Bowers & Wilkins Pi8 Earbuds Review: A Big Remaster?

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90%

90%

• Sound quality

  10
• Comfort

  9
• Design

  9
• Connectivity

  9
• Noise cancelling

  8
• Battery

  9
• Value for money

  9
• User Ratings (3 Votes)
  8.2

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.

Bluetooth 5.4 is on connectivity duties and I can confirm that the Pi8 support multipoint connectivity, Google fast pair, and the Made for iPhone standard. There are also three mics for calls and noise cancelling and the earbuds benefit from IP54 water resistance (the case isn’t rated).

In terms of battery life, you can expect up to 6.5 hours of listening time from the buds alone, with the case adding 13.5 hours. Support for fast charging means you’ll get two hours of playback from a 15-minute juice-up.

The Pi8 will be available for pre-order later this month and will be priced at £349 in the UK, which is the same price as the outgoing Pi7 S2.

Design, comfort, call quality

There are four colours to choose from – white, green, blue, and black (I was sent the latter pair for review), but beyond the new colourways, the Pi8 have received a very comprehensive redesign.

During the press briefing, Bowers & Wilkins told us that the design team had spent a long time looking at the physics of the ear because they weren’t happy with the fit of the previous version. The Pi7 fit me perfectly, but this illustrates the challenge earbuds manufacturers have – there are so many different ear types to satisfy.

The result is a completely different-looking pair of earbuds. They are, arguably, less distinctive than before and now resemble the chubby form factor of most stemless earbuds. Despite this, they’re still premium-looking, as you’d expect from Bowers & Wilkins.

The antennas and mics have been moved to a thin recess that wraps around the earbuds to prevent them from getting covered up while in the ear (an issue, apparently, with the previous generation).

The Pi8 do look more conservatively designed but I have a feeling that means they’ll fit in far more ears than before and I can confirm that they’re incredibly comfortable and easy to insert. It’s a shame they still rely on touch controls, but I guess there’s no option when there are no stems to fiddle with.

The case is much better than before. The Pi7 S2 case was huge, and while the Pi8 case is still chunkier than the AirPods Pro 2 case, it’s far less trouser troubling (although the black version does unfortunately pick up a shed load of smudges and grease).

When it comes to call performance, the Pi8 do the job intended. I still struggle to find a problem with taking and receiving calls on any of the earbuds I test. I can hear the other person, they can hear me – everything is always hunky dory. I’m sorry if this isn’t enough testing for you, but they do just work, I promise. 

Sound and noise cancelling

The Pi8 have a larger dynamic drive unit than before (12mm vs 9.2mm) and use the same material and drive unit configuration as the overhead Px8. Bowers & Wilkins clearly mean business with this new pair of flagship earbuds.

There’s also a separate DAC which is used in conjunction with the latest Snapdragon Sound chip to pump the cleanest possible digital audio into your ears.

I tested the Pi8 connected via Bluetooth to a Samsung Z Fold6 and I can confirm that these are the best-sounding pair of earbuds I’ve ever put in my ears. Again. Out of the box, they sound incredible – full of life with no frequencies jostling for position. They’re exciting, dynamic, and a joy to use.

We now have an EQ to play with, too. Bowers & Wilkins has seen it fit to provide five bands of tweakability this time around, and the earbuds respond tastefully to any adjustments. Crank any of those bands up and you can hear how much headroom is in those drivers – there’s so much power available across the entire spectrum.

These are, quite simply, a stunning pair of earbuds. And no, we don’t have spatial audio, but the reason for that, according to Bowers & Wilkins, is that they have concerns over the reliability of head tracking; they’re “looking into it”. Is it a miss on the Pi8? Not at all – I’ll take this sound over a relatively gimmicky feature like that any day of the week.

Noise cancelling? It’s ok. Bowers & Wilkins say they have focused on making it “subtly judged, rather than over the top” and you can tell. It’s nowhere near as all-encompassing as the noise cancellation on AirPods Pro 2, and there are only three settings – on, off, and transparency. The latter is also passable, rather than AirPods Pro 2 matching.

You can tell Bowers & Wilkins have focused entirely on the audio performance of the Pi8, and if ultimate noise cancelling threatened to derail that, it was obviously going to be given the boot. Again, I’m ok with that.

Audio retransmission

Just like the Pi7 S2, you can use the Pi8 case to retransmit audio from pretty much any source wirelessly to the earbuds.

The premise is simple – you just connect the case via USB-C or USB-C to 3.5mm headphone jack to your computer, plane seat, or phone and the case takes the incoming audio and sends it onto the earbuds. It does so in aptX Adaptive, which means you can enjoy the quality offered by that codec even if the source doesn’t support it.

There are two brilliant use cases for this. The first is the aforementioned plane seat. Don’t fancy having an annoying cable dangling into your disappointing in-flight meal? Just use the Pi8 retransmission feature. The second is for anyone who wants to experience the highest quality audio from these earbuds.

I connected the Pi8 case to my MacBook Air via USB-C and set it up to play back at 24-bit/96kHz in the system audio settings. Somehow, the sound went up another notch. It was even more rounded, detailed, and wider, and there was more volume to play with. Audiophiles will notice the difference, trust me.

Audio retransmission on the Pi8 is a killer feature. Even if you’re not fussed about the improvements in audio quality, the convenience offered during a flight is unrivalled.

Conclusion

The Bowers & Wilkins Pi8 earbuds offer a great fit, the design is a notch above the competition, the sound quality is currently unbeatable, and the audio retransmission feature is genuinely unique and useful.

The downsides? They don’t have the best noise cancelling on the market and the case picks up smudges. They’re also not exactly cheap, but none of that matters if you want the best-sounding pair of consumer earbuds, because that’s exactly what the Pi8 delivers.

There’s another option if you fancy spending a bit less but still want Bowers & Wilkins in your ears – the Pi6. I’ve not tried them, but they cost £219 and I would guess that the sound and noise cancelling will be a few notches below the Pi8. They also lack wireless charging – but that’s a pretty interesting price point, regardless.

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