If we want one of the best sound quality on a pair of wireless earbuds, which should we get? Well, this is what the Bowers & Wilkins Pi8 offers. Touted as the “reference in-ear true wireless earbuds”, the B&W Pi8 is seriously the absolutely best-sounding pair of earphones that I have used so far.
The unboxing experience is rather simple yet unique. Once we peel off this single tab, we can slide the box out from the sleeve, and then open it up and get access to a box with the user manual and quick start guide.
Under that, we have the Pi8 itself – and underneath the Pi8, we have the accessories. We have two cables – a USB-C to USB-C cable, and another USB-C to 3.5mm audio jack, which is a weird cable which we’ll talk about later.
The box at the center is where we can find the different eartip sizes. The M size is already pre-installed and we can change it to XS, S, or L sizes. Very straightforward.
The earbuds case itself is fairly simple in terms of design. It is available in a few different colors – and we got it in the Midnight Blue color. I absolutely love this color – but stains and micro-scratches will show up easily because of this earbud case’s texture.
Now, for the earbuds themselves. They look rather chonky at first but they’re surprisingly lightweight – at 7 grams each. I also thought that they will fall off my ears easily – but no. That big part sits on my ear pinna and it’s basically not going anywhere even if I swing my head around. Honestly, it’s a really nice design.
The Bowers & Wilkins branding is also a touchpad as well – which we’ll get into later.
And I think this is the best time to talk about the app. We can download the Bowers & Wilkins Music app and this app is… surprisingly simple. There really isn’t much to do here other than to change the sound mode. Other than that, we can head into the menu here and change the EQ.
The EQ slider is quite flexible, though I find myself not touching the EQ at all since there is an option called “True Sound” that bypasses all the EQ settings and make it sound as balanced as possible. I find myself liking the balanced sound way lot more because they didn’t lie – it’s really balanced.
Then we can also customize the touch controls – but the options are very limited. There are only two presets and that’s it. We don’t have any other options.
And remember that proximity sensor we talked about earlier? That’s for the wear sensor – and we can disable it via this app.
And that’s pretty much it for the app. It’s that simple. Once I got all my settings dialed in, I forgot about the app entirely. I do find it annoying that if I want to turn off ANC, I need to go back to the app to do it since the touch gesture can only toggle between ANC and pass-through modes.
Both the left and right sides can also be tapped once to play or pause music, double-tap to go to the next track, and triple-tap to go to the previous track.
If we touch and hold both earbuds when it’s in the case, it’ll enter pairing mode. We can pair a few devices simultaneously in Bluetooth mode too.
As for the sound quality, I think this is just one of the best-sounding earbuds that I’ve tested so far. The Pi8 soundstage is certainly amazing. I know this because I listen to a lot of orchestral pieces – ranging from classical music like Habanera and modern big band jazz like The 8-Bit Big Band. Since the sound quality is so balanced, I can truly appreciate the audio mixing that the engineers did, just like how they intended us to hear. I’m trying to go through my entire playlist and I’m hearing new things in those tracks that I enjoy so much. It’s very clear and clean. I can hear absolutely everything in the track and pinpoint the location of where the sound is coming from.
When I listened to Duke Ellington’s arrangement for Take The “A” Train, I can hear the bass strings vibrating next to my right ear, and the trumpets are blasting on the right side. And I can hear the wetness of the trumpets too.
Another amazing piece of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. Oh, it just feels like I’m in a dimly lit pub at night, and a live band surrounds me, playing this song to my ears.
While I can’t really do much, I’ll still let you guys listen to some samples – and that’s included in the video above. Our setup is rudimentary… but it works.
What I can provide you, is some insights on some funky underlying tech that I discovered while using the B&W Pi8. You see, this pair of wireless earbuds sounds amazing – and they also have some great technical engineering as well.
On the website, it says that the Pi8 supports these 5 Bluetooth codecs. I thought – hey, this is cool. It’s very rare to see any sort of earbuds supporting aptX these days. aptX is a proprietary wireless audio codec from Qualcomm. Even if your device is using a Snapdragon chip, it does not mean that you’ll get access to all the aptX codecs. For example, the S24 Ultra only has aptX Classic.
So, I had to whip out my other phone to test the audio latency – the ROG Phone 8. This phone has support for both aptX Classic and aptX Adaptive. aptX Lossless isn’t explicitly listed in the menu and that is because it’s actually housed within the aptX Adaptive codec.
Technically, aptX Adaptive will automatically toggle between aptX Lossless and aptX Low Latency depending on what we’re doing on the phone. If a game is launched, it’ll go aptX Low Latency. If we’re listening to music, it’ll go aptX Lossless. It’s automatic.
From this graph, we can see that the latency is obviously the best with aptX Adaptive. 137ms of audio delay is actually still noticeable especially if we’re playing action or shooter games. All the other 3 codecs are just… not suitable for anything other than listening to music.
But there is another way that we can connect to the Pi8 – and that is through the two cables included in the box. You see, the charging case can become a wireless audio transmitter. It’s my first time seeing this feature and this is surely a unique feature that I really love.
Just take out the earbuds, take the cable, connect it to the Pi8’s charging case, then use the audio jack or the USB-C cable to connect it to our device. It works for phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. The LED will flash, and the case becomes the wireless audio transmitter.
And this is the second reason why I use the ROG Phone 8 – it has an audio jack.
So, I did more audio latency test and came up with this. Surprisingly, there is a massive difference between using the 3.5mm audio jack and the USB-C cable. I’m really not sure why this is happening as I tried on a few devices, and the same thing happened.
Either way, most people are using the Pi8 to listen to music anyway, so the audio delay isn’t an issue. Once you start to watch videos or movies, or play games using the Pi8, then the audio latency will start to be an issue. The best way to mitigate the audio latency is either use aptX Adaptive, or use this weird cable to connect to the charging case.
The battery of the Pi8 is amazing too. With a single charge, I can get 6 hours of listening time with ANC turned on and the case can provide two more additional charges. That’s actually great. Best of all, the earbuds themselves are rated for IP54.
Should you buy the Bowers & Wilkins Pi8?
And finally – the price. It’s RM2,399, or $400 USD. Yes, it’s expensive – but I can assure you that the quality and also the versatility it provides – it is definitely worth the price. Even though the Pi8 can’t achieve 24-bit 96kHz audio output like the Galaxy Buds3 Pro, the sound quality just blows it out of the water. The B&W Pi8 just has much better tuning.
Of course, the app and features could’ve been better, but that’s all on the software side. I think if B&W really wants to add more features, they can do so.
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