Bone conduction – it may sound slightly unpleasant on first hearing, perhaps something akin to the reported practice of the ancient Scythians of drinking from the skulls of their enemies, but it is, in fact, a very clever method of delivering sound straight to your cochlea whilst cutting out all that messy ear canal/eardrum nonsense.
The ‘tech’ behind sensing sound through the bones of the skull actually dates back to the 15th century (in a way) and was in fact how famed German ivory tickler Ludvig van Beethoven managed to keep playing the piano once he lost his hearing. However, despite old LvB being able to keep pumping out tune after tune, it wasn’t until 2008, 181 years after Ludy’s death that the first bone conduction headphones went on sale.
Today, there are bone conduction headphones, or bonephones as they’re more colloquially known. They are mainly targeted towards the sporting community, due to the fact that they’re safer than conventional headphones as users can fully hear the world around them. The sealed units also tend to have a high degree of water resistance, making them ideal for dealing with sweat, rain and, in some cases, even with the swimming pool.
How do they work? Magic. Beyond that, basically, your audio, either streamed or stored on-board, is converted to vibrations by a transducer, that then wibble wobbles across the temporal bone of your skull straight to the inner ear where it gets fired over the auditory nerve, slap bang, right into your brain.
Some bone conduction headphones rely solely on a Bluetooth link with a separate smart device, others rely solely on inbuilt storage you can drag and drop audio files onto, and some have both. Which ones you go for very much depends on whether you actually own audio files or, like so many these days, just use online streaming services.
In any event, it needs to be pointed out that sound quality will be nowhere as good as conventional headphones, but for background music when running, cycling or in any situation where you need to remain fully aware of your surroundings, get it through your thick skull, bonephones rock.
Best bone conduction headphones at a glance:
- Best for running like you’re being chased: Shokz OpenPro Run - £160, Amazon
- Best for simply the best: Creative Outlier Free Pro+ - £120, Amazon
- Best for everyday al fresco audio: Haylou PurFree BC01 - £100, Amazon
- Best for budget bone conduction: Kiprun BC500 - £80, Decathlon
- Best for working from home: Shokz OpenComm2 - £200, Amazon
- Best for an alternative to bone conduction: Shokz OpenFit - £179, Amazon
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Shokz OpenPro Run
Best for: Running like you’re being chased
Ludicrously light, comfortable and secure, the OpenPro Run by Shokz not only states the intended usage scenario loud and clear in the name, but also comes ‘Race Approved’ by England Athletics (the official governing body), so you know you’re good to go. Indeed, worn without playing music (bear with me), it’d be enormously easy to forget you were wearing them at all.
Featuring Bluetooth 5.1 and no internal storage, the connection with your phone is strong and stable, so you needn’t worry about the signal dropping, meaning you can endure the great outdoors indulging in the pastime of your choice for up to 10 hours, listening to your smartphones-stored/streamed audio or taking phone calls, safe in the knowledge that the IP565 rating will keep your bonephones safe in a sudden shower.
Sound quality is decent, made better by the inclusion of bass enhancement, clear and detailed and not muffled like some other options, while operation is made easy by the use of nicely sized buttons to help avoid all the awkward fumbling you’d otherwise be stuck with.
Coming complete with a Shokz app, here you can adjust the EQ between ‘Standard’ and ‘Vocal’ and turn multipoint pairing on and off, which is generally all you need.
Finally, charging comes courtesy of a magnetic connection and quick charge means that 5 minutes gives you 1.5 hours of playback.
As I said at the start, with ‘Run’ right in the name, these bonephones from Shokz are aimed at the athletic, and having put them through their paces I can confirm that for pounding pavements there are none better.
Tech type: Bluetooth 5.1
Internal storage: No
Microphone: Yes
Battery life: 10-hours
Charging time: One-hour
Weight: 29g
Buy now £160.00, Amazon
Creative Outlier Free Pro+
Best for: Simply the best
I recently jumped in at the deep end with reviews of the Best Headphones for Swimming, however I didn’t get hold of these bonephones beauties in time for that, but now I’ve had the privilege of having them vibe my head, I see the absolute sense in going Pro(+).
Okay, firstly, these come IPX8 rated, meaning they’re perfect for swimming, capable of being submerged at 1.5 metres for up to 40 minutes, plus they have Bluetooth 5.3 for the most stable of connections to your smartphone, seeing as Bluetooth’s 2.4GHz signal doesn’t penetrate water well due to no-fun physics. The Outlier Free Pro+ also features a built-in MP3-player with 8GB of storage, so you can simply drag and drop audio files directly onto it using a computer and access all that audio goodness via the three pleasingly defined buttons on the right arm.
Featuring support for AAC; SBC; FLAC, MP3, WAV and APE codecs, the Pro+’s transducers can be adjusted to suit the shape of your head to ensure the best fit and that you don’t skip a beat. And you won’t want to, because when you’re ploughing through the pool the motivational music that these can pulse into your skull is well-balanced, nicely bassy and rich.
A fully charged battery is good for 10 hours of playback (remember, you don’t just have to use them in the pool) and Multipoint connectivity means you can have them hooked up to your phone and another device simultaneously. A built-in microphone means you chat with abandon (a mic plug is included to avoid ingress when underwater) and switching to Low Latency mode means you can enjoy synchronised playback of audio and video too.
On top of all that comes support for Siri and Google Assistant, so you’re never more than a vocal command from whatever you need to know.
Well-priced at £120, the Creative Outlier Free Pro+ is available in two two-tone colourways of Midnight Blue and Matte Black or Midnight Blue and Fiery Orange, meaning they look as good as they sound to boot.
Tech type: Bluetooth 5.3
Internal storage: 8GB
Microphone: Yes
Battery life: 10-hours
Charging time: 2-hours
Weight: 32g
Buy now £120.00, Amazon
Haylou PurFree BC01
Best for: Everyday al fresco audio
Connecting to your phone over Bluetooth 5.2 for strong connectivity, the BC01 features no built-in storage, so be glad that BT is doing all the heavy lifting. And it does, because sound quality here is almost on a par with the £160 Shokz featured above, thanks to that aforementioned firm BT working in perfect partnership with the Qualcomm mid-level 3044 chipset at the centre of the BC01’s build.
With a battery life good for up to eight hours, the PurFree lends itself to outdoor pursuits, such as jogging or cycling, but is also equally suited to being just your day-to-day listen-to while walking or on the commute. However be warned as with all bone conduction cans, there is audio leakage, so you may risk annoying other travellers on quiet trains/planes/shared automobiles.
Protection rated as IP67, the BC01 is hard as nails when it comes to fending off dust, dirt and sand, and it can resist water at a depth of up to one metre for short periods of time, but while you could play in the pool with these, there are other options much better suited to submersion.
Featuring dual microphones and noise reduction for clear calls, volume buttons are easily accessible on the right arm, while the multifunction button has been cleverly positioned away from them on the side of the right transducer, meaning you can just tap to play/pause, skip, take phone calls, or summon Siri or Google Assistant.
Great for everyday use, Haylou’s PurFree BC01 is an exceptional pick at this price.
Tech type: Bluetooth 5.2
Internal storage: n/a
Microphone: Yes
Battery life: 8-hours
Charging time: 1.5-hours
Weight: 28g
Buy now £100.00, Amazon
Kiprun BC500
Best for: Budget bone conduction
Bone connection technology isn’t just for the weighty wallet. Indeed, while you’re going to be asked to pay a premium for the likes of longer battery life and better strains of Bluetooth, you don’t have to be emptying well over £100 from your bank account to get bonephones on your bonce.
Take this fine example by way of proof. These are the BC500 headphones from Kiprun, essentially the tech arm of Decathlon, and they give you bone conduction for a far more attainable £80, while still packing Bluetooth 5.1, double DSP microphones with ‘Vocal Booster’ for clear calls, a six-hour battery life, and even Multipoint pairing.
Not convinced? Feel that anything this reasonably priced must underperform? Well, you’re right to be sceptical, but what if I told you that the tech experts over at Kiprun worked in conjunction with Shokz on the BC500, meaning they employ the same engineering as used in Shokz’s own bonephones? Yes, I know, game-changer.
Comfortable and light too at just 29g, an IP55 rating means they can resist sweat and rain, but definitely not anything any deeper or its audio over, and while the build quality may not feel as premium as the over-£100 options featured here, the 100 per cent Thermoplastic Polyurethane frame lends the Kiprun elasticity and resistance to oil, grease, and abrasion.
Affordable and well-engineered by bone conduction experts, for top audio tech at under a ton, you can’t go wrong.
Tech type: Bluetooth 5.1
Internal storage: n/a
Microphone: Yes
Battery life: 6-hours
Charging time: 2-hours
Weight: 29g
Buy now £80.00, Decathlon
Shokz OpenComm2
Best for: Help working from home
Okay, heads up. Because life isn’t one long leisurely run in the woods and sometimes some graft has to be endured too, bone conduction tech from Shokz has made its way from bonephones suitable for sports to those distinctly designed for the office. Welcome to OpenComm2, a slick Shokz offering that takes all the company’s bone conduction know-how and adds in a DSP noise-cancelling boom mic to make it the ideal way to operate in the office.
Obviously, with hybrid working proving the best way forward for a healthy work-life balance, many are upgrading their tech when it comes to both computers and comms, and when you work in a home or office environment where you need to focus on calls and the environment about you countless hours a day, for the sake of your ear canals, bone conduction will provide the most comfort.
And the OpenComm2 are incredibly comfortable to the point that, if you weren’t working, you’d forget you had them on, thanks to an overall weight of 35g. What’s more the audio is excellent – clear as a crystal bell on calls, while that movable boom mic pics up your voice with utter clarity and noise cancelling eliminates background sound like it was never there.
Coming complete with a Shokz Loop110 wireless adapter that’s both PC and Mac compatible, should you need to move out of Bluetooth range, this do-dah will extend your range to 30 metres and keep your connection stable as stone.
The integrated controls are easy to find and operate and even come Zoom Certified to let you control functions during video calls, Multipoint pairing allows for dual connectivity, and the battery is good for a whole 16 hours of talk time and eight hours of listening, so you’re good for a whole day of being about your business.
A cool bit of kit for any office worker, be that home, way or hybrid, Shokz has nailed it again, making the OpenComm2 the go-to bonephones for business.
Tech type: Bluetooth 5.1
Internal storage: n/a
Microphone: DSP noise cancelling boom mic
Battery life: Talk time: 16-hours. Listen time: 8-hours
Charging time: 60-minutes
Weight: 35g
Buy now £200.00, Amazon
Shokz OpenFit
Best for: An alternative to bone conduction
If the idea of sending vibrations through your own skull sends you a little cold, but you don’t get on with earbuds, there is an alternative. Okay, it’s from Shokz again, but this is their area of expertise, so learn from the best…
Rather than using bone conduction to get the audio across, the OpenFit also transmits sound without blocking your ear but by using air conduction to push audio into your ears without any physical violation, leaving you free to continue observing the outside world.
Clipping comfortably and securely around your ear, once you’ve found your prime position, calls can be enjoyed with complete clarity and, thanks to DirectPitch, music comes at you with bright highs and decent lows.
Linking to your phone over Bluetooth 5.2, AI call noise cancellation technology helps keep out unwanted white noise from around when on important calls, and IP54 water resistance keeps rain and or sweat at bay when out and about.
Multipoint pairing is also a possibility and the Shokz app lets you alter the EQ to suit and customise the controls, so you get things just the way you want.
A new area for Shokz which, having mastered bone conduction, is dabbling in innovative new areas, if you want your ears open, don’t hold with bone-play and free yet want the convenience of music and calls at all times, this is an exciting alternative.
Tech type: Bluetooth 5.2
Internal storage: n/a
Microphone: Yes
Battery life: up to 7-hours, or up to 28-hours with case
Charging time: 60-minutes
Weight: 8.3g
Buy now £179.00, Amazon
