11 Mar Parrot Zik Headphones
The Parrot Zik headphones, designed by Philippe Starck, are a beautiful blend of sleek design and impressive performance.
The Parrot Zik can be used wirelessly or wired (with the supplied 3.5mm cable). With built-in bluetooth and NFC, connecting a phone was as simple as touching the phone to the earpiece (with a NFC enabled phone).
The right earpiece has touch sensitive controls – swiping your finger across the earpiece will forward to the next track, tapping the earpiece will pause the track and by swiping up and down the volume can be adjusted. If you take the headphones off your head the Zik knows and will pause the current track and resume once you have put them back on. These headphones are full of technological gadgetry!
The Parrot Zik have a chic, slick design. The exterior of the headphone cups are made of a matte black plastic, the top of the headband is wrapped in supple black leather and the metal frame sports a matte steel finish. There’s also a discrete flash of orange – a telltale sign of a Starck design. There are no visible buttons apart from a small on/off touch button under the earphone.
Parrot have their very own free app for the Zik which is extremely useful. You can check the battery level, have full control of the Graphic Equalizer, activate Noise Cancellation, and control the “Parrot Concert Hall” audio effect. This allows you to simulate a virtual musical scene, controlling the dimensions of the “virtual” room and the orientation of the loudspeakers in the room. Using the graphic equaliser controls, the sound quality was very impressive, giving a solid performance with no distortion on deep base.
Another great feature of the Zik is the noise cancelling technology. To insulate you from external noise, Parrot has developed an ultra-high performance active noise cancellation system which eliminates up to 25dB of ambient noise. This is fully controlled by Zik’s own custom-made Parrot Audio Suite app.
The Zik headphones have several built-in microphones to fully support making and recieving phone calls via bluetooth when paired with your phone. All the microphones work together to cancel out surrounding noise and focus on just your voice, with good results. However you do find yourself talking loudly as they do a very good job of blocking out all background noise.
Whilst the price may seem a little on the high side these headphones are beautifully designed, and oozing technological features. If you’re in the market for a decent pair of high end headphones these are definitely worth checking out.
