Stumping up £250 for a pair of headphones, you want cast iron guarantees that your new purchases can handle every type of tune thrown at them. The B&W P5s cost that very amount and are aimed at getting the very best from your iPod, as well as being used as your at home cans. So do they do the business? Read our Bowers & Wilkins P5 review: sound quality and find out.
Read the rest of our Bowers & Wilkins P5 review:
Bowers & Wilkins P5 review: overall verdict
Bowers & Wilkins P5 review: design and build
You really can’t escape the exquisite detail served up by the B&W P5s. These are headphones which handle digital music remarkably well. We fed them some 320k MP3s to start with, downloaded from 7Digital. The first album we tried was indie guitar opus Wall of Arms by The Maccabees. A record smothered in layered guitars, the B&W P5s picked out each and every note with stunning efficiency, with little to no degradation noticeable. If you’re nutty for axes and jangly Smiths-style arpeggios, then the B&W P5s are perfect.
Next up we gave Massive Attacks’s Heligoland a whirl, this time in standard 160k. As mentioned in our overall review, the results weren’t quite as we hoped. That’s not to say the sound quality wasn’t good, just that we wanted more from such an investment heavy piece of kit. The bass sounded muddy at times and didn’t pack the oomph we like and need from tracks that aren’t reliant on winsome guitar parts to make them tick. The low quality MP3 didn’t help either, with the sound seeming a tad tinny and not as warm as we would have liked.
Where the B&W P5s do come into their own is with lossless FLAC tracks. When we loaded up these high quality files, the difference was immediately noticeable and welcome. We gave the new Broken Bells album the lossless treatment and the results were superb. The music immediately takes on a more rounded feel and the B&W P5s do a fine job of making out the myriad musical matter on show, giving you a real aural treat when you’re on the move.
We had a similar experience when we chucked in the standard audio cable and listened to Animal Collective’s Feels record on CD. Again, the detail was astonishing, proving that the B&W P5s can work just as well in your own gaff as well as out and about.
The mildly disappointing bass aside, the B&W P5s are a classy pair of cans, capable of making all but the most low end of MP3s sound good. Of course, you could argue it could do better in this direction. But if you’re paying this much for a pair of headphones, then you know the deal with getting the best out of your audio. There are better headphones out there, but if you want great sound blended with stellar design, the P5s are hard to beat.
Read the rest of our Bowers & Wilkins P5 review:
Bowers & Wilkins P5 review: overall verdict
Bowers & Wilkins P5 review: design and build
