I just recently learned that this is a thing that exists. I’ve had a couple audiology tests that use these weird headphones with firm rubber balls where normally expect to see the speakers; the rubber balls sit on your temporal bone, and there’s a metal bar the wraps around your head connecting them and giving them pressure to kinda squeeze your head.
The sound experience was pretty wild - my ears were completely open, so I could still hear ambient noises, but the sounds from the headphones were just kinda there… like it didn’t sound like they were coming from anywhere, but like beamed directly into my brain.
I was curious if these were exclusive for audiology testing or if there were commercial variants for listening to music and such… hit the ol’ search engine, and lo and behold: there are actually quite a few commercial variants!
- TLDR -
Anywho, I’m intrigued as hell, and am curious if anyone here has experience with bone conduction headphones. Lots of questions:
Which brand/model are you using?
How’s the sound quality?
How’s the sound leak?
What kind of music do you use it to listen to? (my poison of choice is symphonic metal, with emphasis on the symphonic bits – looking for that full range hit everything from the flutes to the howler monkeys :P)
Are they comfortable to wear? For how long?
Do you get any skin irritation or even breakdown where it contacts your temple?
Does the hook part wrap around your ears without any pressure points?
Does the behind-the-head band bounce around when you’re walking or running?
How much space is between the band and the back of your head/neck? (I think my noggin is a bit on the smaller side, and I have basically no hair… one of the manufacturers makes one with a smaller sized band, which might be a good selling point for me)
How’s the battery life?
How long have you had it?
When do you use it? (working out, at work, etc)
Do they stay put, or do you need to reposition them frequently?
Anything else to comment on?
If you’re still looking (yeah I stalked your post history to get here), I use a pair of aftershokz bone conduction headphones.
The sound quality is OK but notably worse than my overear noise cancelling stuff.
Still clearly two or three steps up from phone speakers in quality.
The quality of the headphones themselves isn’t great though, the power button fell off after 3 years of regular use, and now the rubber covering is tearing and peeling.
Also, after a few days of heavy use I get a weird headache - but I’m not sure if it’s that the heavy use tends to correlate with busy days at work so I forget to drink enough water, and I get less sleep too.
Do love that I can still get ambient sound. Makes me much less likely to miss my stop when commuting home.
I ended up with a pair of Shokz OpenRun Pro - pretty hefty sale at the local BestBuy, so I jumped on it.
No complaints! 👍
Lol damn you went way back.
I tend to post more in disagreement than advice or support; a personal failing I reckon. So it’s nice to find less oppositional things to engage with.
I’m glad you got a good pair of headphones. 🤝
It’s all good. Intent in the other thread wasn’t meant to be anywhere near as confrontational as what it turned into. That was all supposed to start and stop with a deliberately stupid commentary on Lord of the Rings, lol. The mods’ removal of that comment pissed me off; the comment I was actually replying to was mildly annoying at worst for being off topic… but when mods set the stage to escalate like that, I have a bad habit of poking the bear.