I Have Fallen in Love With Open Earbuds (and You Should Too)

If you did When shopping for wireless headphones lately, you’ve probably noticed a new design category popping up everywhere. They’re called open-back headphones (or open-back headphones, depending on the brand), and almost every audio brand has a pair (or three). They come in a multitude of styles, but most wrap around your ears like older Beats headphones, or clip on like funky-futuristic earrings. Regardless of the style, they are designed to deliver satisfying sound while keeping your ear canals open to the sounds of the world around you.

Open-back headphones are a natural choice for staying alert during outdoor activities like jogging, hiking, and especially cycling, where the tiny microphones of traditional headphones are rendered useless by the wind. They don’t sound as full or detailed as regular headphones, but the best open-back headphones can sound pretty good.

Purchasing such a specified item may seem extravagant when headphones with noise-canceling and transparency modes work in the vast majority of scenarios. This was also my position at the beginning. Like many things in life: sometimes you have to try something in real life to see if you like it. Over the past year, I’ve gone from open earphone skeptic to evangelist — and now I can’t imagine living without them.

This new sound

Photography: Ryan Waniata

“Occlusion” is a foreign word outside of audio circles to most, but it describes the plugged-in feeling one gets with traditional headphones. The best wireless earbuds counter occlusion through ventilation and other design factors, but you can’t completely beat physics, and most of us get tired of blocking our ear canals after a few hours.

Open-back headphones (along with solutions like bone conduction headphones) solve the occlusion problem, with sound that seems to come to you like magic. The airy designs of my favorite pairs from brands like Bose and Soundcore are so comfortable that I can wear them all day, often forgetting they’re on.

Comfort alone wasn’t enough to convince me of a whole genre of headphones that you can’t use in noisy places, but it turns out that’s rarely a problem. As WIRED’s lead reviewer of open-back headphones, the more time I spend with these headphones, the more use cases seem to unfold before me. From life’s complications to my increasingly frayed attention span, open-back headphones go with me wherever I live.

My main use case is probably yours too: I love using them for outdoor activities, to stay in touch with my neighborhood while enjoying Comedy Bang Bang on a walk with a dog to happily grooving to my favorite Yacht Rock playlist while testing an electric bike. But this is actually only the beginning.