Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/25/these-bone-conduction-earphone.html
…
FYI …
“They juice up in just two hours and can last up to 10 hours on a single charge,”
Follow the link …
- Call time: 8-10 hours
- Music playtime: 4-6 hours
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That’s less than optimal for a transatlantic flight.
I wonder how well do they work with earplugs, as a replacement for noise cancelling cans?
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You really need to talk all the way through a 10-hour flight? This is not a rhetorical question, I know there are such people.
Note for bicyclists:
- You will be able to hear the traffic around you using bone phones.
- You won’t be able to hear the bone phones over the noise of moderate traffic (unless you plug your ears, thereby negating the need to hear traffic).
Not that anyone is bitter!
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Has any one here used bone conduction earphones before? My hearing is going but I do get slightly (and irrationally) squeamish about the concept of sound going through the bones of my skull. So the question is: do they work (“crisp stereo sound”?), do they feel weird – for lack of a better word, and is $39.99 kind of cheap and therefore a red flag?
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No, you don’t get “crisp” sound. You get the low notes, but midrange and high notes are muddied and muted as though heard underwater. This means you don’t hear sibilants and it’s hard to understand speech.
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I might like to listen to music/watch movies for more than 50% of a 10-hour flight.
I’d use something with some form of noise-cancelling - either active or passive - for that, though.
These might be good for cycling. I wonder if CA’s BS law against wearing headphones on both ears while riding a bike applies if they don’t actually block your ears.
Ugh those are the worst.
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It’s worth noting, however, that nobody cares if you drive a fancy car, designed to insulate you from all outside noise, with the windows up and music blasting at an unhealthy level (but if you ride a bike with earbuds in you’re insane and will surely be responsible for your own death…)
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Hello! I work in hearing health. Bone conduction earphones do not help prevent hearing loss. Hearing loss typically occurs in the cochlea (specifically, in the hair cells and in cochlear neurons). Bone conducting hearing earphones bypass the eardrum and transmit sound through bone to the cochlea. The opportunity for level based hearing loss is just as strong as with earphones with a speaker. It has been argued that bone conducting earphones prevent damage to the eardrum, however earphones are not capable of producing sound pressure levels great enough to do so.
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Thank you! Although surely any high school biology student should have been able to reason that one out.
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Hmm…I’d like some proof that that sound transmitted through bone conduction at high volumes doesn’t harm hearing.
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What about tooth issues? Would these ever vibrate a loose filling or some similar hypochondriacal nightmare?
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thanks for debunking the marketing crap. Your eardrum is typically not the part that gets damaged.
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I have experimented with professional level bone conduction hearing aids for single sided deafness. My big takeaway is that in order to get usable sound you need a lot of pressure on the skin; otherwise the tissue filters out the high frequencies. And sufficient pressure is very uncomfortable. The only successful bone conduction devices seem to be ones that directly couple to the skull; the BAHA is actually connected to a post surgically drilled into the skull. A promising new device used a wireless transducer worn on a tooth in the mouth, but the company went out of business.
I do like the idea of receiving sound through the tooth like the tin foil hat crowd who receive radio stations in their teeth. Surprised it isn’t yet more popular for covert use like replacing those fbi agent earpieces. Or maybe it is and they are being covert.
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