We all know the different types of headphones available on the market. There’s over ear headphones and earbuds. But what if there was a kind of headphone that didn’t blast sound directly into your ears at all? What if you could listen to music by blasting sound into your bones?
That’s exactly what the Aftershokz Bone Conduction Headphones are doing. Rather than having the sound travel to your inner ears through your ear drums and ear canal, the sound it getting there through vibrations travelling directly to the inner ear and bypassing the ear drum. This is a method that has been overlooked by headphone companies until now, and is one of the main ways that sound gets to your ears.
This might be a cool idea, but what exactly makes it better than normal headphones? Well the biggest thing that bone conduction headphones have over “normal” headphones is safety, especially when it comes to listening to music while jogging or biking. Normally if you’re listening to music while doing these activities, you cannot hear things like oncoming traffic. Listening via headphones that use bone conduction eliminates that problem, and ensures that you can still hear ambient noise such as traffic.
The other main thing that bone conduction headphones have over other headphones is that normal headphones tend to wear out your ear drum rather fast, and people who often listen to music at loud volumes are at a great risk of becoming at least partially deaf sooner in life. Bone conduction headphones bypass the ear drum altogether, meaning that it is not going to wear out, and your hearing is much better preserved.
There are a number of Aftershokz models, ranging from $70 to $120, and you can pick up a pair of your own from the Aftershokz website.
