Bowers & Wilkins has launched its new flagship active noise-cancelling wireless headphone — the Px8 S2.
The Px8 S2’s evolved design and profile have been engineered for comfortable, extended listening, with a notably slimmer form than the outgoing Px8 — even the new carry case is more compact and easier to fit into a bag. As you would expect for a flagship Bowers & Wilkins product, the new Px8 S2 has been trimmed and finished to the highest possible standards. Nappa leather covers every primary surface, while the aluminum arm mechanism with its new, exposed cable detailing, produces a combination of light weight, optimized mechanical stiffness, and exquisite design.
Px8 S2 is available in two Nappa leather finishes — Onyx Black and Warm Stone — each with color-coordinated leather and aluminum detailing. To ensure long-term pride of ownership, Bowers & Wilkins has engineered the new design so that both ear cushions and headband are replaceable by trained service engineers.
According to Bowers & Wilkins, the Px8 S2 is the best-sounding headphone the brand has ever created. Building on the pedigree of Px7 S3, its 40mm Carbon Cone drive units deliver a transformational listening experience by combining low coloration and distortion with light weight, ensuring stunning detail and clarity plus powerful dynamics, whatever you’re listening to.
These drive units feature a comprehensively redesigned and improved chassis, voice coil, suspension, and magnet, and are carefully angled to the listener’s ears to ensure a consistent distance from every point across the surface of each driver to each ear, ensuring better imaging and stereo spaciousness. They are powered by a dedicated, discrete headphone amplifier providing notably more scale and energy to the sound.
Px8 S2 includes both aptX Adaptive 24/96 wireless technology and the latest Qualcomm innovation, aptX Lossless. Both technologies can automatically optimize wireless music transmission from compatible phones, tablets, and computers, ensuring the best possible sound quality with high-resolution music streaming services such as Amazon Music, Qobuz, and TIDAL, which are available to stream directly from the Music app.
Supported by powerful Bowers & Wilkins-developed digital signal processing, the result is 24-bit/96 kHz high-resolution sound quality. 3.5mm analog audio connections are also supported, as is high-resolution-capable USB-C — a great benefit for both computer users and owners of compatible mobile devices, including the latest generation of iPhone. Both cable types are included in the carry case that accompanies the headphones.
Noise Cancelling
Bowers & Wilkins engineers are confident that the new active noise cancelling technologies developed for the Px7 S3 and Px8 S2 are the most powerful and effective the brand has ever developed. As is always the case, the chosen approach carefully balances effective cancellation of unwanted noise while doing no harm to the musicality of the performance.
As with Px7 S3, the new Px8 S2 features eight high-performance microphones, carefully located around the periphery of each earcup and working together to deliver the best results. Two of them measure the output of each drive unit, four — positioned at opposite ends of each earcup for the best possible coverage — monitor ambient noise from the outside world, and two more provide outstanding voice clarity. Careful positioning and angling of those microphones enhances performance even in the noisiest environments. When making calls, unwanted noise is effectively suppressed by the latest generation of voice processing technology, ADI Pure Voice. All eight microphones work in conjunction with the noise-cancelling and voice-processing technologies to ensure outstanding call clarity wherever you are.
Enhanced features
Offering 30 hours of battery life with full noise cancellation on, Px8 S2 can play all day long — and more — on just a single charge, while a 15-minute quick recharge is sufficient to provide up to seven hours of additional listening time.
As with all other current generations of Bowers & Wilkins headphones and earbuds, the Px8 S2 can be configured and controlled using the brand’s Music app. You can activate or disengage the noise-cancelling transparency mode to let in more or less of the outside world, monitor the headphones’ charge levels, select the wear sensor sensitivity, and define your preferred operation for the physical “Quick Action” button on the headphones. Listeners can now opt to fine-tune the sound through an adjustable five-band EQ, complete with the option to store their preferred settings as easily accessible presets. If preferred, the EQ option can be bypassed by selecting the True Sound mode, which represents the preferred audio tuning selected by the acoustic team at the Southwater Research Establishment (SRE).
As with Px7 S3, physical controls on each earcup are also included, ensuring full control even without the Music app. The revised button layout, which reshapes the volume up, volume down, and play/pause buttons to improve their tactile interaction and relocates the power button to the left-hand earcup, is more intuitive to use. The Quick Action button allows users to either quickly cycle through the Px8 S2’s noise-cancelling options — Off, Pass-Through, and On — or seamlessly launch their phone’s Voice Assistant at the touch of a button.
Px8 S2 is future-proof, too. Bowers & Wilkins will roll out a series of over-the-air updates later this year, the first of which will include support for spatial audio listening. Bluetooth LE Audio, complete with Auracast broadcast functionality, will be added later.
The all-new Px8 S2 is available now from bowerswilkins.com and select third-party retailers for $799.
For more information, visit www.bowerswilkins.com.
