So bone conduction technology in headphones is very new to me. This is the first time I’ve tried it, and the first product I’ve taken a look at, so I’ve got no real experience in this area. With that being said, I am a music lover, and I do like owning decent sets of headphones as I do listen to a lot of music on a day-to-day basis, so it needs to sound good. So I must say I am coming into this with my only comparison being your standard earbuds or overhead headphones, so expect a lot of comparison in that way. So let’s dive in.

The Mojawa Mojo2 bone conduction headphones are a small, lightweight audio device that comes with an eight-hour listening battery life and IPX67 rating meaning they’re fully waterproof. By the way they’ll take around 80 minutes to charge from dead to full, and it’s got a magnetic charger that hooks up to the right earpiece. They’re extremely skinny, covered in mostly rubber around the strap and plastic on the earpieces and look very subtle when wearing them. There’s some slight branding down each side and they feature controls for things like playing and pausing music, skipping tracks, changing volume with swipes and access to your phone’s voice assistant. The swipes for volume are touch sensitive, while there is a physical button on the left earpiece.

The actual unit wraps around the back of your head, and the earpieces around the top of your ear, with the two parts of each earpiece sitting behind your ear and on top of your cartilage. Because of this, I have found that if you are a glasses wearer, you’re fresh out of luck. Do you want your glasses sitting over your ears or these headphones? You can’t have both.

In terms of comfortability though, they’re not bad. They’re a little tight, but that’s good for those using these while doing intense sports. They’re not earbuds comfy though, and you can certainly feel a presence on the front of your ear which after a while got a bit achy, but the back of the ears were completely fine for longer periods of listening. I do think it’s going to be something you’d need to get used to though and break them in a bit. Although saying this, I don’t think I could recommend these for a full eight hours in the office, but if you’re spending 30 minutes to an hour in the gym or running around your local area, they’ll be fine.

So listening to some Enter Shikari’s …Meltdown, when the bass kicks in after you know, the meltdown, meltdown bit, I just felt the front of the Mojo2 headphones go absolutely nuts with vibration! There was so much vibration on the cartilage in front of my ear hole that, it didn’t cause any pain as such, but it wasn’t pleasant. And it seemed to be when the bass of a particular track was prominent – hip hop, rap, dance music that kind of thing they just didn’t sound or feel great, especially at higher volumes that could cause the drivers to vibrate. And this is where I just want to talk about sound in general really. Now, I get what bone conduction headphones are trying to do, and by keeping your ear canal open, you can hear literally everything around you making them super safe for working out on the street and listening for things like traffic, or having conversations in the gym while working out. But because of this, they just lose so much detail in the music. Listening to the audio through this thing sounded completely muffled. It’s like if you played some music directly from your phone and then covered the speaker with your entire hand. Give it a try! It kinda sounds like that. All muffly and low quality. Using these was a really bad listening experience, and I for one are not ready to drop the earbud for this type of tech.

So, would I recommend them? No chance. The audio quality just isn’t there. Yes they have great battery life, and yes they’re fully waterproof and all that for sports. But I feel it would be so much smarter to purchase some earbuds with some wingtips on there or even ones that wrap around the entire ear, just to regain the music quality that you’ll lose from buying these. They are some cool tech though I can’t deny that albeit a bit gimmicky, but that cool tech factor is not really enough to recommend dropping £100 on them when something like the JLab JBuds Air Sport cost half that, or the Bose Sport for £82 on Amazon at the time of writing this, and both of those can just produce such a superior sound quality. £100 is a lot of money for a set of headphones dedicated to workouts when a set of earbuds can be used all the time.