Bowers & Wilkins Pi8 Earbuds Review: Soaring Sound, Clever Case Leave a comment

Or, there’s at all times the corporate’s Music app (free for iOS and Android). It too has playback management, but in addition provides in ANC choices (hybrid, off, or pass-through) and can allow you to combine your favourite music streaming providers—supplied they’re Deezer, NTS, Qobuz, SoundCloud, Tidal, and/or TuneIn. And it features a very helpful five-band EQ, together with a Bowers & Wilkins True Sound preset. By prevailing requirements, it’s a clear, logical, and usable app, which is about as a lot as anybody is entitled to anticipate.

So far as efficiency is anxious, the headline right here is that Bowers & Wilkins has come inside an ace of justifying the asking worth of the Pi8—and, what’s extra, drawbacks (equivalent to they’re) to Pi8 possession are each delicate and never centered too closely on the best way they really sound.

Hold quantity ranges wherever between “real looking” and “maybe just a little too loud,” and there’s an enormous quantity to get pleasure from about the best way the Pi8 carry out. They create an expansive, well-defined, and rigorously organized soundstage, which implies that each factor of even probably the most advanced recordings have loads of room through which to unfold out and categorical themselves.

This spaciousness and separation doesn’t have an effect on the singularity or unity of the best way the Pi8 current one thing like Fela Kuti’s Gentleman. Irrespective of how hectic the going will get, there’s a togetherness to the Pi8 sound, regardless of their capability to look so deeply into the combination that any particular person instrument is simple to isolate and study.

Avoiding Aural Pileups

The identical recording permits the Bowers & Wilkins to reveal their facility with dynamics, too. There’s loads of headroom when the shifts in depth or easy quantity come alongside, however the earbuds are additionally in a position to establish and contextualize the extra minor (however no much less necessary) harmonic variations or transient occurrences.

The truth is, element ranges method sky-high at each flip. No facet of the recording is simply too fleeting or too far again within the combine to be neglected by the Pi8. To those earbuds, there’s no such factor as “negligible.”