If you exercise outdoors near cars, you need to stop wearing normal headphones and start wearing bone-conduction headphones so you can hear what’s around you. Specifically, in my personal opinion, you need OpenRun Pro headphones from Shokz, because they’re the best you can buy. And during Presidents Day sales, these headphones are also on significant discount.
I love a good pair of headphones, but I don’t love spending a ton on them. My threshold for spending on headphones is about $100, which is why when all of my cycling friends started raving about bone-conduction headphones a few years back, I was more than a little hesitant. The headphones I was looking at were around $180, and because they use bone conduction instead of normal earbuds I wouldn’t be able to wear them on airplanes or anything like that. I’d only use them as workout headphones, which is why it took me a while to spend the money.
Shokz makes the best bone-conduction headphones you can buy today, and a discount here never hurts. This price is within $5 of the lowest we’ve ever seen them go, too.
A week after I did, I was nearly sideswiped by a pickup truck, and the only thing that saved me was hearing it come up behind me. There’s a reason these are recommended on our list of the best running headphones you can buy.
Bone-conduction headphones sit just outside your ear, resting on the bone. Music vibrates through a set of pads into your skull, and you hear those sounds as if they’re coming from a speaker a few feet away. You can hear everything you’re listening to on your phone without interrupting the sounds coming from the rest of the world around you. For cyclists and runners — really anyone who does anything outside — this is a game-changing experience. It’s more accurate and pleasing than normal headphones with “passthrough mode” and you sacrifice very little in audio quality.
My favorite bone-conduction headphones, and I’ve tried them all, are the OpenRun Pro headphones from Shokz, the company formerly known as Aftershokz. They’re waterproof (which means easy to clean when I’m all sweaty), the battery lasts me about seven hours on a charge (perfect for those 70-mile riding days), and they’re comfortable enough that I can wear them all day and not feel them pressing on me. They charge magnetically with a proprietary charger, but Shokz includes two cables in the box in case you lose things like I do. Oh, and right now the price on these has dropped to an incredible $130. The one catch with this deal is that only the Best Buy-exclusive steel blue color is on sale at that price during Best Buy’s Presidents Day bonanza, which is a shame for those that would prefer one of the other options but it’s a nice hue.
If this headphone deal still a little rich for your blood, no worries. Shokz also has cheaper OpenRun and OpenMove bone-conduction headphones with up to six hours of battery life and IP55 dust- and water-resistance with prices from $55.
Whether you’re physically active outdoors or you just like exploring new things, I highly recommend giving these headphones a try.
More shopping deals from CNET
