New Headphones Help You Really Feel Music

Now that Apple has sold 160 million iPods, reshaped the music business and inspired dozens of competitors, maybe it’s time to admit it: this music player thing might be more than a fad.

Yet in all this time, almost nobody has brought up the screaming flaw that’s built into every one of those things: the earbuds.

That’s right. Hundreds of millions of times a day, music player owners jam little white discs into their ears without a thought, rendering themselves both deaf and rude to the outside world.

And that’s if you can even get them to stay in. A sizable chunk of the population lacks the proper cartilage formation to hold earbuds in place. (I’m among them. Don’t tell anyone.) How about a little sympathy for these long-time sufferers? Where are the self-help groups? Where’s the telethon?

Well, technology created these problems, and now it has solved them. Two alternative earbuds are now available in the United States; both neatly solve all of the hearing, safety and fit problems of the traditional disc-style earbuds. Instead of going in your ear, they pass the audio signal through your bones or cartilage. They’d be perfect, if they weren’t so flawed in their own ways.

The most promising are the Audio Bones, which come in orange, blue, black or white for $190 — or, for $30 more (go figure), pink, lime, tan or purple.

These are bone-conduction headphones, meaning that they pass sound directly through your skull to your inner ear, bypassing the eardrum. The sculpted plastic headband goes behind your head, hooking over your ears, so that the earbuds, if that’s what you call them, rest just forward of your ears.

In other words, your ears are left completely open. You can hear the music from your player, but you can also still hear everything around you.

There’s an immense cleverness to this design, and a long list of advantages. For example, these earbuds neatly solve the rudeness problem, because you’re not shutting yourself off from conversation. It’s no more rude than having a bookshelf stereo system playing in the background — a really, really tiny one that only you can hear.

These devices also stay put, because no cartilage-wedging is involved. Hooking them over your ears holds the Audio Bones in place. Not everyone has iPod-compatible cartilage pockets, but almost everyone has ears.

As a bonus, Audio Bones are less tangly than standard earbuds. A single cord emerges from the back of the headband — not one per earpiece.

Now, this is probably going to sound alarming and controversial. But when you really think about it, these earphones are also perfectly safe to wear while you’re driving. After all, how are wearing these headphones any more dangerous than listening to your car radio? The only difference is that the speakers are much smaller and much closer to your head.

Surprisingly enough, you can even listen to Audio Bones music while you’re wearing earplugs, which could come in handy if you work someplace noisy. Don’t try that with regular iPod earbuds.

They’re waterproof, too. If you can keep the player itself dry (buy a waterproof case, for example), then you can listen to Handel’s “Water Music” while you’re swimming laps.

It’s a small point, but it’s also worth mentioning that Audio Bones make it much less disgusting when you want to share your music player’s output. Admit it: when someone digs regular earbud discs out of their ear canals and hands them to you, there’s at least a brief moment of personal hygiene assessment as you prepare to insert them into your own.

The makers of Audio Bones also assert that bone conduction is less likely to contribute to hearing loss over the years, and that this technology permits some people with eardrum damage to enjoy music once again. (Bone conduction is already available in certain hearing aids.)

That’s quite a list of virtues. And besides the steep price, there’s really only one significant drawback to the Audio Bones — but it’s a doozy: the sound quality isn’t great.

Compared with regular earbuds, the Audio Bones sound muffled, with less presence. They’re also much quieter; you have to crank an iPod to its very top volume to hear what’s going on. Serious audiophiles who already complain about the iPod’s audio quality will be aghast.

CONTINUED : Vibrating headphones

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