Review: Bowers & Wilkins Pi8 Wireless Earbuds

For a company with its exemplary reputation and profound credibility, there are a couple of inexplicable blind spots in the Bowers & Wilkins product portfolio. Passive loudspeakers? Consummate. Wireless over-ear headphones? Superb. Wireless speakers? Slightly hit and miss. True wireless in-ear headphones? Er … let’s be kind and say “ungainly,” shall we? I might chuck in “overpriced” while I’m at it.

And while “overpriced” might be perfectly fine for a product you’ve commissioned David Beckham to be the face of, “ungainly” most certainly isn’t. So for its new, two-strong series of true wireless earbuds, the most immediately obvious step Bowers & Wilkins has taken is to address the design and appearance.

It’s safe to say the measures it has taken have been a success. The Pi8 model is the more expensive of the two, but they share a common aesthetic with their Pi6 siblings—and where previous Bowers & Wilkins earbuds have come off worst in their encounters with the ugly stick, these new models look great. They’re discreet and coherent lookers, almost elegant—certainly the sort of objects you can imagine David Beckham being willing to put in his ears if he wasn't already being paid handsomely by the audio brand to plug its wares.

Photograph: Bowers & Wilkins

These Pi8 are available in four distinct finishes: Anthracite Black, Jade Green, Midnight Blue, and Dove White. Each looks good, and each benefits from nicely judged accents—even the B&W branding on the top of each earbud looks upmarket (once you get close enough to read the extremely small print). And the charging case in which they travel has benefited from this new approach to design. It’s a smooth and tactile palm-sized unit (2 x 2.6 x 1.1 inches) with a nice almost-contrasting stripe carrying some more branding.

Improved Looks, New Tricks

But while this new design philosophy is a welcome upgrade, the way the Pi8 are specified is Bowers & Wilkins business as usual—which means it’s thorough in the extreme.

Wireless connectivity is via Bluetooth 5.4, and there’s compatibility with aptX Adaptive and aptX lossless codecs, as well as the more run-of-the mill stuff. So if you’re lucky enough to have a source player capable of serving up aptX lossless, then CD-quality 16-bit/44.1-kHz lossless resolution is yours from a wireless connection. Multipoint connectivity doesn’t do any harm, either.

The charging case is compatible with Qi-certified wireless chargers, and has a USB-C slot to do the same job. Battery life is a competitive six and a half hours from the earbuds (with the hybrid active noise cancellation switched on) with a further couple of charges held in the case—an all-in total of 20 hours between charges is just about par for the course.

Photograph: Simon Lucas

But the charging case has a party piece in the shape of its retransmission capability. Bowers & Wilkins supplies both USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to 3.5-mm cables in the Pi8 packaging. Connect one end to the charging case and the other to a source that requires hard-wiring (the in-flight entertainment system, say) and the case will stream the content at aptX Adaptive standard to the earbuds. So you can listen wirelessly to sources that ordinarily require wired headphones—which, I’m sure you’ll agree, is a very nice facility. Or think of it like this: B&W has merged an AirFly with its earphone charging case, effectively gifting you a handy $55 gizmo for free.

There’s very serious specification here, too. The DAC, DSP, and amplification hardware are all sourced from storied specialist ADI. Once the digital audio information has been thoroughly poured over, it’s delivered to your ears by a couple of oversized (12-mm) full-range Carbon Cone dynamic drivers—these are variations on the driver technology first developed for the company’s feted Px8 wireless over-ear headphones. Where the hybrid active noise cancellation system, telephony, and voice-assistant interaction are concerned, there are three mics (two cVc) per earbud. The earbuds themselves are IP54-rated, so they should be happy in any realistic environment.

Comprehensive Controls

Thanks to made-for-iPhone support and the imminent arrival of Google Fast Pair support too, the Pi8 will connect to the majority of source players quickly and without alarms. And once they’re connected, there’s more than just your player’s native voice assistant to help you control them.

The top of each earbud—where the B&W branding is rendered in type so small as to be virtually illegible—is a capacitive touch surface, and control of the fundamentals of playback and telephony is swift and reliable this way.

Photograph: Simon Lucas

Or, there’s always the company’s Music app (free for iOS and Android). It too has playback control, but also adds in ANC options (hybrid, off, or pass-through) and will let you integrate your favorite music streaming services—provided they’re Deezer, NTS, Qobuz, SoundCloud, Tidal, and/or TuneIn. And it includes a very useful five-band EQ, along with a Bowers & Wilkins True Sound preset. By prevailing standards, it’s a clean, logical, and usable app, which is about as much as anyone is entitled to expect.

As far as performance is concerned, the headline here is that Bowers & Wilkins has come within an ace of justifying the asking price of the Pi8—and, what’s more, drawbacks (such as they are) to Pi8 ownership are both mild and not centered too heavily on the way they actually sound.

Keep volume levels anywhere between “realistic” and “perhaps a little too loud,” and there’s a huge amount to enjoy about the way the Pi8 perform. They create an expansive, well-defined, and rigorously organized soundstage, which means that every element of even the most complex recordings have plenty of room in which to spread out and express themselves.

This spaciousness and separation doesn’t affect the singularity or unity of the way the Pi8 present something like Fela Kuti’s Gentleman. No matter how hectic the going gets, there’s a togetherness to the Pi8 sound, despite their ability to peer so deeply into the mix that any individual instrument is easy to isolate and examine.

Photograph: Simon Lucas

Avoiding Aural Pileups

The same recording allows the Bowers & Wilkins to demonstrate their facility with dynamics, too. There’s plenty of headroom when the shifts in intensity or simple volume come along, but the earbuds are also able to identify and contextualize the more minor (but no less important) harmonic variations or transient occurrences.

In fact, detail levels approach sky-high at every turn. No aspect of the recording is too fleeting or too far back in the mix to be overlooked by the Pi8. To these earbuds, there’s no such thing as “negligible.”

Tonality, too, is judged expertly—the Pi8 are carefully neutral and natural, and consequently allow a recording to reveal its tonality rather than impose themselves on it. Which means the Fela Kuti recording sounds warm and vivid, while something smaller scale (but no less challenging) like Anastasia Coope’s “He Is on His Way Home, We Don’t Live Together” sounds immediate and intense. This recording further allows the Pi8 to demonstrate their ability to take what might sound in less capable hands like an aural pileup and bring order to bear.

Low-frequency presence is solid and textured, with appreciable punch to go along with the variation that’s on offer. Control is good, especially at the attack of bass sounds, so there’s convincing rhythmic expression and a proper sense of momentum to the sound. The same is true of the top end, inasmuch as there’s more than enough substance to treble sounds to balance out the brightness and drive that’s in plentiful supply.

And in between, the Bowers & Wilkins do absolutely brilliant work through the midrange—they are able to reveal all the nuance, character, and attitude on a vocal performance, communicating with eloquence. The soundstaging allows a singer all the elbow room they require to express themselves unequivocally, even as they’re seamlessly integrated into the presentation as a whole. And there’s a directness to the way the Pi8 describe the midrange that describes a vocalist’s motivations explicitly.

But Watch the Volume

Photograph: Simon Lucas

It’s worth noting at this point that if you’re reckless enough to venture beyond “perhaps a little too loud,” then a little of the winning three-dimensionality of the Pi8 soundstage can go astray. Play at reckless volumes and each element of a recording attempts to rush the front of the stage, and what was a nicely open presentation can get a little congested and ill defined—which is just another reason not to listen at ear-damaging levels, of course. And when I say “three-dimensionality,” don’t go thinking there’s any spatial audio compatibility here. There’s just a deep, wide, tall stereo presentation that does the job just as well almost every time.

Call quality is just as impressive. The mic array is adept at minimizing wind noise, and there are no artifacts or mic clipping in evidence. If telephony is a big part of your use case, you’re in safe hands here.

If noise cancellation is near the top of your list, though, you might want to stay your hand before handing over your credit card details. Don’t get me wrong, the Pi8 do a pretty decent job of minimizing external sounds in most circumstances, although they can struggle just a little with louder lower frequencies—no, the problem they face is the same problem every pair of true wireless in-ear headphones face when it comes to noise cancellation: They’re not as good as Bose. If you’re buying new wireless earbuds more for the sound they keep out than the sound they make, you know where you should spend your money.

But for most people—or, at least, I hope for most people—sound quality beats ANC quality almost every time. And if you fall into the category of “most people,” like I do, then what’s most important to understand about the Bowers & Wilkins Pi8 is that they are among the best-sounding true wireless in-ear headphones around.

And now that they look the part as well as sound it, they’re this close to justifying their eye-watering asking price.