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
“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.
Open earbuds’ true brilliance is the ability to help me stay in tune with everything, everywhere, all at once. I love being able to tap into music, podcasts, and video in nearly any daily scenario without losing touch with the world. Sure, plenty of regular buds offer transparency mode that can mimic full environmental awareness, but few come close to the real thing. It’s the sheer freedom and convenience of open buds that has led me to use them more than any other headphones.
I wear them every day while making lunch, brightening the mood with some tunes or comedy while ensuring I can hear the dog pawing at the door or my wife’s questions about some household item or other. They’re also perfect at the grocery store, where I can tune out the elevator music for my own playlist.
I no longer worry if the bar has the game—I can just set up my phone and keep tabs on it while chatting casually. Just last night, I was watching a tennis tournament on my phone while preparing for bed, still keeping tabs on our baby monitor as our daughter wrestled with her latest teething incident. You really can have it all!
A Great Time to Buy
Open buds should obviously not be your only pair: I recommend you find room in the budget for a pair of buds that work on a loud street or a noisy transit ride before springing for open earbuds. Regular buds are just more useful. While some open earbuds have attempted to incorporate a modicum of noise cancellation, the results have (predictably) been underwhelming so far.
I’m not unaware of the fact that the highest end open earbuds are so expensive they seem reserved for the executive class. For most of us, it could be hard to justify a $200-$300 pair of secondary buds when you’ve already splashed out on a good pair of noise-canceling earbuds or headphones.
Luckily, there are now so many affordable open earbuds that you no longer have to make that choice. As I write this, one of my favorite budget pairs, the Acefast Acefit Air, lists for $30 on Amazon. That’s a helluva deal for something you might use on the daily, and you’ll get surprisingly good sound, comfort, and usability for your money.
Stepping up to something like the Soundcore Aeroclip will get you cleaner, more defined sound quality in a compact, clip-on form factor. At the top of the market are Bose’s $300 Ultra, which do not deliver 10 times the quality of the Acefit, could be worth considering for persnickety listeners with a flex budget.
There’s no shortage of other good models to try, many of which appear on our Best Open Earbuds guide, with more pairs seeming to arrive almost daily. Not all are winners, and many still struggle to deliver full, resonant sound in the lower registers. Now that good open earbuds are easy to be had at such affordable prices, I do think it’s worth the cost of a meal out to see if you find them as indispensable as I do. You might just discover a new favorite listening tool you never knew you needed.
The post I Have Fallen in Love With Open Earbuds (and You Should Too) appeared first on Wired.
