Technologies

Bowers & Wilkins PI7 S2 Earbuds Review: Same Fantastic Sound, But Only Slight Improvements

The company’s flagship earbuds have the same design but offer better battery life and double the Bluetooth range.

When Bowers & Wilkins introduced its first true-wireless earbuds in April 2021, they were among the very best-sounding models in that highly competitive headphone space. Now we get the next generation of those buds, the PI7 S2 ($399, 349, AU$700) and PI5 S2 ($299, 249, AU$450) — and they manage to be both quite impressive and a tad disappointing at the same time. (For what it’s worth, the names are «pi 7» and «pi 5», styled in all caps and no spaces, not «P seventeen» and «P fifteen.» Got it?)

8.2

Bowers & Wilkins PI7 S2

Like

Great sound
Improved battery life and Bluetooth range
Very good noise-canceling and voice-calling capabilities
Wireless charging case turns into a Bluetooth transceiver, enabling you to connect to an external audio source such as an in-flight entertainment system

Don’t Like

Pricey
Same Qualcomm chipset as in the previous model
Missing some features typically found on premium buds

Let’s start with the underwhelming part. For better or worse, although the PI7 and PI5 now come in new color options, their design has barely changed, and they look very similar to their predecessors. If you look closely, the grilles over the microphones appear to be slightly larger, and there’s a sensor just below one of the microphones that wasn’t there previously. Bowers and Wilkins didn’t mention anything about new drivers, so presumably they’re the same, and I’ve confirmed that these new models use the same legacy Qualcomm QCC5126 chipset (with Bluetooth 5.0) as the originals. (The latest 5 series chips are the QCC5141 and QCC5144).

So what’s upgraded? According to Bowers & Wilkins, the new models have better battery life and Bluetooth range, now up to 25 meters, which is double the previous range. Additionally, the buds now integrate into the new Bowers & Wilkins Music app for iOS and Android and have a much improved set-up experience (I can attest to that).

With the original PI7 buds, you only got about four hours of battery life on a single charge with an additional four charges in the case (20 hours total). The battery life on the PI7 S2 is up to five hours for the buds with 16 hours more from the case (21 hours total). Meanwhile, the PI5 goes from 4.5 hours on a single charge to up to five hours but dips from 20 hours additional from the case to 19 hours.

Bowers & Wilkins says the battery life gains in the buds have been achieved through hardware changes, not software updates. The batteries in the buds are new and the antenna design has also changed. «The caps at the end of the earbuds — the sections that carry the logo — have been re-engineered to improve antenna performance,» a Bowers & Wilkins rep informed me. «We’ve introduced a new design of antenna and repositioned it within the earbud endcaps. At the same time, we have switched to use plastic, rather than aluminum to trim each endcap. The result is stronger Bluetooth signal strength, giving us our improved 25-meter range.»

While I certainly appreciate better battery life and improved Bluetooth range with a more reliable wireless connection, the updates struck me as relatively modest. Of course, Bowers and Wilkins could add features later, which we’ve seen before with premium buds that use Qualcomm chipsets (Jabra and Bose, for example). However, Bowers & Wilkins has never updated the firmware of its original buds. So don’t expect these to get multipoint Bluetooth pairing, which allows you to pair the buds with two devices simultaneously — say, a computer and smartphone — and have the audio automatically switch to your smartphone when a call comes in (instead, you have to manually switch between paired devices). Nor can you expect to see support for Qualcomm’s upcoming spatial audio or Bluetooth LE Audio with Auracast capabilities.

The app is also missing an equalizer to tweak your sound. I personally don’t mind a fixed EQ that sticks to a company’s signature sound, but a lot of people like to customize the sound settings of their headphones.

All that said, the touch controls work very well, as does the automatic ear-detection feature. And the PI7 S2’s wireless charging case, like its predecessor, converts into a transceiver, so you can plug the case into the headphone port on an airplane’s inflight entertainment system and wirelessly stream audio from the case to the earbuds. Alternately, you could also connect the case to a laptop audio port and use it to wirelessly stream high-resolution audio to the buds.

Note that the PI5 is very much a step-down model. It’s got a single driver instead of the dual drivers found in the PI7 and one less microphone on each earbud (two instead of three). The aforementioned «wireless audio retransmission» feature in its case is also absent.

All about the sound

Simply put, the PI7 S2 sound great so long as you get a tight seal from one of the three sizes of included ear tips. I’m a fan of Bowers & Wilkins ear tips, which have a similar design to Sennheiser ear tips, and the large tips fit my ears well. These are large ear buds that will stick out of your ears a fair amount, but they did fit my ears comfortably and fairly securely. They offer IPX54 water-resistance, which means they’re splashproof and dust-resistant, so you can run with them, though there are better earbuds options with sport fins that are more suitable for sporting activities (I’m not sure you want to risk a $399 earbud dropping out of your ear). However, I would have no problem using them at the gym.

Like its predecessor, the PI7 supports Qualcomm aptX Adaptive wireless transmission (which includes the aptX HD codec) from compatible mobile devices, allowing for «high-resolution music transmission from suitable streaming services, such as Qobuz.» The list of Android devices — and dedicated music players — that support aptX Adaptive has grown over the last few years and you should ideally pair the buds with a device that supports aptX Adaptive (along with a streaming service that offers high-resolution streaming). That said, the buds also work just fine and sound very good with Apple’s iPhones, which support the AAC codec. (Both the PI5 and PI7 support AAC streaming but the PI5 only supports standard aptX, not aptX Adaptive.) Alas, Sony’s LDAC hi-res audio codec is not supported, but typically headphones support either aptX or LDAC, not both.

I listened to the buds using an iPhone 14 Pro and an Asus ROG 6 Android smartphone that’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 mobile platform. As I said with the original PI7, the PI7 S2 has exactly what I’m looking for in a good set of headphones: Accurate and articulate sounding with deep, well-defined bass, natural sounding mids, nicely detailed treble and a wide soundstage that gives the overall sound some largesse.

On my iPhone, I tested the buds with Spotify, Apple Music and Qobuz. The PI7 S2 can go toe-to-toe and, in some cases, slightly edge out many of the top mainstream earbuds out there for sound, including Sony’s WF-1000XM4, Apple’s AirPods Pro 2, Bose’s QuietComfort Earbuds 2, Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 3 and Bang and Olufsen Beoplay EX, which also cost $400.

However, when I switched to the Asus and streamed high-resolution tracks from Qobuz (with aptX Adaptive), I went from saying to myself, «That sounds really good» to «Wow, that sounds awesome.» Bowers & Wilkins has a playlist on Qobuz for its PX8 full-size headphones, so I ran through a bunch of those tracks. Some of them included Taylor Swift’s Vigilante Shit, Athletes of God’s Don’t Wanna Be Normal, Anna B Savage’s Since We Broke up, Orbital’s Dirty Rat and Pixies’ Vault of Heaven. The quality of the bass was a level up — more visceral with added girth and punch — and there was a little more sparkle, depth and nuance to the music all around. I came away feeling my Spotify needed an upgrade.

Good noise canceling but not best-in-class

As with the sound, you’ll need a tight seal to get optimal performance for noise canceling, which can be set to on, off or an «auto» mode that adapts the noise canceling according to the ambient sound in your environment. You can also adjust how much «passthrough» sound you want to let into the buds, which is typically referred to as an awareness or transparency mode.

The buds’ transparency mode isn’t quite as natural sounding as some of the others I’ve used (at the moment, the AirPods Pro 2’s transparency mode is the gold standard). I settled on a midway point for the slider setting in between «min» and «max» for what I felt was the best transparency experience.

The noise canceling is quite effective and does a nice job of reducing a decent amount of ambient sound, particularly in the lower frequencies. However, the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds 2 do a better job reducing noise across a broader range of frequencies (higher frequencies are more challenging for noise-canceling headphones to muffle). So while the PI7’s noise canceling is clearly respectable, it’s not in the same class as the earbuds’ sound.

The PI7’s voice-calling capabilities are at a similar level — very good but not best-in-class. The buds did a nice job of reducing background noise on the streets of New York. While callers said they could hear a bit of background noise, it was reduced considerably, and they said my voice came clearly without any warbling. I could also hear them quite well, and there’s a bit of sidetone so you can hear your voice in the buds as you speak.

Bowers & Wilkins PI7 S2 final thoughts

Yes, the PI7 S2s are technically a second-gen product, but they feel more like a generation 1.5 product. Bowers & Wilkins has essentially smoothed out some of the rough edges on the original buds (I mean that metaphorically, not literally). The extra hour of battery life and extended Bluetooth range (with seemingly a slightly more reliable wireless connection) are welcome changes. And the setup and integration with the Bowers & Wilkins Music app creates a better overall user experience, despite its somewhat bare-bones quality (compared to Sony’s Headphones app anyway).

If you’re comparing the PI7 S2 to the PI5 S2, which also sound excellent but not quite as good as the PI7, you’ll want to keep an eye on the PI5 S2’s price, which should dip more quickly than the PI7 S2’s price. The original Pi5s are selling for as low as $150, or $100 off their list price of $250, so we’ll see where everything shakes out. The PI5s could end up being the better value, though it’s unfortunate that Bowers & Wilkins added $50 to their list price.

Needless to say, $400 is a lot to spend on a set of earbuds. And when you spend this much, you ideally want the latest technology and features (aptX Lossless, for example). But if great sound is your priority, the PI7 S2s deliver it. And with the buds paired to the right device and streaming service, they can sound downright special.

Technologies

An AWS Outage Broke the Internet While You Were Sleeping

Reddit, Roblox and Ring are just a tiny fraction of the 1,000-plus sites and services that were affected when Amazon Web Services went down, causing a major internet blackout.

The internet kicked off the week the way that many of us often feel like doing: by refusing to go to work. An outage at Amazon Web Services rendered huge portions of the internet unavailable on Monday morning, with sites and services including Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, the PlayStation Network and, predictably, Amazon, unavailable for a short period of time.

The outage began shortly after midnight PT, and took Amazon around 3.5 hours to fully resolve. Social networks and streaming services were among the 1,000-plus companies affected, and critical services such as online banking were also taken down. You’ll likely find most sites and services functioning as usual this morning, but some knock-on effects will probably be seen throughout the day.

AWS, a cloud services provider owned by Amazon, props up huge portions of the internet. So when it went down, it took many of the services we know and love with it. As with the Fastly and Crowdstrike outages over the past few years, the AWS outage shows just how much of the internet relies on the same infrastructure — and how quickly our access to the sites and services we rely on can be revoked when something goes wrong. The reliance on a small number of big companies to underpin the web is akin to putting all of our eggs in a tiny handful of baskets.

When it works, it’s great, but only one small thing needs to go wrong for the internet to come to its knees in a matter of minutes.

How widespread was the AWS outage?

Just after midnight PT on October 20, AWS first registered an issue on its service status page, saying it was «investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.» Around 2 a.m. PT, it said it had identified a potential root cause of the issue, and within half an hour, it had started applying mitigations that were resulting in significant signs of recovery.

«The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now,» AWS said at 3.35 a.m. PT. The company didn’t respond to request for further comment beyond pointing us back to the AWS health dashboard.

Around the time that AWS says it first began noticing error rates, Downdetector saw reports begin to spike across many online services, including banks, airlines and phone carriers. As AWS resolved the issue, some of these reports saw a drop off, whereas others have yet to return to normal. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

Around 4 a.m. PT, Reddit was still down, while services including Ring, Verizon and YouTube were still seeing a significant number of reported issues. Reddit finally came back online around 4.30 a.m. PT, according to its status page, which was then verified by us.

In total, Downdetector saw over 6.5 million reports, with 1.4 million coming from the US, 800,000 from the UK and the rest largely spread across Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany and France. Over 1,000 companies in total have been affected, Downdetector added.

«This kind of outage, where a foundational internet service brings down a large swathe of online services, only happens a handful of times in a year,» Daniel Ramirez, Downdetector by Ookla’s director of product told CNET. «They probably are becoming slightly more frequent as companies are encouraged to completely rely on cloud services and their data architectures are designed to make the most out of a particular cloud platform.»

What caused the AWS Outage?

AWS hasn’t shared full details about what caused the internet to fall off a cliff this morning. The likelihood is that now it’s deployed a fix, its next step will be to investigate what went wrong.

So far it’s attributed the outage to a «DNS issue.» DNS stands for the Domain Name System and refers to the service that translates human-readable internet addresses (for example, CNET.com) into machine-readable IP addresses that connects browsers with websites.

When a DNS error occurs, the translation process cannot take place, interrupting the connection. DNS errors are common are common internet roadblocks, but usually happen on small scale, affecting individual sites or services. But because the use of AWS is so widespread, a DNS error can have equally widespread results.

According to Amazon, the issue is geographically rooted in its US-EAST-1 region, which refers to an area of North Virginia where many of its data centers are based. It’s a significant location for Amazon, as well as many other internet companies, and it props up services spanning the US and Europe.

«The lesson here is resilience,» said Luke Kehoe, industry analyst at Ookla. «Many organizations still concentrate critical workloads in a single cloud region. Distributing critical apps and data across multiple regions and availability zones can materially reduce the blast radius of future incidents.»

Was the AWS Outage caused by a cyberattack?

DNS issues can be caused by malicious actors, but there’s no evidence at this stage to say that this is the case for the AWS outage.

Technical faults can, however, pave the way for hackers to look for and exploit vulnerabilities when companies’ backs are turned and defenses are down, according to Marijus Briedis, CTO at NordVPN. «This is a cybersecurity issue as much as a technical one,» he said in a statement. «True online security isn’t only about keeping hackers out, it’s also about ensuring you can stay connected and protected when systems fail.»

In the hours ahead, people should look out for scammers hoping to take advantage of people’s awareness of the outage, added Briedis. You should be extra wary of phishing attacks and emails telling you to change your password to protect your account.

Technologies

A New Bill Aims to Ban Both Adult Content Online and VPN Use. Could It Work?

Michigan representatives just proposed a bill to ban many types of internet content, as well as VPNs that could be used to circumvent it. Here’s what we know.

On Sept. 11, Michigan representatives proposed an internet content ban bill unlike any of the others we’ve seen: This particularly far-reaching legislation would ban not only many types of online content, but also the ability to legally use any VPN.

The bill, called the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act and advanced by six Republican representatives, would ban a wide variety of adult content online, ranging from ASMR and adult manga to AI content and any depiction of transgender people. It also seeks to ban all use of VPNs, foreign or US-produced.

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VPNs (virtual private networks) are suites of software often used as workarounds to avoid similar bans that have passed in states like Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as the UK. They can be purchased with subscriptions or downloaded, and are built into some browsers and Wi-Fi routers as well.

But Michigan’s bill would charge internet service providers with detecting and blocking VPN use, as well as banning the sale of VPNs in the state. Associated fines would be up to $500,000.

What the ban could mean for VPNs

Unlike some laws banning access to adult content, this Michigan bill is comprehensive. It applies to all residents of Michigan, adults or children, targets an extensive range of content and includes language that could ban not only VPNs but any method of bypassing internet filters or restrictions.

That could spell trouble for VPN owners and other internet users who leverage these tools to improve their privacy, protect their identities online, prevent ISPs from gathering data about them or increase their device safety when browsing on public Wi-Fi.

Read more: CNET Survey: 47% of Americans Use VPNs for Privacy. That Number Could Rise. Here’s Why

Bills like these could have unintended side effects. John Perrino, senior policy and advocacy expert at the nonprofit Internet Society, mentioned to CNET that adult content laws like this could interfere with what kind of music people can stream, the sexual health forums and articles they can access and even important news involving sexual topics that they may want to read. «Additionally, state age verification laws are difficult for smaller services to comply with, hurting competition and an open internet,» John added.

The Anticorruption of Public Morals Act has not passed the Michigan House of Representatives committee nor been voted on by the Michigan Senate, and it’s not clear how much support the bill currently has beyond the six Republican representatives who have proposed it. As we’ve seen with state legislation in the past, sometimes bills like these can serve as templates for other representatives who may want to propose similar laws in their own states.

Could VPNs still get around bans like these?

That’s a complex question that this bill doesn’t really address. When I asked NordVPN how easy it would be track VPN use, privacy advocate Laura Tyrylyte explained, «From a technical standpoint, ISPs can attempt to distinguish VPN traffic using deep packet inspection, or they can block known VPN IP addresses. However, deploying them effectively requires big investments and ongoing maintenance, making large-scale VPN blocking both costly and complex.»

Also, VPNs have ways around deep packet inspection and other methods. CNET senior editor Moe Long mentioned obfuscation like NordWhisper, a counter to DPI that attempts to make VPN traffic look like normal web traffic so it’s harder to detect.

There are also no-log features offered by many VPNs to guarantee they don’t keep a record of your activity, and no-log audits from third parties like Deloitte that, well, try to guarantee the guarantee. There are even server tricks VPNs can use like RAM-only servers that automatically erase data each time they’re rebooted or shut down.

If you’re seriously concerned about your data privacy, you can look for features like these in a VPN and see if they are right for you. Changes like these, even on the state level, are one reason we pay close attention to how specific VPNs work during our testing, and make sure to recommend the right VPNs for the job, from speedy browsing to privacy while traveling.

Correction, Oct. 9: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated how RAM-only servers work. RAM-only servers run on volatile memory and are wiped of data when they are rebooted or shut down.

Technologies

AWS Outage Explained: Why Half the Internet Went Down While You Were Sleeping

Reddit, Roblox and Ring are just a tiny fraction of the hundreds of sites and services that were impacted when Amazon Web Services went down.

The internet kicked off the week the way that many of us often feel like doing: by refusing to go to work. An outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) rendered huge portions of the internet unavailable on Monday morning, with sites and services including Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, the PlayStation Network and, predictably, Amazon, unavailable for a short period of time.

AWS is a cloud services provider owned by Amazon that props up huge portions of the internet. As with the Fastly and Crowdstrike outages over the past few years, the AWS outage shows just how much of the internet relies on the same infrastructure — and how quickly our access to the sites and services we rely on can be revoked when something goes wrong.

Around 4 a.m. PT, Reddit was still down, while services including Verizon and YouTube were still seeing a significant number of reported issues.