Parrot Zik - Worlds Best Bluetooth Headphone - Review

There are several reasons Bluetooth headphones haven’t taken off — lousy designs, poor execution, that cumbersome “pairing” — but the Zik, a new headset that Parrot unveiled at CES 2012, appears to address pretty much all of them. The Zik is one of the cleverest implementations of wireless technology we’ve seen in headphones to date.

For starters, the Zik has serious design cred behind it. It’s another baby of designer Phillipe Starck, who also collaborated with Parrot on speakers, and he seems to have struck gold here. The Zik’s earcups completely enclose the ear — a style made popular again by Beats Audio — but the headset is comfortable to wear and has an elegant look.

The Zik’s sleek look is partly due to the unusual fact that it has no buttons for volume or jumping tracks. To turn up the volume of your streamed music, just swipe your finger up the back of the right earcup. To track up, swipe forward; track down, swipe back. And to pause? Just take off the headset and it knows to stop the music until you put it back on — very smart.

But what about pairing with your cellphone? Yes, you still need to do that, but if your phone has near-field communication (NFC) — the short-range mobile-payments technology found in the Galaxy Nexus and a few other phones — you’ll be saved the trouble. Just tapping the phone to one of the earcups will automatically pair it with the Zik, no typing required.

Want more? How about bone-conduction technology to help cancel noise when you have to take a call. Or the active noise cancellation that detects and stamps out noise both outside and and inside the headset. And the accompanying app, which gives you precise control over your sound, from the width of the soundstage to multiple equalizer.

In our listening test of the Zik, we felt the sound quality was excellent. Both highs and lows sounded clean without distortion, and it could give plenty of oomph when needed. Noise cancellation wasn’t quite as good as, say, the Bose QuiteComfort 15, but it’s fine for most purposes.

Parrot didn’t say when it would be out and what it would cost, so we’ll have to just drool over our photos until then. Are you as impressed with the Zik as we are? Let us know what you want from a pair of wireless headphones in the comments.