playguy wrote:
I'm a HUGE fan of the Aftershokz models. They are sweat proof, but the best and biggest future if that they are bone conduction, so aren't blasting volume down the ear canal. (see hearing loss with time). Also one can hear the outside world if necessary. All of us in the shop I work at have gone to them and they have been bulletproof and really awesome to use. I used mine on the trainer today and they just work well; pair easily, have good tonal range, allow hearing if necessary and withstand tons of sweat.I have the Aeropex most current-gen model. It's really well designed, and does what it claims to do very well.
I have however been surprised with how NOT useful I find the open-ear design. I've posted about this before, but when I run outside, both wind and especially car noise is SO loud that it drowns out what your are listening to, particularly podcast/audiobooks. On a normal traffic commercial street, it's almost useless without earplugs in. Even on my home TM, I have to put in earplugs to make it not annoyingly hard to hear the content. If I were running mostly on trails or empty streets with no background noise, these would be great, but turns out I really like the mild to moderate noise blocking of normal earbuds. I wouldn't recommend these for triathlon training as a result.
I thus prefer my Airpods Gen1 over these for tri and will probably even try a noise-canceling earbud soon even for outdoor running despite the risks since I seem to be able to hear cars so well; I have noise-canceling non-sport cans for home use and I'm sure that since one can turn the overall volume so much lower with noise-canceling, even reduced background noise won't be a problem in terms of cars outdoors. (Lots of folks including youtube runners use noise-canceling on streets with cars now and even recommend them.)
The Aeropex open ear is great for car listening though if you have wife and kids who want to listen to their own stuff so you can't play on the car speakers.