If you’ve done any wireless earbuds shopping lately, you’ve likely noticed a new design category cropping up everywhere. They’re called open earbuds (or open-ear buds, depending on the brand), and just about every audio brand has a pair (or three). They come in a slew of styles, but most either loop around your ears like older Beats buds, or clip on like funky-futuristic earrings. Whatever the style, they’re designed to deliver satisfying sound while keeping your ear canals open to the sounds of the world around you.
Open earbuds are a natural fit for staying aware during outdoor activities like jogging, hiking, and especially cycling, where the tiny microphones in traditional buds are rendered useless by wind. They don’t sound as full or detailed as regular earbuds, but the best open earbuds can sound quite good.
Buying such a specified item might seem extravagant when buds with noise-canceling and transparency modes work in the vast majority of scenarios. That was my stance at first, too. Like many things in life: sometimes you need to try something in real life to see if you’ll like it. Over the last year or so, I’ve gone from open earbuds skeptic to evangilizer—and now I can’t imagine living without them.
That New Sound
Photograph: Ryan Waniata
“Occlusion” is mostly a foreign word outside audio circles, but it describes that plugged-up feeling you get from traditional earbuds. The best wireless earbuds counter occlusion with venting and other design factors, but you can’t fully outswerve physics, and most of us get tired of blocking our ear canals after a few hours.
Open earbuds (along with solutions like bone conducting headphones) fix the occlusion problem, with sound that seems to pop into your head like magic. The airy designs of my favorite pairs from brands like Bose and Soundcore are so comfy I can wear them all day, often forgetting they’re on.
Comfort alone wasn’t enough to sell me on an entire genre of buds you can’t use in loud places, but as it turns out, that’s rarely a problem. As WIRED’s primary open earbuds reviewer, the more time I spend with these buds, the more use cases seem to unfold before me. From the complications of life to my ever-fraying attention span, open earbuds meet me where I live.
My main use case is probably also yours: I love using them for outdoor activities, from keeping in touch with my neighborhood while enjoying Comedy Bang Bang on a dog walk to blissfully grooving to my favorite Yacht Rock playlist on an ebike test ride. But that’s actually just the beginning.
