Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport True Wireless Headphones Review

The Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport are semi-open-backed earbuds, indicated by the grilles on the housings. Unlike most earbuds, which have a closed-back design, the semi-open-back design gives them the best of both worlds. They can reduce some ambient sound while allowing you to stay aware of your surroundings, like open-backs like the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds Truly Wireless, The buds are similarly chunky like the Sennheiser MOMENTUM True Wireless 4 but less squarish and with more of a tapered shape. They have removable ear stabilizers and built-in hidden biometric sensors. While the buds come in semi-metallic plastic, their case is matte and clad in silicone. The buds' color options include 'Black,' 'Graphite,' and 'Olive.'

The Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport feel comfortable. They're lightweight and, unlike the Sennheiser MOMENTUM True Wireless 4, don't have a deep in-ear fit. You can choose between three sets of silicone ear tips and three sets of ear stabilizers, but these stabilizers are optional and can feel too big for small ears. If you need to adjust the fit, it can cause the fitness monitors to stop working.

The Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport have good controls. Their controls use the touch-sensitive pads on the outer face of the buds in an intuitive spot, and you can see their commands here. They're comprehensive, and you can rebind most of the commands and assign your voice assistant via the app. With each command, the buds have distinct chimes and clear voice prompts for pairing, modes, low battery, and registering commands. However, your audio can drown out the chimes and prompts at high listening volumes.

There are no single-tap controls, which is likely to offset the chance of misfired commands. You can adjust the capacitive surface's sensitivity or completely disable the touch controls in the app. Even at reduced sensitivity settings, you can still accidentally trigger a command, especially if you have long hair repeatedly brushing up rather hard against the buds.

Following the manufacturer's instructions exactly, our unit wouldn't pair, so let us know if you encounter this issue. It was found that not placing the earbuds in your ears (as the instructions say) resulted in successful Bluetooth pairing.

These true wireless earbuds are very portable, like most earbuds of this variety. You can pop them into a pocket easily.

The Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport charging case is great. It's rated IPX4 for water resistance and has a magnetic silicone lid. The USB-C port is also protected by a silicone cover. Unlike most charging cases, it's not entirely hard plastic. Instead, it's partly made of semi-flexible silicone to hold shape and contend with moisture and accidental bumps without accruing damage. Small LEDs indicate charging status and pairing modes, and it can charge wirelessly, too.

The Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport's build quality is great. The case is rated IPX4. While the buds gain dust resistance and slightly better water resistance with an IP55 rating, you can confidently take them on a run in the rain. Their plastic feels premium without rough edges, and the silicone feels nice. While the buds feel light, the case is a bit heavy because the silicone on the lid adds mass. As you can see here, their USB-C charging port has a protective cover to keep out dust and water. It's also possible that very careless handling could eventually tear the silicone hinge holding the lid.

These earbuds have excellent stability. Even with rigorous movements and tilts, they stay in your ears, which suits athletes. Their ear stabilizers offer a tighter fit than the Sennheiser MOMENTUM True Wireless 4, so you can take them to the gym or go on a hike without worrying they'll pop out.

• Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport True Wireless earbuds
• 3x pairs of ear tips
• 3x sets of stability fins
• Charging case
• USB-A to USB-C charging cable
• Lanyard for charging case
• Manuals

The Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport have an overall warm sound profile that straddles borders of neutral and punchy in their default tuning. Their bass response is fairly balanced, with more emphasis on the high bass adding that punch. The mids are a bit over-emphasized, adding a little clutter to lead instruments. These bear some resemblance to their sibling, the Sennheiser MOMENTUM True Wireless 4, with a slightly more tamed treble, which veils the clarity of vocals, causing the bass instruments to sound more prominent.

In addition, the Sennheiser Smart Control companion app has an EQ that you can fine-tune, or you can try one of the presets shown here. They also sound similar in all listening modes, though (as you can see here) when ANC is enabled, the bass response elevates a bit.

The Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport have satisfactory frequency response consistency. While they have a secure fit, they're somewhat finicky about precise placement. As a result, there's a bit of variation between wears and wearers in the delivery across the spectrum, most noticeably in the high and low frequencies. That said, the variation isn't terribly drastic.

Their bass accuracy is superb. It's mostly even across the range with a somewhat elevated high-bass emphasis, giving these a bit of extra boom and punch sound with a good amount of thump to bass-heavy tracks like On Parade by Electrelane. At the same time, the bass response doesn't overwhelm other instruments.

Their mid-accuracy is amazing. They're a bit elevated in the low mids, which adds a bit of emphasis to rhythm guitar chords, and a slight dip in the center of the mids nudges lead parts down in the mix. The upper mids are quite balanced, rendering vocals and speech with clarity.

Their treble accuracy is alright. Throughout most of the range, the highs are de-emphasized, leading to veiled and warm vocals with diminished detail in the low treble. Meanwhile, the mid-treble is a bit uneven, sounding dull yet somewhat bright on cymbal hits.

Their peaks and dips performance is very good, and they control their sound profile well. Small dips in the low bass are followed by a wide peak in the high bass through low mids, making them sound more punchy and a bit cluttered than overly rumbly. The small dip in the center of the mid-range thins out vocals and lead instruments a bit, while another peak in the high-mids adds a bit of relative harshness to vocals. The low-treble and part of the mid-treble's dip weaken the comprehensibility of details in articulation and sibilants, while the peak that follows sounds overly bright and sharp.

Their imaging performance is excellent, suggesting these have solid ergonomics and tight quality control compared to other headphones by the manufacturer. The group delay produces tight bass and transparent treble. A bump in the phase response's mids isn't audible with real-life content, and the stereo image isn't noticeably altered by it. Meanwhile, the amplitude and frequency mismatch land within good values, translating to an accurate stereo image. Because imaging can vary between units, our results are only valid for our unit.

The Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport's passive soundstage is bad. Despite having semi-open housings, they don't have the same degree of noticeable openness as over-ear headphones with semi-open backs. They also don't interact with your outer ear the way that over-ears do to help create a greater sense of direction outside of your head. While audio still sounds very much like they're inside your head with these earbuds, the buds are a bit more immersive and spacious than conventional closed-back buds like the Sennheiser MOMENTUM True Wireless 4, which isn't exactly a high bar to surpass.

These earbuds have good weighted harmonic distortion. The levels in the bass through most of the mids are reasonably low. The distortion is elevated in the treble region, peaking where the low treble transitions to the high-treble but still stays within good values. As a result, your music will sound clean and pure.

These are the settings used to test these headphones, with the exception of the Isolation tests, which used the medium-sized silicone ear tips. Our results are only valid when using them in this configuration.

The Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport have good full-range noise isolation, which is a bit better than you might expect from earbuds billed as semi-open-backed. The combined ANC and isolation cut out noises across the frequency spectrum well. They don't isolate out high-pitched noises as well as the heavy-hitters, but they're not too far off. Their ANC makes the greatest difference in the mid frequencies where sounds like speech and traffic predominantly occupy. Surprisingly, passive isolation does quite a bit of heavy lifting when blocking out low-pitched sounds like rumbling bus engines. However, there isn't a 'normal' listening mode, and these only have adjustable ANC and Transparency modes, so the passive isolating results were obtained with the earbuds' battery drained.

Provided you're listening to audio at a reasonable output volume, the buds allow you to hear your surroundings well when Transparency mode is used. Depending on the setting strength and your music volume, the sounds piped in can be louder than when you remove the buds and listen. Transparency mode isn't going to give you extra powerful hearing, though, and basically, whatever you hear without earbuds is what you'll hear with the mode enabled. As expected, due to how our brains process sounds, when you increase the volume of your media, it makes it harder to hear your environment. The semi-open nature of these buds doesn't at all translate to the same kind of seamless awareness facilitated by an open and unimpeded ear canal, like with the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds Truly Wireless. So, you'll need to use the Transparency mode to hear the environment.

In common scenarios, the earbuds do a good job of reducing everyday noise. Their combined ANC and passive isolation tamp down on rumbling buses and shrieking subway brakes. They're comparatively less effective at filtering mid-range sounds like ambient din and conversation, though they still mitigate those noises, only to a slightly lesser degree. They're not totally unique in this regard because the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds Truly Wireless have a similar 'bump' in the mid-range's ANC. Your options are limited to adjustable modes for ANC or Transparency.

The Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport have a wind mode in their app to help mitigate unpleasant noise resulting from gusts interacting with the external mic system. While the mode appears to help, it's not consistently effective across all angles. Somewhat surprisingly, the Anti-Wind mode performs only a little better than the Transparency mode set to minimum, while ANC set to max without Anti-Wind mode is notably worse at dealing with wind noise. You can compare the wind performance of the different settings here. Using the wind mode may impact ANC performance when wind isn't present.

The Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport have excellent leakage performance. Outside of your home, it's unlikely anyone will hear the fairly narrow band of treble that leaks out the most or the deep bass content that's only audible in even quieter settings. This results in a rather thin and bright version of your audio, but most people won't hear it, even at high volumes. Likely due to their less invasive fit, they don't quite prevent audio from escaping as incredibly as the Sennheiser MOMENTUM True Wireless 4.

Their microphone's recording quality is good. Speech is captured, sounding intelligible and recognizably like yourself for the most part. They don't quite have the same amount of low-mids and bass that's present when speaking in person, but the result is totally usable.

The mic system's noise-handling performance is mediocre. While your voice is intelligible with consistent background noise, the caller will still hear quite a lot of that noise, even if it's reduced a bit. Similarly, with loud and unexpected background noise, the mics can't fully separate your voice from the noise, which obscures your speech.

The Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport have a satisfactory battery performance. On a single charge, the earbuds reach 5.5 hours of playback with ANC on. That's not quite enough to make it through a workday without a recharge. However, it's more than sufficient for most workouts, and it's comparable to other fitness earbuds like the Beats Fit Pro True Wireless' continuous battery life. Their case stores about 3.5 extra charges, so you don't get caught without any juice. A 10-minute quick charge lends an additional 45 minutes of battery life.

It's worth considering that the buds have a lot of simultaneous active features to power. Besides ANC or Transparency mode always being on, the buds constantly take in biometric feedback, like your heartbeat and temperature. If you use the app, it synchronizes your biometric information with either the built-in Polar section of the Sennheiser Smart Control app or other compatible apps. It's not possible to disable the monitors either, whether you connect to the app or not. You can choose an auto-off timer and an 'Eco' mode (which disables aptX codecs) in the app, and they have a battery-saving standby mode.

The Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport support the Sennheiser Smart Control and Polar apps, which is great. They boast several features, including five-band EQ, adjustable ANC, Transparency and Anti-Wind modes, control remapping, in-ear detection, battery monitoring ('Eco' mode, auto-off timer, standby), and more. You can check out a tour of the Sennheiser Smart Control app here.

Unlike previous releases by the manufacturer, these integrate fitness-centric biometrics like heart rate and body temperature, which you can find in the Smart Control app. You can also take advantage of more extensive fitness tracking by utilizing the compatible Polar app. The Polar app includes route tracking, activity-specific settings, goal-setting metrics, voice guidance related to performance like heart rate, and extensive logs for tracking your progress.

These earbuds are truly wireless and don't have any wired connectivity. A 12-inch USB-A to USB-C cable comes in the box for charging their case.

Their Bluetooth connectivity is good. You can pair the earbuds with two devices simultaneously. They also have a large selection of codecs that are selectable through the Smart Control app, including aptX Adaptive. You can select aptX Adaptive (High Quality) to access the buds' optimal audio quality with compatible non-iOS devices. However, if you need to improve lip-sync lag for videos, you can choose aptX Adaptive (Low Latency), although you'll still likely notice a slight delay, depending on whether the app compensates for latency or not. Otherwise, they support AAC for the best quality possible with iOS devices. That said, while connection strength depends on many variables, our unit's connection becomes less stable after roughly a 165-foot (50 m) distance between the buds and the connected device, which is probably only an issue if you leave your phone in a locker at the gym.

These are true wireless earbuds that can only connect to compatible PCs via Bluetooth for full audio and mic support.

The Sennheiser MOMENTUM Sport includes a battery charging case, which charges via the USB-C port or a wireless Qi pad.