Or, there’s all the time 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 count on.
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 (reminiscent of they’re) to Pi8 possession are each delicate and never centered too closely on the best way they really sound.
Hold quantity ranges anyplace between “sensible” 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 signifies that each component of even essentially the most advanced recordings have loads of room by 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. Regardless of how hectic the going will get, there’s a togetherness to the Pi8 sound, regardless of their skill to look so deeply into the combination that any particular person instrument is simple 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 determine and contextualize the extra minor (however no much less essential) harmonic variations or transient occurrences.
Actually, element ranges method sky-high at each flip. No side of the recording is just 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.”
