Depending on your use case, sound quality may be way down the line in importance. The earbuds I use on the subway don’t need to be high quality. Anything better than AM radio will do the job.
Anything without ANC is basically unusable, and better ANC (which usually correlates with good sound quality) pretty noticeably improves your experience on the subway.
Yeah, probably. At least until the Sony's break down and start sounding like trash.
But, to be honest, I do more audiobooks and podcasts than I do music, so the audio quality was not the top reason I picked them. The link buds have a fairly unique design with a 2~3 mm hole in the middle of the earbuds that lets outside sound in. I like it a lot better than any active transparency mode I've ever tried. They also have much better controls than any other earbuds I've tried.
The problem with the Sony's is that they either get something messed up inside the speaker and start sounding like crap at medium to high volume, or the case's open/closed sensor breaks and they wake up and start discharging in the case, and then they're dead by the time I try to use them.
I occasionally try watching videos on my phone, but the latency that Bluetooth adds throws me off, so I don't really enjoy anything with dialogue because the lips are moving out of sync with the words. I've tried lots of different Bluetooth earbuds - from Sony, Aukey, Jlab, even the "gamer" ones from razr - and all of them seem to have noticeable amounts of latency.
I'm not sure if I'm more sensitive to it than most people or they're just all shit, but the latency is the big reason that I'm annoyed that nearly all the manufacturers removed headphones jacks from flagship phones. (Sony actually deserves some credit here, I think their flagship Xperia phone still include a headphone jack and a MicroSD slot!)
I haven't specifically tested it, but my $50 "Backbay Tempo" earbuds have a low-latency "Movie Mode" that sacrifices range to I think buffer sound for ~0 latency.
I bet the sound quality on the Sony buds was better.