If AirPods Pro Aren’t Expensive Enough — Try These
The Bowers & Wilkins Pi8 are here!
Last year, I called the Bowers & Wilkins Pi7 S2 “the best-sounding pair of earbuds I have ever put in my ears”.
Now, we have the successor to the Pi7 S2 — the Pi8. Apart from being a far easier name to quote during a YouTube video, these new earbuds are, according to Bowers & Wilkins, designed to take learnings from their overhead range and transfer them to earbuds.
Have they done it? Can the Pi8 really sound like the wonderful overhead Px8 headphones?
On the improvement list for Bowers & Wilkins were sound (no, really), noise cancelling (fair), fit (not an issue for me previously), and call quality. Let’s find out if they’ve done it.
Specs and pricing
The Pi8 feature 12mm carbon cone drive units and a high-performance DSP with a dedicated DAC and amp. There’s also a true 24-bit audio connection now between the two earbuds, along with support for aptX Lossless, aptX Adaptive, aptX Classic, AAC, and SBC codecs. The case also supports audio retransmission, which I’ll get to later.
