I’ve fallen in love with open ear headphones (and you should too)

If you did If you’ve been shopping for wireless earbuds lately, you’ve probably noticed a new design category popping up everywhere. They’re called open-ear headphones (or open-ear headphones, depending on the brand), and almost every audio brand has a pair (or three). They come in a slew of styles, but most either wrap around your ears like old 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 informed during outdoor activities like jogging, hiking and especially cycling, where the small microphones on traditional buds are rendered useless by the wind. They don’t sound as full or detailed as regular earbuds, but the best open-ear headphones can sound very good.

Purchasing such a specific item may seem expensive when buds with noise cancellation and transparency modes work in the vast majority of scenarios. This was my position at the beginning as well. Like many things in life: sometimes you need to try something in real life to see if you like it or not. Over the past year or so, I’ve gone from open-ear headphones skeptic to evangelist, and now I can’t imagine living without them.

This new sound

Photography: Ryan Wanyata

“Occlusion” is mostly a foreign word outside of audio circles, but it describes the feeling of occlusion you get from traditional earbuds. The best wireless earbuds combat blockage through ventilation and other design factors, but you can’t completely beat physics, and most of us tire of clogged ear canals after a few hours.

Open ear headphones (along with solutions like bone conduction headphones) fix the blockage problem, where sound seems to jump into your head like magic. The lightweight designs of my favorite pairs from brands like Bose and Soundcore are so comfortable that I can wear them all day, often forgetting I have them on.

Convenience alone wasn’t enough to convince me of an entire genre of buds that you can’t use in noisy places, but as it turns out, that’s rarely a problem. As WIRED’s primary reviewer of open-ear headphones, the more time I spend with these headphones, the more use cases I’ll see. From life’s complexities to my ever-declining attention span, open ear headphones meet me where I live.

My main use case is probably yours too: I love using it for outdoor activities, from keeping in touch with my neighborhood while having fun Bang Bang comedy On a walk happily enjoying my favorite Yacht Rock playlist on an e-bike test ride. But this is actually just the beginning.