Old Zik 2 to new Zik 3

Parrot is a really strange company. After just a little over a year and pretty ligtht usage the left ear cup’s cushion of my Zik 2 broke. A seam just opened revealing the foam. It was obvious that the cushion parts are just glued together and not stitched. Pretty shameful. I returned the full headphone to the dealer, it was still under warrenty. In Parrot’s spare part shop there are replacement cushions avaiable, for Zik 2 and 3. So I expected a repair and exchange of the cushion. Far from it! After four weeks I received a notification from my dealer that Parrot refused a repair and I would get a full refund.

Well, I do not like this kind of customer care because at least I would expect to be offered a choice – get back the broken item or get the refund. In this special case I am not so sad about this outcome because there is the newer Zik 3 for almost the same price so I happily accepted the refund and got myself a new Zik 3 in camel leather – at least it was advertised as leather but in fact it is the same faux-leather as from the Zik 2.

Changes Zik 2 to Zik 3

There are quite some changes from the Zik 2 to the Zik 3. First of all the sound is different and to my ears in most aspects way better than with the Zik 2. The older Zik 2 had a strong emphasis on the mid frequency range, my equalizer profiles always looked like an inverse Gaussian distribution. The Zik 3 is much more balanced in this respect, which I like a lot. The older Zik 2 showed the strange side effect that the noise canceling changed the sound quite significantly. Without enabled noise canceling it sounded a little dull and flat, with noise canceling enabled it became fuller and richer. The Zik 3 is neutral in this respect, noise canceling cancels noise, nothing more. Also an improvement.

I also like the direct USB audio which also works flawlessly with Linux. When connected via USB to a PC or similar the Zik 3 is detected as a USB audio device and can be used transparently as a sound card. The sound quality then is the maximum you can get from the Zik 3 since audio is played back at a maximum of a 24 bits per sample and up to 48kHz. This is a significant difference to the SBC encoded audio stream via Bluetooth. In USB mode the most neutral equalizer setting already gives a very nice sound.

While talking about Bluetooth, the Zik 3 does only support SBC as A2DP codec. While the Zik 2 also offered AAC the Zik 3 only supports SBC – so also no APX. And while talking about equalizer I have the impression that the dynamic range of the sound / equalizer settings is drastically reduced. With the Zik 2 I was able to tune the sound into areas where it started to hurt. With the Zik 3 even maximum settings only results in subtle changes. But since the overall sound is much better I do not mind that too much.

There are also slight changes to the mechanical parts. The size of the headband is increased i.e. the Zik 3 fits better on a little bigger heads. The power button changed from concave to convex so that one can not push it accident that easily anymore. Indeed this happened to me with the Zik 2 from time to time. The cushions of the ear cups are a little stiffer and, according to Parrot, not prone to fall apart anymore. We’ll see that.

Another change concerns charging. The new Zik 3 supports wireless charging via Qi so you do not have to fiddle with an USB cable if you don’t want to. The Qi coil sits in the right ear cup. But obviously Parrot designed it in a strange way so it does not charge with many Qi chargers. After the release of the Zik 3 they became painfully aware of that and started to include a Qi charging pod with every Zik 3 – even in headphone color, cool!

But when I got mine I recognized that the security seals were doubled, i.e. the package has been opened, why? While unboxing I found that my package contained an ugly black Qi charging pod instead of my headphone’s camel color. This is yet again pretty typical for Parrot’s customer care. After having decided to include the charger in all products they opened all existing packages and added the charger but ignored the color. My dealer confirmed that they have a whole bunch of Zik 3 with doubled seals and the ones they opened all have the wrong colored charging pod. Oh dear…