TheMusicDad
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2017
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I bought these back in September on Amazon pre-order, and received them on September 16th, 2016. As such, I've had a lot of time with them. I noticed a number of people commenting on the "noise" issue with these today when I googled this issue again (see below). That noise issue bothered me enough to report it to B&W, and I wanted to share with the forum my experience (very positive so far)
I found two problems:
1) When you turn the headphone on and it connects to Bluetooth, you hear nothing. But when I would open a music service or app (like Spotify, for example) on a device or get to the point where you are going to "play music" (if that makes any sense), a very perceptible hissing noise would occur. It sounded very similar (but louder) to what I perceive on my noise cancelling travel/flying/ much lesser sound quality headphones (Bose QC 35) . It would mostly disappear when I started to listen to music, but it was still perceptible at low volumes. This seemed unusual to me, especially because when I listened to the headphones corded, there was no sign of it at all. That to me meant it may have something to do with the Bluetooth/electronics in the device. As a headphone which marketed both it's sound quality and superior Bluetooth quality, I found this disappointing. I also noted that listening to the headphones wireless vs. wired, there was definitely some amplification of the signal on wireless mode; much louder at the same setting on my device. (I think this is normal, but pardon my electronics ignorance)
2) The other problem I noticed was volume control issues; namely, when listening wireless in a quiet room on an IOS mobile device (such as Ipod, Iphone, Ipad etc), I could only turn the volume down to "3" on a scale of 10. ( or 11 for Nigel Tufnel fans). After that, the sound simply cut out. As such, it always seemed too loud while listening in a quiet room, to the point that it was bothering me. When I tried this with the headphones "wired", it was no problem at all; I could easily get the headphones down to "1-2" and listen comfortably. It was sort of dumb luck I discovered this; I happened to be at home, it was late and my wife was sleeping, so I had the headphones at a low level.
At first, I suspected that possibly this was intentional; that you could only listen so "quietly" while on wireless mode to help mask that "hissing" noise. However, that hissing noise will show up even when no music is playing at all (as noted above) so that didn't make sense. When I googled various forums at that time back in October, I could find no one reporting this, so I wanted to make B&W aware of the problem. In the past when I had issues with a B&W Zeppelin, their customer service was excellent and went above and beyond, so I figured, why not.
I reported this to B&W on October 28th. They responded back on November 8th, "that they are currently looking into this matter and are trying to replicate the issue." With the holidays and everything, I sort of lost track of it, which prompted me to reach out to them again yesterday. They responded within 24 hours with the following:
"Thank you for your email regarding the B&W P7 wireless. Currently, I cannot comment on the release of the fix; however, we plan on having a fix for your issue very soon."
So for those of you perceiving the hissing, you are indeed not crazy! haha. It appears B&W has identified an issue and is working on a fix which will hopefully be out soon. I will update this forum when I hear more.
I found two problems:
1) When you turn the headphone on and it connects to Bluetooth, you hear nothing. But when I would open a music service or app (like Spotify, for example) on a device or get to the point where you are going to "play music" (if that makes any sense), a very perceptible hissing noise would occur. It sounded very similar (but louder) to what I perceive on my noise cancelling travel/flying/ much lesser sound quality headphones (Bose QC 35) . It would mostly disappear when I started to listen to music, but it was still perceptible at low volumes. This seemed unusual to me, especially because when I listened to the headphones corded, there was no sign of it at all. That to me meant it may have something to do with the Bluetooth/electronics in the device. As a headphone which marketed both it's sound quality and superior Bluetooth quality, I found this disappointing. I also noted that listening to the headphones wireless vs. wired, there was definitely some amplification of the signal on wireless mode; much louder at the same setting on my device. (I think this is normal, but pardon my electronics ignorance)
2) The other problem I noticed was volume control issues; namely, when listening wireless in a quiet room on an IOS mobile device (such as Ipod, Iphone, Ipad etc), I could only turn the volume down to "3" on a scale of 10. ( or 11 for Nigel Tufnel fans). After that, the sound simply cut out. As such, it always seemed too loud while listening in a quiet room, to the point that it was bothering me. When I tried this with the headphones "wired", it was no problem at all; I could easily get the headphones down to "1-2" and listen comfortably. It was sort of dumb luck I discovered this; I happened to be at home, it was late and my wife was sleeping, so I had the headphones at a low level.
At first, I suspected that possibly this was intentional; that you could only listen so "quietly" while on wireless mode to help mask that "hissing" noise. However, that hissing noise will show up even when no music is playing at all (as noted above) so that didn't make sense. When I googled various forums at that time back in October, I could find no one reporting this, so I wanted to make B&W aware of the problem. In the past when I had issues with a B&W Zeppelin, their customer service was excellent and went above and beyond, so I figured, why not.
I reported this to B&W on October 28th. They responded back on November 8th, "that they are currently looking into this matter and are trying to replicate the issue." With the holidays and everything, I sort of lost track of it, which prompted me to reach out to them again yesterday. They responded within 24 hours with the following:
"Thank you for your email regarding the B&W P7 wireless. Currently, I cannot comment on the release of the fix; however, we plan on having a fix for your issue very soon."
So for those of you perceiving the hissing, you are indeed not crazy! haha. It appears B&W has identified an issue and is working on a fix which will hopefully be out soon. I will update this forum when I hear more.