Drop Announce New Panda Wireless Headphone

Chances are, you’re probably familiar with the company Drop. In case you’re not, they used to be called Massdrop, and their business model was essentially to ‘drop ship’ products. What this means is that they would set up agreements with various manufacturers to take advantage of bulk-order pricing by offering products to consumers via Drop at a lower price than what they would sell for at retail. Thus far it has been incredibly successful, even to the point where Drop have been able to collaborate directly with various manufacturers such as Sennheiser, AKG, HiFiMAN, and Monoprice to offer exclusive Drop products. These collaborations usually consisted of products that were perhaps somewhat slight redesigns of existing products.
Lately, Drop have been teaming up with the likes of THX to release some very interesting and well-regarded headphone amplifiers. But now, they’ve gone ahead and teamed up with THX once again to release something brand new – a set of wireless headphones. They’re called the Panda headphones and they seem to offer quite a lot of value on paper.

At first glance, the Panda looks rather similar to OPPO’s PM-series of headphones. Unfortunately, OPPO suspended their portable audio segment some time ago which was a real shame since the PM-series ticked off many boxes such as offering great sound along with great build quality. The Panda almost looks like a black-out version of those PM headphones. 

However, where the PM-series did offer a premium build, the Panda is apparently mostly crafted out of plastic, whereas cast aluminium has been used for the gimble arms, hinges, etc. So, that’s not to say that the Panda cant feel premium, but it seems unlikely that it would feel quite as special as the old PM-series. 

Perhaps the second hint that the Panda is indeed influenced by the aforementioned OPPO products is that the driver used in the Panda is the same as the one that was used in the OPPO PM-3. In fact, this particular type of driver design – Planar Ribbon Driver – has only been used in the OPPO PM-series of headphones. The design is a derivative of planar magnetic drivers which use a dual-sided magnet array alongside a braced diaphragm.
According to Drop, they had acquired this particular driver technology as well as all other designs from OPPO, and then redesigned the damping system to alleviate some of the apparent darkness in the signature that others had been critical of in the PM-3. As such, they’ve stated that the Panda is “the first portable wireless headphone to deliver full-system sound.”
But, it didn’t just stop there because a wireless set of headphones require their own internal amplifier, and for that Drop have yet again turned to THX to implement some THX-AAA technology for this portion. Apparently, this discreet THX-AAA amplifier can easily power the Panda to volume levels that will suit anyone whilst still having some headroom to spare.
The Bluetooth chip employed here is the Qualcomm QCC5124 which is compatible with a wide range of Bluetooth formats including LDAC, AptX HD, regular AptX, as well as a couple of other formats.One thing that many wireless headphones have is some internal DSP (digital signal processing) trickery, but the Panda reportedly does not employ any form of DSP. The QCC5124 chip does actually have DSP capability on-board, but this has been disabled within the Panda. Instead, Drop have claimed that the sound signature has been achieved entirely due to the driver design and various passive acoustic tuning techniques. However, they’ve also said that, if there is enough interest from users, they might be able to create a dedicated equalization app at some point in the future.   

As with any wireless headphones, battery-life can be a bit of a concern. Thankfully, the Panda should see a battery-life of around 30 hours or more. Quick Charge has also been implemented, which will get you around 3 hours of playback time with only 10-minutes of charging via the USB-C port. Unfortunately it does not seem like the Panda offers any ANC (active noise cancellation), but Drop have stated that the fully-closed design of this headphone can create isolation which is “on-par with deep-setting IEM isolation”. What is unclear is if by “deep-setting IEM” they mean that it’s on-par with the isolation provided with something like the ER-series from Etymotic. That seems very unlikely, but if it’s true then that would essentially negate the need for ANC anyways.
There is also a regular analogue input which means that you could still use the Panda with devices that don’t have built-in Bluetooth capabilities, or if you simply want to connect it to a high-quality DAC / AMP system. 

Pricing and Availability

Drop have mentioned that they are aiming to launch the Panda towards the end of January, with the most likely date thus far being on the 27th. However, that is just the official launch date, whereas the actual date the the first units will start shipping seems to be closer towards the Summer months, but it might be sooner. As previously mentioned, the whole idea behind Drop was to offer products at a reduced price, and so the target is always outright bang-for-buck value. Thankfully, it’s no different with the Panda as these will come with an MSRP of just $ 399.99.