Aftershokz Trekz Titanium wireless bone conduction headphone review
The Aftershokz Trekz Titanium open ear wireless bone conduction headphones are my first foray into open-ear headphones, so I’ll put it out there that I may be missing some portion of the note points to research, but this has been my experience with them.
First off, the past 30+ days that I’ve had them I have not been jogging, exercising, or doing any sport-related activities with them due to life stuff (wife’s appendix, sick babies, sick me.) They have been purely listening, walking, and doing the headbang test (they pass as a note).
The Trekz were originally presented to me as the best safest headphones for fitness as being open ear they do not particularly impair external audio (they do slightly just by nature of being a thing near your ear making sound).
On the open ear front, it is really odd to be rocking out to your music feeling like you’re closed off from the world and then suddenly realizing that you can completely hear someone talking to you.
Sitting with them I feel like I’ve got a good pair of over-the-ear headphones going on, but then realize there’s pretty much no sound in the room that’s being diminished.
Should you want to diminish the surrounding audio and only hear your music, the Trekz Titanium ship with a pair of squishy earplugs, good for blocking out airplane noise, snoring partner, the world.
They can pair to multiple devices, sound good on phone calls, and not being jammed in your ears you can run the battery out before your ears get tired of the headset.
That’s where my first issue with these comes in. Six hours is what you can reasonably expect of constant play. When your ears aren’t hurting starts to feel a little limited Perhaps that’s just me. It would be nice if it held a work-week’s worth of workout charge, but I’m nitpicking.
My second issue with this is while listening at work if I look up the headband, which sits on the back of my neck, causes the headphones to move slightly out of position. Now, I don’t look straight up a whole lot in the course of a routine exercise/listening session, but it is something to note.
It may also be because I have an enormous head (XXL motorcycle helmet.) I’ve come to grips with most things don’t quite work perfectly for me.
With the HTC 10 playing FLACs with VLC I’ve determined that there is nowhere I can carry my phone that I get any distortion or breakout, and the distance I can wander from the phone and still have fine audio is reasonable for any situation I can think of.
After playing with these for a while I checked out the negative reviews on Amazon, most interesting standouts were low volume, low quality audio. Definitely not experiencing that in the pair I have, but several people had issues so there may be a phone or series of them out there that doesn’t play nice with them (nobody seems to consider their phone could be source of the problem so they don’t list it).
It appears that 19% of people aren’t particularly impressed by these. I have to say I am mostly. For listening comfort and being situationally aware of what’s going on around you, they’ve got my vote. With the HTC 10 and their Bluetooth codecs/setup, it sounds great. Your mileage may vary as evidenced by reviews.
I should probably stress how they make you more situationally aware, however my experiences have not had any “wow” moments, then again it’s also not been outdoor weather/health/etc lately so maybe they’ll get an update when I get some exercise use and the price goes down a bit.
The Aftershokz Trekz Titanium open ear headphones are available at Amazon for $129.95
