The Sony WH-CH520 Wireless Headphones are Sony’s entry-level on-ear Bluetooth model. On-ear means the earcups rest against the outside of your ears rather than fully enclosing them, which keeps the overall size and weight down compared to over-ear headphones. The CH520 weighs 147 grams and folds flat, making it a good fit for travel, commuting, or anyone who finds over-ear headphones too bulky for daily use.
Crisp, punchy bass with a lengthy battery life
The WH-CH520 has a battery life of 50 hours per charge. This is at the higher end of the current market standard for wireless headphones. You can Fast Charge via a USB-C cable, which will add about 1 hour and 30 minutes to your listening time in 3 minutes if you forgot to plug it in the night before.
The wh-CH520 uses two 30mm dynamic drivers and has a frequency range of 20Hz to 20kHz. The headsets are designed with a flat, or neutral, sound signature rather than a bass-heavy one like some other headphones. You can create custom tone curves in the Headphones Connect app by adjusting parameters such as bass boost and treble. There are also several predefined options based on music genres if you’re not into adjusting individual values. Additionally, built-in DSEE (Digital Sound Enhancement Engine) aims to recover some of the detail lost in compressed sources, such as MP3s or Spotify streams.
Bluetooth 5.2 supports multipoint pairing with two devices at once. A laptop and a phone can both stay connected simultaneously, and the CH520 switches between them automatically when audio starts playing from the other source. Google Fast Pair on Android reduces first-time pairing to a single tap, and the headphones show up in Google’s Find My Device network. Wireless range is the Bluetooth standard 10 meters of line-of-sight coverage, with the usual drop-offs through walls.
A single microphone on the right earcup handles hands-free calls and voice assistant commands for Google Assistant and Siri. Three physical buttons on the right earcup control power, pairing, play/pause, track skip, volume, and call answer directly from the headphones without needing to open the companion app on a phone.
What the CH520 does not include is active noise cancellation, which is the feature that separates budget wireless headphones from the Sony WH-1000XM5 and other premium models in Sony’s lineup. Passive isolation from the on-ear pads dampens some ambient noise, but airplane engines and loud subway cars will still be clearly audible.
The Sony WH-CH520 Wireless Headphones are on sale for $38 instead of the usual $70. At $38, a Sony-branded wireless headphone with 50-hour battery life, multipoint pairing, USB-C charging, and a full app-based EQ is priced competitively with generic Amazon store earbuds while offering the build quality and software ecosystem of a major manufacturer
