When you are looking to purchase bone conduction headphones, you may understand how they work but not have in-depth knowledge of them versus traditional headphones.
What you may wonder about, though, is how they hold up when the world gets noisy, so can you use bone conduction headphones in loud environments?
By themselves, they can work well with loud noise by adding earplugs as they help stop excess background noise from coming into the ears. Bone conduction is perfect in many uses except with loud external noise, as they don’t block your ear canals which can lead to sensory overload.
Now let’s dive into what bone conduction headphones are and what makes them more awesome for listening in specific circumstances but limited versus traditional loud headphones.
While they can be excellent for many purposes, they have many times when they are less efficient than regular headphones for most people’s listening experience.
Why Do They Perform Poorly In Loud Areas?
The bone conduction technology functions by reverberation on the bones within your cheeks and the surrounding area, but this leaves them open to ambient noise intrusion.
While this creates very good sound in most environments, bone conduction in loud environments has some issues.
This is due to the normal hearing taking in sound at the same time and processing both sounds at one time. While this seems like you should be able to focus, your body is built to funnel sound through the ears.
Bone conduction headphones used in loud background noise environments face sound quality challenges that normal headphones don’t have due to volume levels.
Standard headphones can cover your ears, which muffles the sound outside, allowing them to focus their sound directly into your ear canals in a self-contained quiet environment.
The Best Bone Conduction Headphones On The Market
As you look around my site, you will see I am a huge fan of Shokz bone conduction headphones, and this is because they are the leader in creating and pushing designs forward for this technology.
Shokz also strives to showcase everything amazing about using the technology, this will come at a higher price, but they also outlast and outperform EVERYONE else.
- If you are looking for the current best-performing bone conduction headphones, you can look at the top-of-the-line Shokz OpenRun Pro here.
- If you are looking for bone conduction headphones for swimming where you can’t bring a phone, you can check out the Shokz OpenSwim, which are internal storage for mp3, allowing for playback without a device.
Final Thoughts on Are Bone Conduction Headphones Good In Loud Environments
While they may not be the best on their own in a noisy environment, the use case was not specifically around a noisy environment but instead around being able to hear your environment.
Suppose you use earplugs, which Shokz, previously known as Aftershokz bone conduction headphones, typically include. In that case, you remove the additional input from your ear canals which will help dramatically increase your ability to listen in loud environments.
I was able to use them on an airplane trip across the US with the earplugs, and they make a big difference in making bone conduction headphones loud enough!
