Disk Inserted

Hard to believe this is a rookie effort

Bowers & Wilkins’ P5 Mobile Hi-Fi Headphones have blown away several of our long-held beliefs: First, they’ve demonstrated that circumaural muffs aren’t the only means of isolating outside noise and preventing sound leakage in a traditional headphone design; second, they’ve proven that large drivers aren’t a requirement for fantastic bass response; and third, they’ve revealed that we’re not immune to the charms of fashion.

We find this last revelation the most curious. While we’ve always appreciated great design, we’ve always valued function over form. And on airline flights, we’ve always preferred in-ear monitors because they draw less attention than headphones. But the P5’s look so fabulously elegant that we wouldn’t mind if people did give them a second look. More importantly, they sound so superb that we wouldn’t mind if people asked us about them. That’s doubly impressive considering these are the company’s first-ever headphones.

B&W’s minimalist design approach renders the P5’s excellent travel partners. Where most sound-isolating phones come in oversized, hard-shell cases, the P5’s pads fold flat for storage and the phones fit inside a black, quilted clutch—yeah, it’s just a bit effeminate—but the whole package is just 1.5 inches thick and weighs less than eight ounces.

The headphones are constructed primarily from metal wire and brushed aluminum and are all but devoid of plastic. The earmuffs and headband, meanwhile, are generously padded with memory foam and covered in exquisitely soft and breathable New Zealand sheepskin—a welcome departure from the typical vinyl, especially since the pads rest on your pinnae as opposed to your skull. And that brings us back to our preconceptions about headphones. When we placed the P5’s over our ears, the pads compressed just enough to form a remarkable seal that blocked nearly as much outside noise as the vastly inferior Able Planet NC300B headphones we recently reviewed—and those use active noise cancellation. This seal was so effective that when we removed them after a listening session, we felt a tiny pop as the pressure inside our ears equalized.

Don’t worry, we’re not degenerating into audio fashionistas—the P5’s sound as spectacular as they look and feel. Listening to “Tonio Yima,” from the album The Afrobilly Sessions was a genuine feast for our ears. This album is an outstanding collaboration from British producer and blues guitarist Justin Adams and Gambian singer and ritti player Juldeh Camara encoded in 24-bit FLAC. And these headphones’ reproduced the entire audio spectrum—pounding bass drum, plucked bass strings, distortion-rich guitar, chanting male and female vocals—with such superb definition and clarity that they transported us to an imaginary seat behind the studio’s mixing console. Indeed, we found no reason to dispute B&W’s remarkable frequency-range claim of 10Hz to 20kHz.

Pull off the magnetic ear pads and you’ll find 40mm mylar diaphragms driven by neodymium magnets. The phones come with two cables: a conventional cord with 1/8-inch jack and a ¼-inch adapter, and a second featuring an in-line remote control and microphone that’s compatible with newer iPods and iPhones. The cable connection is made at a right angle inside the left earpiece, which should reduce strain on the cord if it becomes caught on anything. We do hope B&W will introduce a longer cable as an accessory, because we want to plug them into our hi-fi system, kick back in our La-Z-Boy with a generous pour of Red Breast, and groove the night away.

It’s a party in a box

The Sonos ZonePlayer S5 is a fabulous addition to the multi-room Sonos Digital Music System, even if the company’s engineers did make some sonic compromises in the name of delivering an all-in-one model at a friendlier price point.

The passive ZonePlayer 90 sells for $350, and the ZonePlayer 120—which features an excellent integrated 55-watt-per-channel amplifier—goes for $500. The ZonePlayer S5 packs both an amplifier and speakers, and is priced at just $400. This low price, coupled with the company declining our query about the amp’s power and total harmonic distortion specs and the material used in speaker fabrication, leads us to believe that Sonos is looking for a bridge to a more proletarian market.

The S5 doesn’t have a battery-power option, so it’s not entirely portable; but a handle cleverly integrated into the rear bass port renders the 9.l5-pound system luggable.

Be that as it may, when we integrated the S5 into our existing Sonos system (ZonePlayers form their own wireless network, but at least one of them must be hardwired to your router), we were bowled over by its ability to fill two adjoining rooms (680 square feet in aggregate) with jangling guitars and the plaintive wail of Gillian Welch’s voice singing “Burn My Stillhouse Down.” The box houses five speakers altogether: a pair of 0.75-inch tweeters, two 3.0-inch midrange drivers, and a 3.5-inch subwoofer that delivers a lot more bass than you’d expect from a driver of that size.

Changing things up to test the S5’s bass response, however, revealed a problem: When we cranked up the Peter Gabriel/Kate Bush duet “Don’t Give Up,” the cabinet began to rattle in sympathy with Tony Levin’s prominent and sustained bass work. As it turns out, a screw inside the enclosure apparently worked its way out during our listening test. We finished our evaluation with a second unit and the issue didn’t repeat itself.

Several hours of critical listening left our ears feeling a bit fatigued—an issue we didn’t encounter with B&W’s Zeppelin (not entirely an apples-to-oranges comparison, since the Zeppelin is a non-networked iPod dock), but the S5 was a huge hit when we had weekend guests over to listen to tunes and play pool.

How do you define “true fidelity?"

We don’t consider ourselves dyed-in-the-wool audiophiles, but we do tend to look askance at audio hardware that adds to, subtracts from, or otherwise monkeys with what a recording artist intended for us to hear. We’ve made the occasional exception—praising Creative’s X-Fi Crystalizer technology, for instance—but we welcome “features” like active noise cancellation about as warmly as an oncoming bout of jock itch.

As you’re probably aware, active noise cancellation produces white noise to mask steady background noise, such as the thrum of a jet engine or the drone from your PC’s power supply and cooling fans. The active noise cancellation in Able Planet’s True Fidelity NC300B headphones was very effective at masking the noise of our desktop rig, but there’s no way to prevent it from also masking some of the frequencies in the music we listened to. And that renders its promise of delivering “true fidelity” more than a little hollow.

Able Planet uses a circumaural design, with bulky ear cups that encircle your pinna and vinyl-wrapped foam pads that rest on your skull. The cups themselves are quite deep, reminding us of the muffs an aircraft carrier’s flight-deck crew wear. In spite of their bulk, however, the cups—which are 3.75 inches long on the outside, but only 2.5 inches long on the inside—didn’t fit all the way around our average-sized ears, cramping the lobes. The uncomfortable cups also leak a considerable amount of sound; so not only would we not relish the idea of wearing them on a long, crowded flight, we wouldn’t want to sit next to someone wearing them either.

An AAA battery powers the active noise cancellation chip and boosts the signal. You can control the volume using an inline thumbwheel on the removable cable, but there’s no transport-control mechanism for newer-model iPods. Able Planet provides an airline adapter and a 1/8-inch-to-1/4-inch adapter as well as a sturdy hard-shell carry case.

Comparing the NC300B to our old favorite conventional headphones, Sennheiser’s HD 555, we found that it took a lot more amplifier power to drive Able Planet’s product, even with the battery engaged (the company doesn’t publish impedance numbers; Sennheiser claims nominal impedance of 50 ohms for the HD 555). The NC300B delivers much stronger bass response than the HD 555, but their performance is not at all balanced: frequencies at the other end of the spectrum come across muted and flat. The issue is particularly noticeable on Julianna Raye’s Dominoes release (we downloaded the 16-bit FLAC tracks from Bowers & Wilkins’ Society of Sound music service). Raye’s retro vocal stylings on this bossa nova-infused album sound positively luscious through the Sennheiser phones, but restrained and compressed on the NC300B. Important sonic details, meanwhile, such as the drummer’s brush work on the snare that sound so present and alive on the HD 555, become lost in the background on Able Planet’s product. We don’t actually think the missing frequencies reside in the same band as the white noise the headphones are generating—we’d need a spectrum analyzer to be sure—but they didn’t emerge when we turned the noise cancellation off.

If you’re looking for a personal listening solution that eliminate background noise, we’ve found in-ear monitors that physically occlude sound—versus masking it with noise of their own—to be a far superior solution. And while you can turn off the JC300B’s active noise cancellation, you lose a lot of volume without gaining any improvement in audio fidelity. In short, we’ve heard plenty of comparably priced headphones that deliver much better performance.