Switching the pair on is easy: press the one obvious button found on the headset, and if you’re wearing the headphones, will make a little drum noise and start to sound like it’s cancelling out a bit of the world (it is).
From there, pair using either Bluetooth on your phone, or if you have NFC equipped, rub the phone on one of the ear pads, kickstarting the Bluetooth handshake for you.
Controlling the headphones is pretty easy, too, with swiping up and down on the right ear pad — which is also a touchpad — controlling the volume level, while swiping left and right will go forward and backward on a track. Touching the ear pad will pause and play a song. It’s an easy system to get your head across.
Once you’re all familiar and you’re good to go, time to run the headphones with the app.
Parrot’s headphones work closely with the Parrot Zik app, a piece of software which will tell you the battery life of your headphones upon load, and then let you turn off the various noise cancellation, equaliser, or concert hall spatial simulation settings with one touch.
If that’s not enough, you can swipe left to right from this screen and control the each of these settings with more granularity, and if you want to go further than that, Parrot even lets you control the audio dynamics on a track by track basis.
For now, we’ll test with most of the effects off, save for noise cancellation, which will utilise several of the included microphones to sample the outside world and then cancel it out by way of double up.
And as usual, we’re starting this off with electronic with Mooro’s “M66R6” and here the synth is solid at both the top and bottom ends of the track, with a solid thud to the sound and a fair amount of room to move as far as volume goes. The Glitch Mob’s “Skullclub” brings a little more in the way of mids, with a more thorough and deeper sound, which really kicks in the bass as the song gets started, the Zik headphones never really losing step and pumping out the sound here.
Even when the bass is hard and heavy, the mids and highs are still just as pronounced, though it is clear the bass is a little more prominent, but otherwise it’s quite balanced.
Next up is rock, and while we’re planning on making the GadgetGuy Sound Test a little more varied in 2015, for now we start with the 2014 test and “Radioactive” by the Imagine Dragons. Like the electronic tests, the bass is quite pronounced, but in this track, the mixing leans harder on the highs, and the headphone is doing a pretty solid job of recreating both, with excellent balance on each, the guitar and synth working together beneath the vocals.
Muse’s “Supremacy” is next, and a little softer on volume but still balanced through the instruments, with strong highs and mids, and clear drums with punch, which is much the same as we hear on Closure In Moscow’s “A Night At The Spleen” with crystal percussion and vocal overlay, with excellent guitars at the high end of the sound spectrum.
Even The Rolling Stones sound pretty solid here, with “Gimme Shelter”’s use of percussion in the background clear just behind the guitars, with the vocal echoing in front. Stevie Ray Vaughn’s “Voodoo Child” is soft on the guitar with a solid tap of the drums, the Zik headphones creating a sound that makes it feel like you’re listening in a small room, and Stevie was playing just for you.
Over to popular music, and the classic music testing piece “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson shows just how strong the bass recreation on these cans is, with balance in the bottom end as the music tackles the middle and MJ’s voice handles the high. The distinction is clear, obvious, and the amount of balance found here — even with Jackson’s clicks heard through it all — make us want this sort of sound for every song. This track on these headphones is masterful, it really is.
Modern music is a little emptier, evident in Jessie J’s “Bang Bang”, which retains balance, but lets you hear just how synthetic the sounds are in the original track, with oomph and yet no real depth to the sounds. That’s not the fault of the headphones; rather, these cans are just pointing out how much sampling is actually going on.
Hip-hop handles better thanks to the complexity of the track overlaying, and the balance is noticeable in the sound of “Can’t Hold Us” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, which has verses spoken in the highs, the mids handled by samples, and a big punch of bass in the back end that is so good, it can’t be ignored.
You can usually tell how good a headphone is with how it handles jazz, and in Dave Brubeck’s “Maria”, you’ll hear clear distinction between sax, piano, drums, and bass, with the headphones not really leaning to one side; it’s all as balanced as it should be, with the sax taking centre stage mostly when it’s on, and then the piano, with subtlety of the high hat from the drums still heard beneath it alongside the rounding of the bass and a too-strong pluck from time to time.
Brass bands sounds great, too, with New Orleanian Kermit Ruffins blasting our ear drums in “Treme Second Line” as each horn is picked up in the mids and horns clearly, none of it gelling together, the vocals on top and not taking over, the bass and drums sitting underneath and not lost. Awesome.
One of our favourites sounds just as solid, too, with Coltrane’s “Blue Train” rich as the saxophone screams, and a level of clarity in the mids to the back that lets you hear the softer notes of a bassist working with the other musicians.
Finally, there’s classical, and with jazz working so well on these headphones, we have high expectations for the sort of sound we’ll have here, starting with Yo-Yo Ma and Claude rolling on the jazz-fused “Baroque in Rhythm” which only consists of a few musicians — piano, cello, drums, and bass — but yet offers a richness to all of them, though the volume is much lower here. The sharp attack of the cello can almost be felt here giving way to the piano, while the pitter patter of the drums on the snare is still clear and evident, with the bass never lost in the back end, all of the musicians playing along harmoniously.
Recreating a piano playing Chopin is also a success here, with high mids and highs on Freddy Kempf’s “Fantasie Impromptu in C”, while Nigel Kennedy’s take on Satie’s “Gymonopédies” is soft yet rich, the orchestra soft underneath it.
Simply put, the Parrot Zik 2.0 headphones pass our headphone test with flying colours, and it’s hard to find a track or a style of music they don’t like, but the feature set isn’t over yet, because these cans do a lot more, and we were testing solely with noise cancelling on and no other EQ settings.
That’s the trick of the Zik 2.0: they come with so much in the way of sound customisation, even if you can find a track the headphones don’t work well with, you’ll still be able to manipulate the sound so that the track does sound amazing.
Beware of the ear cup foam padding, it wont last for very long. Mine spilt opened twice in 6 months.