Headphone Reviews

Measurements

The Parrot Zik has a vibration sensor in the right earpiece that puts it into pause mode when no skin vibrations are present. Because my measurement head is dead (poor thing) it doesn't have vibrations in its skin, and therefore I was unable to measure these cans in anything but passive, wired mode. Unfortunately, these headphones sound pretty darn sad unless their internal DSP is doing the necessary corrections. So, the measurements shown above are NOT indicative of their performance when turned on. I will make a couple of comments though.

As you can see from the compensated frequency response curves, the Zik is quite flat and well extended in the bass. The 30Hz square wave has good shape. The THD curve shows little distortion, even to the lowest frequencies. And the impulse response, while showing some ring, is fairly clean and damps fairly quickly.

The big problem is the obvious and large feature between 800Hz and 8000Hz and the severely misshapen 300Hz square wave, which is echoed in the large change in impedance and phase between these frequencies.

I suspect these headphones are engineered to have a fairly simple and straightforward, though large, problem that can be readily corrected by the DSP processing in the headphones.

When I first got these cans I plugged them into my burn-in station and listened passively for a few minutes. I was deeply discouraged by what I heard. Once I powered them up though, I found them to be remarkably better sounding. I'll simply say you should buy the spare battery and never listen to these cans passively, and leave it at that.