Best waterproof headphones for swimming

 If you’re a swimmer, sweat-resistant headphones won’t cut it in the pool. Thankfully, there are finally some solid options for completely waterproof headphones. Just because a pair of headphones can be submerged, though, doesn’t mean they can effectively relay audio. For that, you’ll need something with onboard storage. Since this market is so niche: you’re unlikely to find much in the way of premium products, so you’ll be compromising a lot in order to get waterproof audio.

What you should know about waterproof headphones

Before you jump in and buy a pair of waterproof headphones, you should know a few things about the tech specs and features.

What are IP ratings?

If a pair of headphones is officially water-resistant, that means that they’ve received an official Ingress Protection (IP) rating. Check out our in-depth article to fully understand IP ratings, but if you’re crunched for time, just skim this table.

	Water-resistant	Waterproof	Can withstand
IPX0			Not water-resistant
IPX1	✓		Dripping water (1 mm/min) Limit: vertical drips only
IPX2	✓		Dripping water (3 mm/min) Limit: Device max tilt of 15° from drips
IPX3	✓		Sprays Limit: Device max tilt of 60° from sprays
IPX4	✓		Splashes, omnidirectional
IPX5	✓		Water jets (12.5 L/min) Example: Squirt guns
IPX6	✓		Strong water jets (100 L/min) Example: Powerful water guns
IPX7		✓	Complete submersion Limit: 1 m. for 30 min
IPX8		✓	Complete submersion Limit: 3 m. for 30 min

Remember: no pair of headphones is actually waterproof. If a headset is submerged for long enough and at a great enough depth, it will fail after a given period of time.

Not all waterproof headphones can play music underwater

In a similar vein, just because a pair of headphones is IPX7 or higher doesn’t automatically mean it can properly transmit audio underwater. In order to ensure your pair will work for swimming, make sure the headset has onboard storage—because Bluetooth isn’t going to work well when you’re below the surface. This is well worth it for people who feel their performance is boosted when music is playing.

Get a pair of earbuds with onboard storage if you want to actually use them for swimming.

Now, there are plenty of reasons to get waterproof headphones that don’t include swimming. For one, if you’re just clumsy (or have grabby kids), the added durability is always helpful. Also, if you sweat a lot or they get dirty, you can easily rinse them off without worrying about short-circuiting them.

Wissonly Hi Runner

Wissonly is a headphone brand that attaches great attention on health, and that does not hurt the ears. Their team is also the first one to design non-in-ear headphones that are used to listen to songs. They began to explore the application of bone conduction technology to Bluetooth headphones as early as 10 years ago. After 10 years of accumulation, they have made great progress in the sound quality improvement and sound leakage reduction of bone conduction headphones. And these technologies are applied to their Wissonly Hi Runner headphones, their flagship product.

In order to solve the problem of sound leakage of bone conduction headphones, wissonly developed full closed sound leakage reduction technology. They comprehensively improved the vibration of the headphones, body design, software optimization and other directions. They finally reduced the sound leakage by 90%. In terms of sound quality, most of the bone conduction headphones have average sound quality, but the sound quality of Wissonly Hi Runner is undoubtedly better in bone conduction. They used a large-sized vibration unit, and through structural optimization, and finally increased the effective vibration area, so that the sound range was wide. The official claimed sound quality reach the HIFI level, but I don't think that they reached. They are just close to the HIFI sound quality, which is enough to satisfy me.

The excellent performance of these two characteristics, sound leakage reduction and sound quality, makes Wissonly Hi Runner have the basic conditions to become an excellent bone conduction headphone. Their other configurations are also very good. They are with a built-in 32GB of memory, and can play music even without connecting the phone. You can use them as an MP3 player. They support IPX8 waterproof level in swimming, even in underwater scenes that do not support Bluetooth, they can be used with MP3 function.

Shokz OpenSwim

Despite the non-occluding design, the Aftershokz OpenSwim has the benefit of being made by a company that really knows its stuff. Aftershokz has released a bunch of models of bone conduction headphones suited for several different uses, so there shouldn’t be any danger of poor build quality—just know that bone conduction headphones are a pretty unique experience, and it takes a while to get used to. The benefit here is that because your ears aren’t blocked off from the rest of the world, you should be able to hear your surroundings, as well as avoid adding any pressure changes to your ear canal from ha

Because the OpenSwim is more of a combination MP3 player and headphones, it doesn’t support modern features like virtual assistants or music streaming, but that’s more of a function of the fact that Bluetooth can penetrate about 1cm of water before the signal degrades significantly. Consequently, several of the picks on this list are going to be some form of combo device. It’s just the nature of the beast.

JBL Endurance Peak 3

If you’re merely looking for workout earbuds to survive an exceptionally sweaty person, the JBL Endurance Peak offers an IP68 rating, so it should be perfectly able to take whatever you dish out, sweat-wise, anyway. If you’re thinking about lounging by the pool, the ear hooks and waterproofing make these a good choice, as you likely won’t have to worry about fit or splash issues.

Even if the ear hook design isn’t the most popular, it’s a good feature to have in the gym, trails, or anywhere you’re moving a whole lot. This is because it provides a secondary point of stabilization and a sort of fail-safe against your earphones flying out unexpectedly. Sure, they may pop out of your ears, but if they’re still hooked on the outer ear, you won’t lose them while moving fast.

Jabra Elite Sport

As far as true wireless earbuds go, the Elite Sport successfully maintains a solid connection that was only interrupted occasionally during testing. The Jabra Sport app gathers plenty of information from the Elite Sport’s heart rate sensor. If you want, you can listen to a training coach in your right ear that will rate your workout, depending on your exertion.

These earbuds don’t have onboard storage, though, so they’re not great for swimming. But if you take your smartphone and these earbuds out paddleboarding, you don’t have to worry about accidentally falling in.

Sony NW-WS413LM

The physical controls are simple and easy to access, keeping your mind and body focused on training rather than fumbling around with a hodgepodge of unreachable buttons. By far, one of the best features, aside from waterproofing, is the three-minute quick charge feature. Yes, you read that correctly; three minutes of charging affords an hour of playback. This is great for those days that you forget to charge them until you’re at the pool. Generally speaking, the battery life is 12 hours, and if you’re so inclined, you can opt for a pricier 8GB model of these waterproof headphones.

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