Bone conduction headphones are an incredible new technology. The thought of hearing music without headphones or speakers is a bit mind-blowing to some, causing many people to try it not because they have to but because it’s so interesting. Though bone conduction headphones have pros, they also have a clear set of cons you should be aware of before buying them.
Bone conduction headphones’ main pros are near-perfect environmental awareness and the fact that they are more hygienic since they don’t block your ears. But on the con side, they don’t have perfect sound quality, they aren’t as safe as they may seem, and they can still damage your hearing.
Many people will find the advantages of bone conduction headphones good enough to negate the disadvantages, but it’s essential to be mindful of the cons to get the best results from your headphones. Let’s examine the pros and cons of bone conduction headphones more closely.
How Bone Conduction Headphones Work
To really understand the pros and cons of bone conduction headphones, let’s take a quick look at how they work.
Regular headphones, earphones, and speakers use a method called “air conduction.” These devices have speakers of varying sizes that vibrate, creating waves in the air around them. These waves travel into your outer ears, where they get channeled to the eardrum, which passes the vibrations into small bones in the middle ear.
The middle ear bones vibrate the cochlea, which is in your inner ear and contains fluid. The fluid vibrates, causing small hair cells to bend and release chemicals that are then detected by your auditory nerve, which carries the sounds to your brain.
Bone conduction headphones bypass the outer ears entirely. Instead of letting the eardrum pass the vibrations through the bones into your inner ears, bone conduction headphones vibrate against your skull, directly passing the sound into the tiny bones in your middle ear.
So, instead of sitting inside your ears or covering them and broadcasting the sound waves through the air, bone conduction headphones sit against your skull and pass the sound waves as vibrations through the bone.
Now that we understand what makes bone conduction headphones different, we can examine their pros and cons.
The Pros Of Bone Conduction Headphones
Bone conduction headphones have various pros that can benefit some people.
Bone Conduction Headphones Are Safe For Outdoor Use
The number one selling point for bone conduction headphones is the fact that they are much safer for outdoor activities, like sports, than regular headphones or earphones. You can see this clearly when you look at the marketing of the best-selling brand of bone conduction headphones, Shokz. All of Shokz’s marketing, and even the names of their products, target some kind of sport.
The logic behind this is that bone conduction headphones don’t block your ears and offer no active or noise canceling, so you can be more aware of your environment than you would be with any other type of headphones or earphones. When you’re running, for example, you can hear the traffic around you and be fully aware of what’s happening in your environment.
With this in mind, many racing events and marathons (that traditionally don’t allow any type of headphones) now allow bone conduction headphones. A notable example is the Cardiff 10K, but this is true of most marathons worldwide, though some still don’t allow any type of headphones, including bone conduction.
Listen To Music When You Need To Maintain Awareness
Tied to the first advantage, the fact that you can maintain near-perfect environmental awareness also helps people who enjoy listening to music while working but work in environments where they have to remain fully aware, like a busy office or factory floor.
When you have bone conduction headphones, you can listen to your music, audiobook, or podcast while working. However, you can still follow conversations, hear announcements, and even answer the phone without pausing your music or necessarily turning down the volume.
It also helps since the only other way to do this is to have a radio playing music somewhere, which could irritate some people around you, and some people might be able to hear it over the phone. Though many businesses have music playing somewhere, it might not always be the type of music you enjoy; bone conduction allows you to listen to your own music without bothering others.
They Are Comfortable To Wear
This is a bit of a subjective advantage since not everyone finds bone conduction headphones comfortable; some people don’t enjoy the vibrations against their scalp or find that the headphones get in the way of their glasses.
However, those who find in-ear earphones uncomfortable, like people with cauliflower ears, often prefer bone conduction headphones because they cause no pressure inside your ears.
The same applies to over-ear headphones. Many people don’t like wearing them because they find them too heavy or don’t like how the headphones press into their ears, especially if the cups aren’t great. All our ears are different, making it even more difficult for manufacturers to design headphones that will suit everyone.
Bone conduction headphones have none of those aspects to make them uncomfortable, so many people prefer them.
People With Hearing Loss Can Listen To Music
People who suffer from certain types of hearing loss can listen to music using bone conduction headphones. It depends on the type of hearing loss and which parts of the person’s ears are affected by it.
For example, if the hearing damage is limited to the outer ear up to the eardrum, bone conduction headphones will work for them. In fact, many modern hearing aids are based on bone conduction technology, and the famous deaf composer Ludwig Van Beethoven used bone conduction (through his jawbone) to hear the music he was playing.
People with hearing loss can use bone conduction headphones to listen to music, podcasts, or even movies if their hearing loss isn’t caused by damage to the auditory nerve, cochlea, or their brains.
They Are Hygienic
Medical science has proven that earphones, especially the in-ear type, can cause various diseases and health problems. This happens on two levels:
- Dirty earbuds can carry bacteria. You may use them when your ears are dirty, then clean your ears before using the dirty earbuds again. A build-up of earwax on the earbuds will increase the likelihood of bacteria sticking to them, and the chances get even higher when multiple people use the same earbuds. Every time you use them, the bacteria spread into your ears.
- Blocking your ears creates a warm, moist, dark environment – the perfect breeding ground for bacteria.
Bone conduction headphones carry neither of these risks since they never enter any part of your ears, and they don’t block your ears at all, which helps to avoid the spread and growth of harmful bacteria in your ears.
They Can Help People With Tinnitus
Tinnitus is a constant beeping or bumping noise in your ears, often caused by hearing loss. People who suffer from tinnitus often can’t listen to music using regular headphones because, depending on the type of tinnitus, the sealing of their ears can sometimes make it worse.
Bone conduction headphones are a safe way for most tinnitus sufferers to listen to music. Some medical experts even use these headphones to play tinnitus therapy sounds to their patients. Though bone conduction headphones won’t cure tinnitus, they could help to soothe the symptoms and make their lives a little bit better.
The Cons Of Bone Conduction Headphones
So far, bone conduction headphones sound pretty awesome, and don’t get me wrong – they are. But the advantages are only half the story, and we must also consider the cons.
They Don’t Have Perfect Environmental Awareness
People often buy bone conduction headphones believing that they offer perfect environmental awareness. This is confirmed by various studies that found that bone conduction headphones do not impair story comprehension.
The problem is that your brain can still only process a limited number of stimuli. For example, the effect of bone conduction headphones while driving will be similar to listening to music on a car radio. Though it doesn’t directly affect your environmental awareness, it could cause distractions and, if it’s too loud, can still reduce your environmental awareness.
Similar to how we tend to subconsciously turn down the volume on a car radio when we’re looking for something (since it reduces the number of stimuli for our brains to process, making it easier to focus), you should be mindful of when and where you use bone conduction headphones, and keep the volume low.
Lower Sound Quality
Bone conduction technology is improving in leaps and bounds, but you must keep in mind that these headphones are not for audiophiles.
Passing sound waves through your bones with enough clarity that you can hear the music is already a major technological accomplishment, so excellent sound quality is not one of the selling points of bone conduction headphones. You will often notice that the sound isn’t quite as perfect as it would be over regular in-ear earphones.
One factor that the manufacturers have been trying to improve for quite some time is the bass response, and they have made incredible strides in that arena, but now the bass can sometimes be so overpowering that it drowns out the mid-range.
This doesn’t mean the sound quality is terrible, as such, but don’t expect the same quality you would get from high-end air conduction headphones or earphones. It will be comparable to the sound of a radio playing softly in your room.
Low Sound Volume
Another aspect that manufacturers of bone conduction headphones have been trying to get right but haven’t entirely managed yet is the matter of low volume. Bone conduction headphones are notorious for not reaching the same volume levels as regular headphones and earphones. However, that’s false–the in-ear seal is lacking, not the volume.
One of the reasons why regular earphones and headphones can have such high volume levels despite how small their speakers are is that they seal your ears to some extent. This allows less outside noise to interfere with the audio, and it also means that the sound has nowhere to go except into your ears.
Bone conduction headphones don’t have that seal, so you don’t hear the music at its actual volume. Some people use earplugs, which does help, but that negates the environmental awareness advantage, so it’s only useful in specific scenarios, such as if you want to listen to your music more clearly when you’re home and don’t want to spend more money to buy extra headphones.
They Can Still Damage Your Hearing
There’s a common misconception that bone conduction headphones can’t cause hearing damage, but that’s not true at all. In fact, they can often damage your hearing without you even noticing.
Most hearing damage is not located in the outer or middle ear but in the inner ear – the same part of the ear that bone conduction headphones interact with.
The problem is high volume levels. Just like with regular headphones, bombarding your cochlea with high volumes will weaken the sensitive hair cells, making them less efficient at creating the chemicals the auditory nerve requires. In other words, bone conduction headphones can cause hearing damage.
To make the problem even worse, the fact that bone conduction headphones seem to have lower volume levels means that you won’t notice how loud they already are, so you might be tempted to increase the volume even more. Before you do that, plug your ears with your fingers – you might be shocked to find how loud they are.
They Can Contribute To Vertigo
This won’t happen to everyone who uses them, but some users have noticed that bone conduction headphones cause (or contribute to) vertigo, though the reasons aren’t clear. Sales representatives often tell you that their particular brand contains “anti-vertigo technology,” but it’s also unclear what they mean by that.
It seems that vertigo mainly happens in two scenarios:
- People who are already prone to getting vertigo or motion sickness then start using bone conduction headphones; and
- People who use bone conduction headphones while driving or riding a bicycle.
It also seems to be somewhat tied to volume, so don’t increase the volume above about 60%, no matter how tempted you may be.
They Are Expensive
Though bone conduction headphones aren’t expensive compared to high-end earphones and headphones, like Apple’s AirPods Pro range, it’s important to remember that they don’t offer the same sound quality. In reality, bone conduction headphones are quite a bit more expensive when you compare them on a sound quality vs. price ratio.
However, it’s also important to remember that the real benefit isn’t the sound quality but the environmental awareness. On the other hand, you can get AirPods Pro with adaptive transparency (and much better sound quality) for a similar price.
So, unless you need bone conduction headphones for another reason, like hearing loss or participating in marathons, they might not be worth the price.
Conclusion
Bone conduction headphones are incredible devices, and some people will find them truly helpful. But they are not without their cons, and as tempted as many people might be to try out this new technology, it’s crucial to compare both sides of the coin before spending money. If you can, borrow a pair and try them first, then decide if bone conduction headphones are what you’re looking for.