Review: Parrot by Starck

review by Bill Palmer

Sixteen hundred dollars. Yeah, you read that correctly. Can any iPhone accessory possibly be worth that kind of price tag? Parrot wants to find out, with this new product designed by famous French product designer Philippe Starck (although the product is named “Zimku” it’s more commonly referred to as “Parrot by Starck”), and more tangibly, it comes in the form of two standalone speaker towers that connect to each other wirelessly. Cone-shaped on bottom, each tower funnels up into a rectangular shape that’s only about five inches wide and one inch deep, with an iPhone/iPod dock on the top of one tower and playback controls on top of the other.



If you’re going to spend the kind of money on an iPod/iPhone stereo system that could instead be used to buy an iPhone and an iPod touch plus all nine colors of iPod nano and still have money left over, then it had better offer a mind blowing experience. Not great. Not excellent. Mind blowing. Nothing less. And after having spent quality time this week with the Parrot by Starck, set up in various positions around the house, I can report back that the experience did in fact blow my mind. Is it perfect? No, and I’ll get to that. Is it worth $1600? As always, that’ll be for each of you to decide after reading the review. But here are my experiences and conclusions.



The first litmus test with any wireless product is ease of setup, and in this case, after taking the two towers out of their rather large box and plugging each into an electrical outlet, I found that there was no wireless setup to even worry about. I placed my iPhone into the dock, hit the play button, and music came out of both speakers. Ideally, wireless products should be as easy to set up as wired ones, and while that’s not always the case with various products I’ve tested, it is with this one.

As far as range, I started with the towers ten feet apart from each other, then twenty, then thirty, then forty, all with success. It wasn’t until I placed them about fifty feet apart (with two walls in between them) that I started to get some flakiness from the second tower. It’s not that the audio quality ever did degrade, just that it started to cut out intermittently at that distance. So figure on being able to use these up to roughly fifty feet apart within the same room, a little less if you’re going to put them in different rooms. In any case you’re probably most likely to position them ten two twenty feet apart in the same room, but it’s nice to have the extra flexibility.



Having passed the setup and range tests, it was time to move on to testing what really matters, which is of course audio quality. The music that comes out of the Parrot by Starck is just plain beautiful. Amazing. Stunning. Pick a word, they’re all understatements. The clarity is exquisite. The higher ranges and lower ranges all sound fantastic.



But then you probably already guessed all of that, based just on the price tag. At this price point, and also at this size, the Parrot by Starck had better go beyond merely delivering beautiful rich music, which you can get from a product a fifth the size and a fifth the price. It needs to offer something substantially more. Sure, you can crank the Starck loud enough to literally wake the neighbors without any loss of audio quality (actually, at its top volume, I think the Starck could not only wake your neighbors but enrage them to the point where they come over to your house and murder you), but it’s not just about high-fidelity volume, either. Placing one tower on each side of my desk, both facing me, I felt so immersed in the music that it seemed to be a part of the room itself as opposed to coming from any particular direction – and that’s what you can’t get from even the best of the $300 desktop dockable systems. It’s quite a price premium, but the immersion does offer an entirely different kind of listening experience.



My only criticism of the Starck is with what you can’t do with it. The included remote impressively also works through walls, all too rare in this market, but lacks the ability to navigate the iPhone’s or iPod’s menus, a feature that’s increasingly commonplace on even $100 systems. And perhaps more importantly, you can’t adjust the Starck’s bass or treble ratio. Not that you’d necessarily want to, seeing how stunning it sounds out of the box. But again, this is a standard inclusion for many less-expensive competing products.



Obviously you have to be at a certain income or wealth level in order to afford the $1600 Parrot by Starck in the first place. But if you are, then consider yourself lucky, as the listening experience is nothing short of amazing. It can also be used as a computer speaker system.

Learn more about the Parrot by Starck at Parrot.