on PC: on PS5 the H9 simply uses the console's native Tempest 3D audio like any other headset, with the personalised filters inactive.

The ANC delivers entirely respectable performance, though nothing like what Sony achieves on its premium travel headphones. Attenuation concentrates on the lower mids and has little effect on deep bass — the H9 is definitely not built for commuting, where engine and rail noise would defeat it — while upper mids and treble are essentially left to the (very respectable) passive isolation, so nearby conversations remain clearly audible. Where it genuinely shines is against the noises that matter for a mainly domestic headset: sound drifting through an open window, or PC fans running at full tilt.

The microphone sits on a rotating boom that mutes automatically when raised; the boom is neither removable nor retractable, but its length should suit the vast majority of users. Voice capture is nothing exceptional yet does the job: the pickup is relatively narrow, but the timbre of the voice remains recognisable and intelligibility is beyond reproach — even the tricky distinction between "s" and "sh" sounds comes through without difficulty. Rejection of external noise is decent too, though it cannot silence an energetically hammered mechanical keyboard. A sidetone feature, adjustable in the PC app, feeds your own voice back into the earcups — a welcome comfort for anyone who dislikes speaking without hearing themselves, a problem noise-cancelling headsets make particularly acute.

Good at everything, exceptional at nothing: that is the Sony INZONE H9 in a sentence. Its effective noise cancellation and virtual surround are welcome luxuries, but slightly stronger raw sound quality would have been needed to fully justify its premium positioning.