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—offered 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 value 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 way in which they really sound.
Maintain quantity ranges wherever between “lifelike” and “maybe a bit too loud,” and there’s an enormous quantity to get pleasure from about the way in which the Pi8 carry out. They create an expansive, well-defined, and rigorously organized soundstage, which signifies that each aspect of even probably the most complicated recordings have loads of room through which to unfold out and specific themselves.
This spaciousness and separation doesn’t have an effect on the singularity or unity of the way in which 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 combo that any particular person instrument is straightforward to isolate and study.
{Photograph}: Simon Lucas
Avoiding Aural Pileups
The identical recording permits the Bowers & Wilkins to show 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 essential) harmonic variations or transient occurrences.
The truth is, element ranges strategy sky-high at each flip. No side of the recording is simply too fleeting or too far again within the combine to be missed by the Pi8. To those earbuds, there’s no such factor as “negligible.”