I love my bone conduction headphones. I wear them when I’m running so that I can hear traffic approaching. I also love them for noisy environments where I need to put in earplugs—since the headphones don’t require my ear canal to be open, I can use earplugs and still be able to hear my bone-conducted music. But there's no denying that bone conduction headphones offer a rather different experience than traditional earbuds. What’s going on with this strange technology, and what are the downsides? I’ll explain.
SHOKZ OpenRun Bone Conduction Headphones $109.95 at Amazon $179.95 Save $70.00 Get Deal Get Deal $109.95 at Amazon $179.95 Save $70.00How bone conduction works
That's the only part of hearing that you'll need to understand for this explainer. But if you're curious, after the vibrations get to those little bones, they are then transmitted to the inner ear. There, in the cochlea, the sound waves are translated into signals sent to our brain and then further processed into our perception of sound. All of that is outside the scope of this article, though. We’re just interested in how the vibrations get from our headphones to the middle ear.
There’s another way to vibrate those middle ear bones, though: you can do it directly, by sending vibrations right through the head. According to legend, Beethoven would bite his conducting wand and hold it against his piano, so that he could “hear” through his teeth. You can try this right now, with any old earbuds: turn on some music and hold your earbud’s speaker against your tooth. You’ll hear the music. Wild, huh? You can even buy novelty lollipops that play music through your teeth—bite down on the candy and you'll hear a song.
AMOS Music Lollipops, 4-Pack Gift Box $21.59 at Amazon $29.99 Save $8.40 Get Deal Get Deal $21.59 at Amazon $29.99 Save $8.40Bone conduction headphones take advantage of this phenomenon. Like all headphones, they have tiny little speakers. But instead of pointing those little speakers into our ear canals to vibrate the air and then our eardrums, the headphones are designed to press their little speakers against a bone—usually the cheekbone right in front of the ear. Technically, they are also conducting the sound through soft tissues like skin, muscle, and fat, but the bones do a really good job of transmitting sound and are what the technology is named after.
First, wear them normally. The little speakers will be on the bony spot right in front of your ear. Turn on some music. Now pull the speakers gently away from your head, so they’re no longer making contact. Yes, you will still hear the music, but it will be tinny and quiet compared to when you were wearing them normally. This shows that bone conduction really is delivering a lot of the sound that you're hearing.
Some headphones use a hybrid approach on purpose. The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 headphones have an extra set of speakers for air-based transmission in addition to the speakers intended for bone conduction. This tends to give a better balance of frequencies, and thus better sound quality than headphones that use only bone conduction.
Is bone conduction safe for your ears?
There is one way that bone conduction headphones can be better for your ears, as I noted above: If you’re in a noisy environment, you can wear earplugs to protect your ears from the loud sounds around you, and you can wear bone-conduction headphones to deliver a bit of music to fill the silence.
I started wearing the earplugs-and-headphones combo this summer when I was doing a lot of outdoor workouts near a loud air conditioner (I also realized that the sound of dropping the bar was actually pretty darn loud as well, dropping the bar being a routine part of Olympic weightlifting). So I got some Loop earplugs, and found that not only could I still hear my music through my Aftershokz Aeropex Mini (an older version of what is now the Shokz OpenRun Mini), I was able to turn the volume to a near-minimum and still hear it just fine. Overall, my ears are getting a lot less noise exposure, so that’s a win-win.
Loop Experience 2 Ear Plugs $27.95 at Amazon $34.95 Save $7.00 Get Deal Get Deal $27.95 at Amazon $34.95 Save $7.00What are the downsides of bone conduction headphones?
When I wear bone conduction headphones with earplugs, I don’t get great sound quality either. Just like your voice sounds different with your ears plugged, the sound mix of bone conduction plus earplugs is not quite the same as what you’d hear through a good pair of quality headphones.
Personally, I find these minor downsides are balanced by the advantages that bone conduction headphones provide. I don’t need to hear my podcasts in crystal-clear audio while I’m running; I just want to be able to tell what the hosts are saying while also listening for approaching cars. When I do want to listen to music in high fidelity, I do that at home, with a nice pair of noise-canceling headphones.
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