Home Hi-Tech Android World ,,,,,Noise-canceling, an electronic mechanism for reducing external noise, has now become a hunting ground for all the big headphone brands: a difficult and niche market but which perhaps represents the future for this sector and to which Bowers & Wilkins, too, with the PX model, you cannot give up.
Certainly, however, for such a brand we expected something really important, on the one hand because the competition is very fierce, and on the other hand because Bowers & Wilkins has made construction and sound quality one of the distinctive arguments.
The answer, we anticipate it, is certainly positive: the desire to become a protagonist can be seen in many aspects, especially in the software one, and even if here and there there is still something to fix, we are faced with a product that is already capable of carving out a good slice of the market, even if the tradition in this particular sector is of other names and the road is undoubtedly uphill.
We were lucky enough to try them for a few weeks, taking advantage of various environments: from the office for everyday life to the living room at night for movies, from traveling by bus and tram to walking downtown, and yes, although usually these latter activities are not recommended for models with Noise-canceling, the activity turned out to be anything but dangerous, thanks to the precise control via App.
But before we go into everything, let's understand what it means to have and how a headset with an active noise cancellation system works.
Noise-canceling, a silence that makes itself heard
The (Active) Noise-canceling technology (Active Noise Cancellation in Italian) allows you to cleanly cut some of the unwanted frequencies that, despite the shape of some closed headphones, enter the same and disturb those who listen to music and movies.
This process is obtained thanks to a microphone which, positioned just outside the earphones, “listens” to the external noise and passes it to a system that reproduces an equal and opposite sound wave in the headphones, effectively canceling the unwanted audio. Basically, it is mathematics, given a sound wave, superimposing it on an equal and opposite one obtains a flat result, in practice silence.
The sound wave returned, in fact, can be total or, often, filtered by frequencies, in order to modulate the result on the noises that we want to silence and on those that we want instead to pass: a practical example are the cuts at low frequencies, typical of engines of planes, cars, buses, unlike the voices of friends and colleagues, which are on higher frequencies, and which must be heard so as not to isolate us too much.
Using a pair of headphones with active cancellation can be very dangerous if this system is not well calibrated, because the result is too accentuated sound insulation, which reduces the perception of the world around us and therefore is potentially dangerous.
For this reason, after the first models that completely isolated others, others arose that allowed the user to select when to activate or deactivate the system (in fact a headset with NC disabled is the same as a normal headset), others that reduce the impact. of the soundproofing system and finally others such as these PX that allow you to adjust everything via the App, with an intelligent system that describes the situation and allows the user to have precise control over the response.
This aspect is precisely the most interesting and curious aspect of the headphones: the Noise-canceling system, which is activated by default every time the PX is switched on, can be disabled via hardware from the special button located just above the ignition one, but it is via the dedicated App that gets the best control.
Once the Bluetooth pairing has been performed and the App has been started, it communicates with the headphones by modifying the intervention of the NC on three ideal situations: Office, City and Airplane, and for each of them it allows a voice pass-through filter that can be modulated in three positions (from the lowest on the left, where no voice passes to the highest one, on the right, where the frequency range is much softer and several surrounding voices pass).
The musical response suffers, of course, but to a small extent: otherwise the system works very well and if used at its best it allows for truly peaceful use in all situations: using the City set with Natural Pass-through (medium position) , we walked leisurely in the center of Milan, catching all the necessary nuances, and even if some noises were a bit strange, like the strangely sharp bus engines, the situation did not put us in dangerous situations.
Much better in the office, where we used the set of the same name with Pass-through deactivated, in order to cut cleanly any external noise (and if someone spoke to us and we did not hear it, so much the better) while, despite not having been able to try headphones on the plane in the test period, we used this set at night watching the movies with Pass-through on Amplified, to enjoy the latest hilarious chapter of Thor: Ragnarok on iTunes while keeping an eye on the weak sleep of the child.
The sets work very well, and even the jump from one set to another did not give any particular problems, with a silence of less than a second (acceptable, given the work): the only flaw we feel is that the headphones are been combined with various devices, from an iPhone 8 to an iPad Air, from a MacBook Pro to a Surface Laptop but only on mobile devices (iPhone and iPad) we were able to modulate the operation of noise cancellation and pass through in a careful way, while in use with a computer we trusted the set present in the headphones.
PX, the dress that makes the monk (handsome)
In the review of the PX we inevitably started with talking about the Noise-canceling module, because it is the most important news for the brand, but the headphones have many other more important aspects to report, starting for example from the USB-C connector which is a future vision that all manufacturers should seriously think about (even if the cable is USB-C / USB-A only and not USB-C / USB-C).
The build quality is, as expected, impeccable: metal, fabric and plastic are perfectly integrated in a headset that, in both colors, can be looked at and looked at.
The shape is important, no doubt, but it looks good both in the living room and in the office and on the street (and if you don't trust it, you can always deactivate the NC with a click on the appropriate button), where Bluetooth was very convenient .
Just on the street we really appreciated another feature of the headphones, the proximity sensor that pauses the music when we temporarily remove the headphones, which is very convenient when, listening to music, we start chatting with someone and take them off. (also please) putting them back after a few minutes, without having to put your hand to the music player.
Having said that, in the right pavilion, just behind, there are the playback buttons, useful for moving around the library leaving the phone in your pocket (but which also work on Mac).
The audio quality is very good, even if it is clearly inferior to other Bowers & Wilkins models, such as the P9 model we recently reviewed: the noise reduction system affects qualitatively in some passages and on some frequencies, it could not be otherwise, and some songs seemed more contained than in other headphones, even if the gain by turning off the NC system is still minimal.
However, this falls within the model's perspective: they are not headphones for audiophiles, they are a model that includes a noise-canceling system, with an impeccable shape and construction materials, and a quality weighted to the class of the product.
The final judgment on the model is certainly very positive: we did not detect construction defects, the battery life is in line with expectations and the sound quality seemed weighted to the class of the product, which however has a Noise-canceling system. very detailed, perhaps too much for the common use that most users will make of it, but that will make happy those who have always looked for that little bit more in the B&W brand that can be distinguished from the others.
Pro :
Against:
Price: 399.00 Euro
The model is available through the manufacturer's website or at specialized stores, but it can also be found on the internet in the classic Gray / Black or Gold / Blue colors (subject of this test).
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