Bowers & Wilkins PI5 : Elegant Style, Big Bass Sound

It took Bowers & Wilkins (B&W) longer than expected to launch its first true wireless earbuds, but they’re finally here: The $400 flagship PI7 and the step-down PI5, which cost $250. The slick-looking earbuds hit the market at a pivotal time when most brands are already working on their second-, third-, or even fourth-generation products, having had years to learn and make improvements. Can B&W jump in with a first-gen product with a top-tier price and give the incumbents like Sony, Bose, Jabra, and JBL a run for their money?

I put the B&W PI5 through their paces to see.

What’s in the box?

Not only is B&W a little late to the true wireless party, but it also seems to have missed the memo on sustainable packaging. Though the box is relatively small, it has embedded magnets, foam padding, and fully coated surfaces, which will make it difficult, if not impossible, to recycle.

Inside, you’ll find the PI5 already in their charging case, two additional sizes of eartips, some paper documentation, and a generously long USB-C to USB-C charging cable. Unfortunately, B&W neglected to include a USB-A to USB-C adapter for those of us who don’t have a readily available USB-C port or charger.

Design

B&W has a flair for sophisticated designs. Whether it’s the company’s full-sized PX7 headphones or its Formation wireless speakers, it’s all about understated elegance. The PI5 share this design language, with smooth lines and subtle accents like the spiral texture on the outer touch control surface and an aluminum ring bearing the B&W brand.

The earbuds manage to look smaller in your ear than the Sony WF-1000XM4, Jabra Elite 85t, and JBL Tour Pro+, thanks to their terraced shape.

They’re easy to extract from their wireless-capable charging case, and the case’s magnets have just the right amount of strength to lock the earbuds in place with precision — no worries here about misaligned charging contacts.

The case’s lid flips open and shut smoothly and easily and the large LED indicator on the front lets you quickly check its charging status, as well as the status of the buds when they’re docked.

The case is just small enough to be pocketable. The only hitch in an otherwise beautiful design is B&W’s choice of plastics for the case: Within moments of unboxing it, the case was covered in fingerprints and even assiduous buffing with a soft cloth couldn’t restore it to its factory condition.

They don’t look like it, but the PI5 are IP54-rated for good dust resistance and moderate water resistance. The case, however, is not protected against either dust or water, so make sure you clean the earbuds before replacing them.

Comfort, controls, and connections

The PI5’s sleek lines don’t exactly suggest great comfort, but I found them to be very comfortable. The inner portion of the earbuds are gently curved, while the outer portion manages to sit within the concha, where, along with the silicone eartips, it locks the earbuds into place.

They may not be perfectly secure for high-energy workouts, but I think most people will find them suitable for their daily run or treadmill routine.

Like most touch controls, there are times when taps on the PI5 didn’t register, but B&W includes a feedback tone so you know when you have tapped accurately. There’s no way to alter the gestures — you get play/pause, call answer/end, track skip forward/back, and voice assistant access. Volume control must be done on the phone (or you could ask Siri/Google Assistant to do it).

There’s also the ability to toggle active noise cancellation via a tap-and-hold gesture on the left earbud, but I’m not wild about it. To my mind, the opposite of ANC on isn’t ANC off, it’s transparency mode on. You want to quickly shift from hearing nothing from the outside world to hearing as much as possible. But there’s simply no way to do that. To switch from ANC (on or off) to transparency, you must use a control that’s buried in the B&W Headphones app.

Bizarrely, it’s possible to have both ANC and transparency modes engaged simultaneously, which makes no sense at all. This is a big oversight that I hope the company fixes with a firmware update as soon as possible.

The PI5 are equipped with wear sensors (which can be disabled in the app) and they work very accurately, pausing and resuming music almost immediately when you remove or replace an earbud.

We experienced some pretty flaky Bluetooth connections when testing the B&W PI7, but for the most part, the PI5 were reliable. Their wireless range is perfectly acceptable if you keep your phone with you: 35 feet outside and 20 feet or so indoors, but if you need to roam more than this, you’ll likely experience dropouts.

I had a few glitches when getting the PI5 to reconnect after being put back in their case. The earbuds would often take several moments to power on, and then another five to 10 seconds to reconnect to my phone.

On one occasion, the earbuds shut down the microphone portion of the connection without warning. About halfway through doing a recording, they simply stopped working and I had no idea until I played the recording back.

On the plus side, the PI5 can remember the last four paired devices, and the app will let you select which of these should be tried first when you pull the earbuds out of their case (or you can select “last paired” as the default). You can also use each earbud independently.

Sound quality

The PI5 have a very bass-forward sound signature, giving music a warm, rich, and full rendering. That bass lets you really feel the dark strains of a track like Hans Zimmer’s Time, but it lacks the subtlety of Sony’s WF-1000XM4, which are better at teasing out the little nuances.

The challenge here is that B&W doesn’t offer any EQ adjustments within the app. On some tracks, like Dominique Fils-Aimé’s Home, in which deep acoustic bass thrumming and drums are accompanied by sultry vocals, the lower midrange can start to sound a little distorted. This becomes more pronounced as you ratchet up the volume. It’s not a deal breaker, and despite the lack of low-end precision, there’s excellent clarity in the upper midrange and highs, making vocal performances really enjoyable.

The PI5 are equipped with Qualcomm’s aptX Bluetooth codec, which should offer slightly better perfor