Running with earbuds makes you choose between listening to your music or hearing the car behind you, and the SHOKZ OpenRun Pro eliminates that choice altogether by using bone conduction. Bone conduction lets you listen to music through your cheekbones instead of plugging your ears. The OpenRun Pro uses TurboPitch and sits in front of your ears, allowing for better sound quality while keeping your ear canals open. TurboPitch includes two additional bass enhancers to improve low-end frequency response, something previous bone conduction headphones couldn’t achieve. These headphones have a ten-hour battery life, and a five-minute quick charge gives you an additional one and a half hours.
Bone conduction headphones that also offer killer sound
Sound travels through your skull via vibration through your bone structure rather than through your ear canal. Transducers sit right in front of your ears and create vibrations, and these vibrations are transmitted directly to your auditory nerve. Since nothing enters the ear canal, you’ll still be able to hear traffic, a training partner, or a race announcer as you listen to your music. Anyone who pulls out their earbuds every time they approach a road crossing knows exactly how much this benefits you.
Shokz developed TurboPitch to address the common criticism that bone conduction headphones have thin bass. Using two bass enhancers alongside the transducer delivers deeper bass, so you hear music as full rather than tinny like the previous generation of bone conduction headphones.
With ten hours of playback time, you should easily get through a week of runs before needing to recharge, and if you forget to plug them in until morning, a five-minute quick charge adds another 1.5 hours of playtime. Recharging uses a proprietary magnetic connector rather than USB-C, so you’ll have to keep tabs on the included cord.
The titanium alloy frame fits snugly around the back of your head and bends with you rather than breaking under stress, and the entire unit weighs about one ounce, so after a mile of running you’ll no longer notice it. The IP55 water-resistance rating protects against sweat and rain, so inclement weather won’t cut your workout short.
Multipoint pairing keeps both a phone and a laptop connected at the same time, so if a call comes in during a run, it switches over automatically. The Shokz app manages your equalizer presets and software updates. It offers Standard Mode and Vocal Boost Mode for podcasts and audiobooks, plus dual noise-canceling microphones to maintain clarity in windy conditions.
