Or, there’s always the company’s Music app (free for iOS and Android). It, too, has playback control, but also adds active noise-cancelling options (hybrid, off, or pass-through) and will let you integrate your favorite music streaming services, as long as they’re Deezer, NTS, Qobuz, SoundCloud, Tidal, and/or TuneIn. And it includes a very useful five-band equalizer, along with a Bowers & Wilkins True Sound preset. By today’s standards, it’s a clean, logical, and usable app, which is all anyone could hope for.
Performance-wise, the headline here is that Bowers & Wilkins has come close to justifying the Pi8’s asking price, and besides, the drawbacks (if any) to owning a Pi8 are slight and don’t focus too much on how they actually sound.
If you keep the volume somewhere between “realistic” and “maybe a little too loud,” there’s a lot to like about the Pi8’s performance. It creates an expansive, well-defined, rigorously organized soundstage, meaning every element of even the most complex recordings has plenty of room to expand and express itself.
This spaciousness and separation does not affect the uniqueness or unity of the way the Pi8 presents something like what Fela Kuti did. Gentleman. No matter how hectic the environment becomes, there’s a unity to the Pi8’s sound, despite its ability to peer so deep into the mix that any individual instrument is easy to isolate and examine.
Photography: Simon Lucas
How to avoid auditory accumulations
The same recording allows the Bowers & Wilkins to also demonstrate their skill with dynamics. There is plenty of dynamic range when changes in intensity or volume occur, but the headphones can also identify and contextualise harmonic variations or smaller (but no less important) transient events.
In fact, detail levels are sky-high at every turn. No aspect of the recording is too fleeting or too far back in the mix for the Pi8 to miss. For these headphones, there is no such thing as “negligible.”
